Thus the planters of Virginia
paid high prices in order that mills might flourish in Connecticut;
and the sovereign States of the South, to their own detriment, were
compelled to contribute to the abundance of the wealthier North. The
interests of labour were not less conflicting. The competition
between free and forced labour, side by side on the same continent,
was bound in itself, sooner or later, to breed dissension; and if it
had not yet reached an acute stage, it had at least created a certain
degree of bitter feeling. But more than all--and the fact must be
borne in mind if the character of the Civil War is to be fully
appreciated--the natural ties which should have linked together the
States on either side of Mason and Dixon's line had weakened to a
mere mechanical bond. The intercourse between North and South, social
or commercial, was hardly more than that which exists between two
foreign nations. The two sections knew but little of each other, and
that little was not the good points but the bad.
For more than fifty years after the election of the first President,
while as yet the crust of European tradition overlaid the young
shoots of democracy, the supremacy, social and political, of the
great landowners of the South had been practically undisputed.
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