6 
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters . 
ceivecl her share of the emigration, and the census of 1850 would show a 
population in the slave states equal to that in the free states. Now the 
truth of the matter is that without the tariff, and with the fullest reign of 
squatter sovereignty, the result would not have been different. The 
North was destined to obtain the bulk of emigration in any event. The 
natural repulsion and antipathy between free labor and slave labor settled 
the question in advance. Slavery would have starved free labor out of the 
South, even had it sought entrance there. The peculiar civilization of the 
South gave the North all the advantages of development. Had southern 
leadership at the start been of the style of Jefferson Davis and Robert. 
Toombs, rather than of the temperament and range of Madison and Jeffer¬ 
son, the lead which the South gained and held for sixty years could never 
have been. The natural growth of the country was against her equili¬ 
brium; but the traditions of a lofty statemanship kept her in the ascend¬ 
ant. It might have been foretold at the treaty establishing equilibrium of 
the sections in 1787 that unless emigration was to be shut out, as ^well as 
the importation of slaves, after 1807, the South was doomed to numerical 
inferiority. 1 Otherwise it was starting a nation with all the conditions of 
enlargement and progress, with healthy life currents and virile institutions 
in a race for the ascendancy with a nation already palsied by servitude and 
mortgaged in half its energies to an effete civilization. The ship which 
caught in its sails every breeze from over the Atlantic was bound, even 
against odds, to outstrip the slaver becalmed in a dead sea. 
IV. 
A table of the sectional electoral vote in the leading Presidential contests 
since 1790, will show that; the war has had no effect on the animus of the sec¬ 
tions. New England and the South are still at opposite poles. But a table 
of the apportionment of the electoral vote under the several censuses since 
1790, will illustrate important changes. Classing Delaware as a southern 
rather than a middle state, our table indicates that the South cast nearly 
one half of the vote of the electoral college at the beginning. She casts 
thirty-eight per cent, of the electoral votes under the census of 1880. The 
New England section had twenty-eight per cent, of the electoral vote in 
1790; to-day she has less than ten per cent, of it. The middle section con¬ 
sisting of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey has declined much less 
than New England, and rather less than the South; while the West which 
cast a little more than one-fifth of the electoral vote when Abraham 
Lincoln was a candidate, now casts a third of the whole vote, and bids fair 
to cast almost half the vote which shall elect a president in 1924. 
1 Draper (American Civil War, 1-446), puts this opinion in the mouth of the slaveholder; 
“ The mistake with us has been that it was not made felony to bring in an Irishman when 
it was made piracy to bring in an African.” 
