igned the Negro in the social consciousness of the North and the
one very soon to be assured to him throughout the entire nation in
Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, insisted that he be included in
those broad and somewhat indefinite categories of rights embodied in
our national political symbols. The enthusiasm for these is to be
explained not so much from the objective and eternal nature of the
rights themselves as from the feeling that they represent a phase of
common social experience of fundamental importance for society as a
whole. Previous training in democratic traditions made men capable of
the noblest self-sacrifice in their loyalty to these ideas of freedom
and equality, but the fact of their being associated with the enslaved
Negro was accidental. No sooner had they assisted the runaway slave to
freedom than they forgot him. He was left to make good in the
autonomous, _laissez faire_ atmosphere of a vigorous democracy. Soon,
however, his economic helplessness and inefficiency, his ignorance of
the tense northern life aroused the same men who had helped him to
freedom to the realization that he was of an alien race, with
characteristics that made his social assimilation difficult. Where the
blacks were present in large numbers the situation was fraught with
the gravest difficulties of social adjustment. These were facts not
encouraging for the future of the two races in the nation. They should
have taught men that emancipation, instead of solving the problem,
would plunge the nation and particularly the South into a situation
the infinite difficulties of which were never dreamed of by the
enthusiastic champions of abstract human rights. DeTocqueville's
language, though written almost thirty years before the _debacle_
came, sounds like a veritable prophecy. He felt that national
abolition was bound to come in the course of events. "I am obliged to
confess," he says however, "that I do not regard the abolition of
slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the
United States," for abolition will inevitably "increase the repugnance
of the white population for the men of color."[310]

It is well to remember, when we come to examine the status of the
Negro in the slave States, that slavery would naturally follow lines
of development determined by the economic, social and climatic
conditions of the sections concerned. These conditions, of course,
vary greatly throughout a region stretching