EQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES 543 



ual broadening of the suffrage in the different states, in the abolishment 

 of religious and property qualifications for office, in the election of Jack- 

 son and the spoils system, and in the "war on the United States Bank. 



The economic situation rendered the craving for property in the 

 main at one with the ideal of equality. The one noteworthy exception 

 was property in human chattels against which the forces of equality 

 protested until the close of the Civil War. In colonial days African 

 slavery was an American institution. But gradually slavery died out 

 in the north, as the fact that it did not pay became more generally rec- 

 ognized, and even in the south, except in South Carolina and Georgia, 

 the feeling against the institution as late as 1790 was strong. Two 

 events, just at this juncture, the invention of the cotton gin and the in- 

 troduction of short staple cotton adapted to the uplands of the south, 

 made slave ownership much more profitable and changed the whole situ- 

 ation. The simultaneous introduction of spinning and weaving by 

 steam-driven machinery greatly reduced the cost of manufacturing cot- 

 ton goods and, aided by improved transportation, brought them into 

 general use, enlarged the market for the product of the cotton fields, 

 hastened the spread of slavery and helped to fasten it more firmly upon 

 the south. Improved transportation also contributed to this result by 

 rendering the interior of the south accessible to the cotton manufactur- 

 ing centers. Likewise, the growing of slaves in the border states for the 

 southern market became more profitable, and public opinion in these 

 states which had been half way friendly to emancipation suddenly re- 

 coiled. As a consequence, slavery ceased to be a national and became a 

 sectional institution. The explanation is at bottom economic, for while 

 slavery as a method of applying labor disappeared in the north, the slave 

 trade continued for some years, even after it had been made unlawful, 

 and was the foundation of not a few fortunes in Newport and other 

 northern cities. Slavery died out in the north because it did not pay, 

 while northerners continued to traffic in slaves because it was profitable. 

 Under the same economic conditions, the southerner is ethically the peer 

 of the northerner. 



Property in human beings conflicted with the ideal of equality. So 

 long as one individual owns the body of another, the conception of fair 

 play is set at naught. Not only is the slave denied the freedom neces- 

 sary to the expression of his personality, but the effect upon the owner is 

 apt to be degrading. The aspirations for better things of both master 

 and slave are either restrained or suppressed. Clearly, slavery was in- 

 consistent with the professions of democracy and was out of accord with 

 the spirit of nineteenth-century civilization. The inconsistency was 

 so glaring that the authors of the constitution scrupulously avoided the 

 use of the words " slave" and " slavery" in framing that document. It 

 would have been strange, therefore, if the restraint and abolition of slav- 



