Looking at the institution of slavery from the point of view of the master, the Southern community was divided into three strata of white people: (1) The large slaveholders. In 1850 about 2,000 families owned as many as 100 slaves each; the largest number under one management was about 2,500. These 2,000 families made up the social and political aris tocracy of the South, furnished a great num ber of the professional men and almost all the holders of high political offices, State or na tional, in the South. (2) The small slavehold ers, about 350,000 families: of these, in 1850, about 60,000 held only one slave. Such people commonly had a poor living, in rough houses with unsavory food and few opportunities for their children; with them were associated a considerable body of non-slaveholding farmers. (3) At the bottom of society was the great class of poor whites, including the moun taineers; they held no slaves, but owned their own land and lived upon it in a miserable fashion. They were a naturally intelligent people, but extremely ignorant and made up about three-fourths of the white population. They implicitly followed the political leader ship of the great planters and were perfectly persuaded that the cause of slavery was their own, although they were looked down upon by well-to-do white men, and were sometimes despised by slaves.
The system of slavery was maintained by a rigorous code of special laws. Property and mortgage right in slaves were protected by law. The masters were assured the physical control of slaves by laws and customs which gave them authority to compel obedience and force labor; and to resist any real or supposed belligerency of the negro by force, which com monly took the form of whipping. The laws held a master responsible for killing a negro, unless in defense of his life; but negro testi mony could not be received against a white man, and the law of a State which absolved the master in case a slave was so inconsiderate as to die under a "moderate" chastisement suf ficiently indicates that public sentiment de manded giving discretion to the master in all doubtful cases.
Assemblages of slaves and any sort of riot ous behavior were dealt with by special acts. In many States special tribunals of the slave holders in the neighborhood took testimony in a summary fashion, and executed punishment, even to the taking of life. There were also special laws against the consorting of whites with negroes, or their purchase of property from slaves. Runaways were stopped by a sys tem of patrols, a kind of voluntary mounted police, who scoured the roads and picked up suspected characters.
Such was the system of slavery, a system of brute force, buttressed by a powerfully welded public opinion, backed up by a body of positive law. On many plantations the life of
a slave was easy enough, labor was light and he was looked on as a reasoning being; on other plantations he was treated worse than the beast of the field, because he could talk and was held to the responsibility of men. Slave labor was notoriously inefficient and wasteful; and small planters made very little out of their slaves. The larger planters, by working out a kind of machine system, had better results; but it was at the expense and the degradation of their white neighbors as well as of the slaves.
The Southern opposition to slavery, which had been widespread in 1787, grew less and less as the years went on, though till 1830 there was a national anti-slavery organization, which held a convention about once in two years, usually in a border State city. The system of slavery grew more and more deeply rooted, and when the Northern abolitionists began an active crusade against it in 1831, the Southern so cieties disappeared and only a handful of Southern men and women could be found who would so much as make a public argument against the desirability of slavery.
From looking on slavery as an "evil* which must be destroyed, by 1820 the South as a com munity were thinking of it as a difficulty which could not be removed without destroying the country. By 1830 they grew to advocate it as something which, whether evil or not, must neither be attacked nor discussed; thence it was an easy step to advocate it as desirable in itself, as Calhoun put it, as good, a positive good!' In the last stage of the contest, just before the Civil War, Southern leaders like Jefferson Davis insisted that slavery must be extended in some degree to the Northern States.
The abolition movement is elsewhere dis cussed,— our object at this point is to show how slavery, so strongly buttressed in the in terests and the pride of the South, yet quickly came to an end. As has already been shown, when the two sections had clearly adopted op posing systems of labor, many questions of choice between the two systems came before the Federal government. It was in vain to urge that slavery was a State institution existing only tinder State laws,iin the face of the fact that Congress, by its regulation of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, of inter national relations, of fugitives and of the Ter ritories, had a power to increase or to diminish the slave power. In fact, the national govern ment furnished the arena in which the ques tion was finally fought out.