rking class than the negroes of
Liberty county as I knew them in my boyhood."

Against this description are to be set such statements as this made by
Frederick Law Olmsted, after many months of travel in the South: "The
field hand negro is on an average a very poor and a very bad creature,
much worse than I had supposed before I had seen him and grown familiar
with his stupidity, indolence, duplicity, and sensuality. He seems to be
but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized
manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous
circumstance to a civilized people." Olmsted saw no resource but gradual
emancipation with suitable training. A resident of this same Liberty
county, Rev. C. C. Jones, himself a staunch supporter of slavery, but
urgent for giving better religious instruction to the slaves, wrote in
1842; "That the negroes are in a degraded state is a fact, so far as my
knowledge extends, universally conceded.... Negro marriages are neither
recognized nor protected by law. Uncleanness--this sin may be considered
as universal.... They are proverbial thieves." But how could "religious
instruction" produce chastity in those for whom the law did not
recognize marriage, or honesty in those who themselves were stolen?

But the bright side of the medal, which had so dark an obverse, was the
interpretation on which Calhoun and the slave-holding class took their
stand. They resolutely ignored the frequent abuses and the essential
degradation of manhood. They fashioned the theory--it was the old
familiar theory of past ages, but had fallen out of sight in the
enthusiasm of the revolutionary period--that society rightly and
properly is constituted with a servile class as its base. Calhoun
declared: "I hold that there never has yet existed a wealthy and
civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in
point of fact, live on the labor of the other." And generally, he adds,
the condition of the laborer has been worse than it now is in the South.
In advance of civilization, he declares, there always comes a conflict
between capital and labor; and this conflict the South avoids by
unflinchingly holding the laborer in his subject condition.

Calhoun is dead, and slavery is dead, but the ideas he then avowed are
still powerfully, if more latently, asserting themselves in our social
order.

For these theories the slave-holders now found justification from the
min