Note (return) — Chapter V

The war-cry employed to train the Northern mind for the deeds contemplated by the agitators was "No extension of slavery!" Was this sentiment real or feigned? The number of slaves (as has already been clearly shown) would not have been increased by their transportation to new territory. It could not be augmented by further importation, for the law of the land made that piracy. Southern men were the leading authors of that enactment, and the public opinion of their descendants, stronger than the law, fully sustained it. The climate of Kansas and Nebraska was altogether unsuited to the negro, and the soil was not adapted to those productions for which negro labor could be profitably employed. If, then, any negroes held to service or labor, as provided in the compact of union, had been transported to those Territories, they would have been such as were bound by personal attachment mutually existing between master and servant, which would have rendered it impossible for the former to consider the latter as property convertible into money. As white laborers, adapted to the climate and its products, flowed into the country, negro labor would have inevitably become a tax to those who held it, and their emancipation would have followed that condition, as it has in all the Northern States, old or new—Wisconsin furnishing the last example.12 It may, therefore, be reasonably concluded that the "war-cry" was employed by the artful to inflame the minds of the less informed and less discerning; that it was adopted in utter disregard of the means by which negro emancipation might have been peaceably accomplished in the Territories, and with the sole object of obtaining sectional control and personal promotion by means of popular agitation.