But the gravamen of the indictment against the Southern people is not
that they seceded, but that they seceded in order to preserve and to
perpetuate slavery; or, to put it more forcibly, that the liberty to
enslave others was the right which most they valued. This charge, put
forward by the abolitionists in order to cloak their own revolt
against the Constitution, is true as regards a certain section, but
as regards the South as a nation it is quite untenable, for
three-fourths of the population derived rather injury than benefit
from the presence in their midst of four million serfs.* (* Of 8.3
million whites in the fifteen slave-holding States, only 346,000 were
slave-holders, and of these 69,000 owned only one negro.) "Had
slavery continued, the system of labour," says General Grant, "would
soon have impoverished the soil and left the country poor. The
non-slave-holder must have left the country, and the small
slave-holder have sold out to his more fortunate neighbour."* (*
Battles and Leaders volume 3 page 689.) The slaves neither bought nor
sold. Their wants were supplied almost entirely by their own labour;
and the local markets of the South would have drawn far larger profit
from a few thousand white labourers than they did from the multitude
of negroes.
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