made his living out of industrial occupation and in 1825 the capital invested in manufactures amounted to $160,000,000 and gave employment to 2,000,000 persons1- increased the demand for protection and intensified the bitterness of the planters against a policy that they believed was selfishly sucking the heart's blood out of the South for the enrichment of the North.

It is worth noting that while Calhoun defended the Tariff Act of 1816, the Southern leaders opposed the Act of 1820, as did Massachusetts, while Connecticut and Rhode Island supported it. Up to this time the tariff was not a sectional question, but a few years later, when Massachusetts advocated protection, the sectional lines were drawn and remained unchanged until after the war.2

I shall not follow in detail the efforts in and out of Congress, on the one side to plant protection firmly on the country as a cardinal principle of the national policy and on the other to resist it, or the arguments used by advocates and opponents. It is sufficient to say that protection won, and the passage of the bill that caused the greatest rejoicing in the North saw a sullen, angry, and defiant South; defiant almost to the point of rebellion, and sharply warning Congress that it would submit to no usurpation of legislative powers. The South contented itself with protest and denunciation for the next

1 Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii, p. 375.

* Cf. Taussig: The Tariff History of the United States.

few years, but in 1832 it took more forcible means to show its displeasure. In that year South Carolina enacted an ordinance nullifying an Act of Congress. No man could see it then, but the hand of the South was on the sword to protect its slaves.

CHAPTER XVIII

AGAIN THE SWORD IS DRAWN

THE great politico-economic struggle that divided the country from the beginning of the nineteenth century until 1860 falls naturally into three periods. The first begins with the adoption of the Constitution, when the North endeavored to prevent the recognition of slavery and the Southern States made the legality of slavery their condition of the acceptance of the Constitution, and ended in

1820, the year of the adoption of the Missouri Compromise. The second period is covered in the thirty years from 1820 to 1850, which witnessed the Wilmot Proviso, the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law, and, finally, the adoption of that other cowardly compromise fathered by Clay. The third period runs from 1850 to 1860. For nearly three quarters of a century there had been a series of compromises and arrangements, and an effort was made to postpone the day of reckoning by temporizing. Slave state had been set off by free state, the balance of power between North and South was supposed to be so accurately adjusted that the danger of one section dominating the other was effectually guarded against. Finally there came the day when, as Lincoln said, the government could not

endure permanently half slave and half free.1 It was in 1850 that the decision was made, although another ten years must elapse before men had the courage to back their beliefs with the sword. Up to 1850 a settlement was always possible, after that year nothing was possible except the settlement that Lincoln wrote in Washington and Grant executed at Appomattox.

It is perhaps not out of place for the author to repeat what he has said before: that he assumes the reader to be conversant with the main facts of American history, and that his purpose is not to write a history of the American people, but to trace their psychology through historical development. It is therefore unnecessary that more shall be done here than to sketch in the fewest words the history of the United States from 1800 to the Civil War; but it is important that the bearing of historical events on character shall be correctly understood.

The long slavery struggle was in the beginning, as we have already pointed out, economic, and economics were inextricably involved in politics; for the political preeminence of the South rested on its social system, which in turn rested on slavery. Without slaves there could be no great landowners, whose wealth and position made them the ruling class. Free labor, the South saw, would destroy its industrial system, and under its ruins would lie buried its political power. "The relation which now

1 Lincoln: Letters and Addresses, p. 105.

exists between the two races in the slaveholding States," Calhoun declared, "has existed for two centuries. It has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions, civil and political. None other can be substituted."1

Slave or free? — that was the question on every man's lips, it was about that the thoughts of all men turned. It was not a question that came to the front at stated times, or was so remote that the average man felt it was beyond his power to form an opinion. It entered into the life of a people. Their newspapers, their statesmen, their preachers defended or attacked; it was the burden of all discussion. Everything shaped itself to one end. Every assault made by Abolitionists only encouraged slave-owners to greater resistance.

Between the people of the two sections grew up a bitter antagonism. The South, proud of its birth and blood, came to look with contempt upon the North and to believe that the North was inferior to the South in culture and intellect. The commerce of the North and the keen trading spirit that its people developed were not only obnoxious to the South, but proof that the Northerners were lower in the social scale; for the South clung to the tradition that the landowner is superior to the trader, and that trade is vulgar. To grow cotton by black labor on a large scale did not lower the dignity of a

1 Von Holst: John C. Calhoun, p. 133.