considerable. It must of course be understood that the holding of slaves
and the slave trade from Africa were regarded as two distinct questions.
The new Congress abolished the slave trade on the first day on which the
Constitution allowed it to do so, that is, on January 1, 1808. The
mother country abolished it just about the same time. But already all
but three of the States had for themselves abolished the slave trade in
their own borders. As to slavery itself, seven of the original thirteen
States and Vermont, the first of the added States, had abolished that
before 1805. These indeed were Northern States, where slavery was not of
importance, but in Virginia there was, or had been till lately, a growing
opinion that slavery was not economical, and, with the ignorance common
in one part of a country of the true conditions in another part, it was
natural to look upon emancipation as a policy which would spread of
itself. At any rate it is certain fact that the chief among the men who
had made the Constitution had at that time so regarded it, and continued
to do so. Under this belief and in the presence of many pressing
subjects of interest the early movement for emancipation in America died
down with its work half finished.

But before this happy belief expired an economic event had happened which
riveted slavery upon the South. In 1793 Eli Whitney, a Yale student upon
a holiday in the South, invented the first machine for cleaning cotton of
its seeds. The export of cotton jumped from 192,000 lbs. in 1791 to
6,000,000 lbs. in 1795. Slave labour had been found, or was believed, to
be especially economical in cotton growing. Slavery therefore rapidly
became the mainstay of wealth and of the social system in South Carolina
and throughout the far South; and in a little while the baser sort of
planters in Virginia discovered that breeding slaves to sell down South
was a very profitable form of stock-raising.