Opposition to it was not only offensive, but dangerous. It was
sacrilege.
So far as the South was concerned the revolution is easily accounted
for. Slavery became profitable. A Yankee magician had touched it with
a wand of gold, and from being a languishing, struggling system, it
quickly developed into a money-maker.
Whitney, the Connecticut mechanical genius, by the invention of the
cotton-gin, made the production of cotton a highly lucrative industry.
The price of negroes to work the cotton fields at once went up, and
yet the supply was inadequate. Northernly slave States could not
produce cotton, but they could produce negroes. They shared in the
golden harvest. Such cities as Baltimore, Washington, Richmond,
Wheeling, and Louisville became centers of a flourishing traffic in
human beings. They had great warehouses, commonly spoken of as "nigger
pens," in which the "hands" that were to make the cotton were
temporarily gathered, and long coffles--that is, processions of men
and women, each with a hand attached to a common rope or
chain--marched through their streets with faces turned southward.
The slave-owners were numerically a lean minority even in the South,
but their mastery over their fellow-citizens was absolute.
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