Nor was
there any mystery about it. As the owners of four million slaves, on
an average worth not far from five hundred dollars each, they formed
the greatest industrial combination--what at this time we would call a
trust--ever known to this or any other country. Our mighty Steel
Corporation would have been a baby beside it. If to-day all our great
financial companies were consolidated, the unit would scarcely come up
to the dimensions of that one association. It was not incorporated in
law, but its union was perfect. Bound together by a common interest
and a common feeling, its members--in the highest sense co-partners in
business and in politics, in peace and in war--were prepared to act
together as one man.
But why, I again ask, were the Northern people so infatuated with
slavery? They raised no cotton and they raised no negroes, but many of
them, and especially their political leaders, carried their adulation
almost to idolatry.
When Elijah P. Lovejoy was shot down like a dog, and William Lloyd
Garrison was dragged half naked and half lifeless through the streets
of Boston, and other outrages of like import were being perpetrated
all over the North, it was carefully given out that those deeds were
not the work of irresponsible rowdies, but of "gentlemen"--of
merchants, manufacturers, and members of the professions.
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