ave section waxed, in
consequence, rich and prosperous apace. But as our expanding slave system
was essentially agricultural, it required large and expanding areas within
which to operate efficiently. Wherefore there arose early in the
slave-holding section an industrial demand for more slave soil. There was
a political reason, also, which intensified this demand for more slave
soil, but as it was merely incidental to the economic cause, I will leave
it undiscussed for the present. This economic demand of the expanding
slave system for more land was met by the opportune cession to the United
States by Georgia and North Carolina of the southwest region, out of which
the States of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee were subsequently carved,
and by the acquisition of the Louisiana and the Florida territories. So
much for the causes, conditions and circumstances in the early history of
the republic, which combined to revive slavery, and to make it an
immensely important factor in American industrial life, and consequently
an immensely important factor in American political life as well.

Just a word in passing regarding the character of Southern labor. It was,
as you all know, mainly agricultural. Its enforced ignorance, and its
legally and morally degraded condition, incapacitated the slave-holding
States from diversifying their single industry and limited them to the
tillage of the earth. This feature was economically the fatal defect of
the slave industrial system in its rivalry with the free industrial system
of the North. There were, of course, other forms of labor employed in the
South, such as the house-servant class, while many of the Negroes on
plantations and in Southern cities worked as carpenters, bricklayers,
blacksmiths, harness-makers, millwrights, wheelwrights, barbers, tailors,
stevedores, etc., etc.; but, as labor classes, they were relatively of
slight importance in point of numbers, and as wealth producers, in
comparison to the field hand.

Unlike the Indian under similar circumstances, the Negro did not succumb
to the terrible toil and inhumanity of his environment. He did not decline
numerically, nor show any tendency to do so, but exhibited instead
extraordinary vitality and reproductive vigor. In physical quality and
equipment he was, as a laborer, ideally adapted to the South, and
accordingly augmented enormously in social and commercial value to that
section, and in numbers, at the same time. He po