What was the cause of all this misfortune and misery? Benton found it, and other Southern leaders also, in the unequal action of federal fiscal legislation. “Under this legislation,” he shrewdly remarks, “the exports of the South have been made the basis of the federal revenue. The twenty-odd millions annually levied upon imported goods are deducted out of the price of their cotton, rice and tobacco, either in the diminished prices which they receive for these staples in foreign ports, or in the increased price which they pay for the articles they have to consume at home.”

The storm centre of this area of industrial depression passed over Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. The very heart of the slave system was thus attacked by the unequal fiscal action of the general government. The South needed for its great staples of cotton, rice and tobacco the freest access to the markets of the world, and unrestricted competition of the world in its own market, and this the principle of protection denied to it. For the grand purpose of the new policy of protection was to occupy and retain as far and as fast as practicable, and in some cases a little farther and faster, a monopoly of the home market for the products of the new industrialism, and therefore to exclude foreign buyers and sellers therefrom on equal terms with their domestic rivals. Owing to the limitations of its peculiar labor the South was disabled from adapting itself, as the North had just done, to changing circumstances and new economic conditions, and so was deprived of participation in the benefits of a high tariff. Its slave system and industrial prosperity were accordingly caught by the free industrialism of the North at a fatal disadvantage and pressed mercilessly to the wall.

And so it happened that the protective tariff which was welcomed as a boon by one set of industrial interests in the Union was by another set at the same time denounced as an abomination. But when the struggle between them grew fierce and threatened to disrupt the sections a compromise was hit upon and a sort of growling truce established for a season whereby the industrial rivals were persuaded that, in spite of the existence of bitter differences and memories, they could nevertheless live in peace and prosperity under the same general government. The soul of the compromise measures of 1833, which provided for the gradual abolishment, during nine years, of the specific features of the high tariff objectionable to the South, failed, however, to reach the real seat of the trouble, namely, the counterexpanding movements of the two systems, with their mutual inclinations during the operation, to encroach the one upon the other, and a natural tendency on the part of the stronger to destroy the weaker in an incessant conflict for survivorship, which would persist with the certainty and constancy of a law of nature, compromise acts by Congress to the contrary notwithstanding. And so the struggle for existence between the two industrial forces went on beneath the surface of things. Meanwhile modern industrialism was gaining steadily over its slave competitor in social strength and political importance and power.

This conflict for industrial domination developed logically in an industrial republic into one for political domination. It was unavoidable, under the circumstances, that the strife between our two opposing systems of labor should gather about the federal government and rage fiercest for its possession as a supreme coign of vantage. The power which was devoted to the protection of slavery and the power which was devoted to the protection of the new industrialism here locked horns in a succession of engagements for position and final mastery. It seems to have been early understood by a sort of national instinct, popular intuition, that as this issue between the contesting systems happened to be decided the Union would thereupon be put in the way of becoming eventually either wholly free or wholly slave, as the case might be. Wherefore the two sections massed in time their opposing forces for the long struggle at this quarter of the field of action.

It has already been noted that certain advantages had accrued to the South from the original distribution of political power under the national Constitution, and from sundry cessions of territory to the general government after the adoption of that instrument. But while the South secured indeed the lion’s share of those early advantages, the North got at least two of considerable moment, viz., the Constitutional provision for the abolition of the African slave trade, in 1808, which imposed, after that year and from that source, a check upon the numerical increase of slaves within the Union, and, secondly, the Ordinance of 1787, which excluded forever the peculiar labor of the South from spreading into or taking root in the Northwest territory, and, therefore, in that direction placed a limit to its territorial expansion. Together they proved eventually of immense utility to free industrialism in its strife with the slave industrial system, the first operating in its favor negatively, and the second positively in the five populous and prosperous commonwealths which were subsequently organized out of this domain, and in which free labor grew and multiplied apace.

The struggle over the admission of Missouri into the Union terminated in a drawn battle, in which both sides gained and lost. The slave system obtained in esse an additional slave State and two others in posse, out of the Louisiana territory, while free industrialism secured the erection of an imaginary fence through this land, to the north of which its slave rival was never to settle. Maine was also admitted to preserve the status quo and balance of political forces between the sections. Alas! however, for the foresight of statesmen who build for the present only, and are too much engrossed by the cares and fears of a day to see far into national realities, or to follow beneath the surface of things the action of moral and economic laws and to deduce therefrom the trend of national life. The slave wall of 1820, confidently counted upon by its famous builders to constitute thenceforth a permanent guarantee of peace between the rivals, disappointed these calculations, for it developed ultimately into a fresh source of discord and strife. And in view of the unavoidable conflict of our counterexpanding systems of labor, their constant tendency to encroach the one upon the other in the operation, and the bitter and ever-enduring dread and increasing demands of the weaker, it was impossible for the compromise of 1820 to prove otherwise.

The South, under the leadership of Calhoun, came presently to regard the Missouri arrangement as a capital blunder on its part, and from the standpoint of that section this conclusion seems strictly logical. For the location of a slave line upon the Louisiana territory operated in fact as a decided check to the expansion of slavery as a social rival and a political power at one and the same time, while it added immensely to the potential strength of the rapidly expanding forces of modern industrialism in its contest for social and political supremacy in the Union.

In the growing exigency of the slave industrial system, under these circumstances, the reparation of this blunder was deemed urgent, and so, in casting about to find some solution of its problem, the attempted abrogation of the compromise law itself not being considered wise by Calhoun, the slave power fell upon Texas, struggling for independence. An agitation was consequently started to correct the error of the Missouri compromise by the annexation of a region of country described in the graphic language of Webster to be so vast that “a bird could not fly over it in a week.” What the South had lost by the blunder of the slave wall of 36° 30′ was then