as naturally possible only in the
North. Apart from all questions of self-interest, no Southerner, no
reasonable person who knew anything about the South, though the
knowledge might be as superficial and the indignation against Slavery as
intense as was Mrs. Beecher Stowe's, could possibly believe the
proposition that all Southern slave-owners were cruel and unjust men.
But that was not all. Garrison's movement killed Southern Abolitionism.
It may, perhaps, be owned that the Southern movement was not bearing
much visible fruit. There was just a grain of truth, it may be, in
Garrison's bitter and exaggerated taunt that the Southerners were ready
enough to be Abolitionists if they were allowed "to assign the guilt of
Slavery to a past generation, and the duty of emancipation to a future
generation." Nevertheless, that movement was on the right lines. It was
on Southern ground that the battle for the peaceful extinction of
Slavery ought to have been fought. The intervention of the North would
probably in any case have been resented; accompanied by a solemn
accusation of specific personal immorality it was maddeningly
provocative, for it could not but recall to the South the history of the
issue as it stood between the sections. For the North had been the
original slave-traders. The African Slave Trade had been their
particular industry. Boston itself, when the new ethical denunciation
came, had risen to prosperity on the profits of that abominable traffic.
Further, even in the act of clearing its own borders of Slavery, the
North had dumped its negroes on the South. "What," asked the
Southerners, "could exceed the effrontery of men who reproach us with
grave personal sin in owning property which they themselves have sold us
and the price of which is at this moment in their pockets?"

On a South thus angered and smarting under what is felt to be undeserved
reproach, yet withal somewhat uneasy in its conscience, for its public
opinion in the main still thought Slavery wrong, fell the powerful voice
of a great Southerner proclaiming it "a positive good." Calhoun's
defence of the institution on its merits probably did much to encourage
the South to adopt a more defiant tone in place of the old apologies for
delay in dealing with a difficult problem--apologies which sounded
over-tame and almost humiliating in face of the bold invectives now
hurled at the slave-owners by Northern writers and speakers. I cannot,
indeed, find that