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.
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