SLAVERY (from slave, from OF. Fr. esclave, from MHG. slave, sklave, Ger. Sklave, slave, Slav; originally referring to Slavs taken by the Germans in war). Legally, that status of an individual or individuals characterized by the perpetual and almost absolute loss of personal and political liberty; socially, an institution defined by law and custom similar to patria potestas, comitatus, clientela in personal dependence and to villeinage, vassalage, serfdom, servitude, and apprenticeship in personal and economic subjection and common incidents, but distinguished from them as the most absolute and involuntary form of human servitude.
The slave is the property, chattel or real, of his master, and cannot participate in the civil right of personal freedom, though, except in strict Roman law, he may enjoy limited personal rights. Slavery represents a stage in social or industrial organization and development. It probably coincides with the beginnings of settled agricultural tribal life, but its ultimate origin is in dependence resulting from inequality of capacity or opportunity between individuals or sets of individuals brought into competitive relations. Whether recognized by common, statutory, or international law, slavery is a developing status varying its character in place and time as defined by local law and custom. Slavery, either by historic contact, slave trade, or independent origin, existed anciently among Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, Phœnicians, Greeks, and Romans, and in India, China, and Africa. It is interpreted in ancient monuments and literature and locally defined by law. Philosophic justification of slavery, ancient and modern, rests historically upon natural subjection and difference of race or creed, or both. But nationals as well as barbarians, heathen, and heretics have been enslaved by all races. Classical philosophy, Hebrew and other ancient religions, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism sanctioned the institution, but its essential sanction rested in law defining the status and its incidents. Of the chief sources of slavery (capture in war, man-stealing, purchase, birth by a slave parent, and action of law), capture was most prevalent in early society. Hebrew, Greek, and Roman slavery, recruited from all these sources, more often than modern slavery, applied to a subject the equal or superior of his master. An extensive slave trade with the Mediterranean islands, Asia Minor, Africa, or Southern Europe aided to fill Athens, Corinth, Ægina, and Italy with vast numbers of slaves, numbering often thrice the free men. At Sparta conquered helots, owned by the State but let to individuals, numbered seven to one Spartan.
The incidents of Greek, Roman, and American slavery are strikingly similar, but Rome's war-like and organizing genius gave the institution greater legal definiteness and harshness. In each country the slave was sold, hired, seized for debt, and treated as his master's property, chattel or real. He was controlled by whipping, branding, fetters, exile, or by the tie of mutual affection in the family of which he was one. He had customary limited rights of marriage, property, maintenance, contract, religion, and personal security and sanctuary (in Greece). Post-Homeric Greece, the later Roman Empire, and some American colonies of the eighteenth century legalized his right to life and limb. Previously Roman slaves were ‘things’ in the master's dominica potestas, subject to life and death, torture, mutilation, crucifixion, gladiatorial combat, and work in mines under drivers; but were, like American slaves, superior to Greek in having greater opportunity to obtain their freedom, Greek and Roman freedmen gradually became free men. Classical and American slave labor was prædial, domestic, industrial, clerical, and public. Rome denied slaves civil or military service. Many Greek and Roman slaves entered learned professions. Italian latifundia worked by slaves destroyed free-hold yeomanry and increased, with harsh treatment, danger of servile insurrection. Serious revolts occurred in Greece and Rome, and later in the West Indies, but North America suffered only minor local insurrections, such, for instance, as Gabriel's Insurrection (q.v.) and Nat Turner's Insurrection. (See Turner, Nat.) The closing of Roman conquest, jus naturale, and Christianity, modified the rigid chattel conception of jus civile and jus gentium, and law gave the slave personality and protection. Finally Justinian enlarged the coloni, men personally free but tied to the soil like serfs. Thereafter slavery, the chief labor system since the Punic Wars, though practiced by Rome's Teuton conquerors, was gradually replaced in mediæval Europe by feudal vassalage, villeinage, or serfdom, particularly where German and Roman life came in close contact. Serfdom persisted to modern times, surviving in Russia until 1861. See Serf.
Slavery and the slave trade, continued by mediæval Venice, the Saracens, Tatars, Turks, and African tribes, were freshly extended by Mohammedans in Africa and Asia, who made subject alike Christians, heathen, whites, and blacks. Negro slavery was a long established African tribal custom with debtors, criminals, vagrants, and captives. The commercial expansion of Portugal incidentally began the African slave trade in modern Europe and America. Through kidnapping and from Moorish slavers Prince Henry of Portugal received negro slaves in 1442, and two years later began the European slave trade from the west coast of Africa. For a half century Portugal monopolized the traffic, which finally embraced the Spanish possessions in America, where Indian slavery established by Spain was exterminating the natives. Spain entered the slave trade in 1517; the English (under John Hawkins) in 1553, and France in 1624; they were followed by Holland, Denmark, and the American colonies. The market was the West-European countries and their colonies in America, particularly the Spanish West Indies. England finally took the lead in the commerce, granting from the time of Elizabeth to 1670 five separate patents for its monopoly to favored merchants and companies. Between 1712 and 1749 the exclusive supply of the Spanish colonies was granted by Spain to the English South Sea Company. Thereafter all Englishmen could enter this field and continue their former trade to the English colonies. Of the total number of slaves imported previous to the American Revolution, British subjects probably carried half, employing in one year 192 ships, carrying 47,000 slaves. Often a fourth of the slaves perished in the overcrowding of the ‘middle passage.’ Massacre and the torch marked the track of the kidnapping African slaver and numbers of slaves died during the process of ‘seasoning,’ or acclimatization in their new homes.
Research has proved that the first negroes landed at Jamestown in 1619 and others brought by early privateers were not reduced to slavery, but to limited servitude, a legalized status of Indian, white, and negro servants preceding slavery in most, if not all, of the English mainland colonies. Statutory recognition of slavery occurred in Massachusetts in 1641, in Connecticut in 1650, in Virginia in 1661, and later in the other colonies. Jews, Moors, and Turks were also subjects of colonial slavery. Indian slavery was confined chiefly to the seventeenth century with the English, as their Indian captives were less profitable than those of the Spanish, who were subjected to more rigorous treatment. Slavery in the region now constituting the United States was patriarchal. Statutory law and court decisions added to such incidents of servitude as alienation, whipping, disfranchisement, limited marriage, trade, etc., first the incident of perpetual service and then a denial of civil and juridical capacity, as well as of marriage, property, and possession of children, thus creating slavery. The slave, contrary to the famous obiter dicta in the Dred Scott decision (see Dred Scott Case), had some legal rights, such as limited personal agency, security (after 1788), support in age or sickness, a right to limited religious instruction, and suit and evidence in special cases. Custom gave numerous rights, such as private property, marriage, free time, contractual ability, and to females domestic or lighter prædial labor, which, however, the master was not bound to respect. Barbarities like mutilation, branding, chaining, and murder were regulated or prohibited by law, but instances of cruelty were not infrequent before the nineteenth century.
It was a mooted point in the courts of the former slave-holding States of the United States whether a slave had any rights under the common law which the master was bound to respect. There was very little precedent in the English law, and under the early Roman law a master had absolute power of life and death over his slaves, who were generally captives taken in war. In 1820 a Mississippi court held that under the common law the wanton killing of a slave was murder. In 1851 the Supreme Court of Georgia repudiated the reasoning advanced for the above conclusion, contending that a master had absolute dominion over a slave under the common law. The first legal provision in America on this subject seems to have been a Virginia statute of 1723, making the willful killing of a slave murder. In 1770 a colonial act prohibited the malicious and unnecessary killing of slaves by white men. However, in most of the Southern States, statutes were enacted prohibiting the wanton killing or mutilation of a slave, thus finally disposing of the question. Slaves were liable under the criminal laws of the States in which they lived. Most of the slave States also passed statutes securing to slaves certain other rights, such as to be treated in a humane manner, to receive medical attention when ill, and to be provided with the necessaries of life when from old age or other causes they were unable to work.
With such humane provisions recognition of a slave as a person ceased, and for all other purposes he was regarded as a chattel, subject to the will of his master, and a thing to be bought and sold. The law of personal property was applied in governing his ownership. The children of a slave mother belonged to her owner, irrespective of who owned the father. In most of the Southern States the marriage of slaves was not recognized in law, though perhaps generally encouraged by slave-owners from religious or moral principles. The legal duties and priviliges of the marriage relation were considered to be incompatible with the duties owed by the contracting parties to their owners. The question of the legal status and effect of a slave marriage has become important since the general emancipation of the slaves in determining the descent and distribution of property of former slaves. Generally, the States in which slavery flourished have enacted statutes providing for legalizing such marriages by certain formalities, and in a few States continued cohabitation merely, after emancipation, was held sufficient. However, it is doubtful if any of these States would recognize as valid a marriage contracted during slavery and followed by separation before emancipation.
A slave could not hold property, and anything acquired by him belonged to his master. The testimony of a slave would not be received in a civil action in which a white person was a party. However, slaves could testify in a criminal suit in which other slaves were defendants, or in actions to secure their freedom. The right of an owner to give a slave his freedom was recognized, and a free negro could hold property.
Sentiment against the increase of the negro population and the slave trade early developed in America. English colonies by numerous statutes from 1695 imposed duties to discourage or prohibit slave traffic, but British merchants and commercial policy defeated these efforts. The enforced slave trade appears in State constitutions, and in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence as a justification of the American Revolution. Virginia by protest in 1772, Connecticut by statute in 1774, and Delaware by her Constitution in 1776 attempted to stop the trade, and Virginia, by an act of 1778, was the first political community to prohibit it with efficient penalties. Similar action in nine other States during 1783-1789; abolition of slavery in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania in 1780; the desire of John Jay to make prohibition a feature of the Treaty of Paris of 1783; the struggle for prohibition in the Federal Convention, resulting in the compromise limiting the duration of the trade to twenty years, at the end of which period the United States passed the act of 1807 abolishing it, show the priority and force of American sentiment against the slave trade. Similar sentiment developed in Europe. Denmark by royal order prohibited the trade after 1802 in her possessions. France, following the doctrine of her Revolution, abolished her colonial slavery and slave trade in 1793, but Napoleon soon undid the work of the Convention. Napoleon's decree of March 29, 1815, however, confirmed by the Treaty of Paris and a law of 1818, made the trade illegal. In England Dellwyn, Sharpe, Clarkson, and Wilberforce began to organize anti-slave trade opinion in 1787. In 1788 Dolben and Pitt moved bills for its regulation or suppression. But mercantile interests repressed the movement until 1806, when the Grenville-Fox Ministry secured the passage of acts for the partial abolition of the slave trade, which were followed by an act on March 25, 1807, for total abolition.
The Jay-Fox entente of 1783 paved the way for the joint pledge of England and the United States, in 1806, to strive for international abolition. This object appears in treaties of England with Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden, during 1810-1814. France then pledged aid to British advocacy of abolition in the Congress of Vienna. The Netherlands, by royal decree in 1814, abolished the traffic. Spain restricted it, and Portugal in 1815 agreed to prohibit it in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Treaty of Ghent the United States and Great Britain again pledged their endeavors for suppression. The United States by supplementary acts in 1818 and 1819 endeavored to enforce her prohibition. From this time to 1840 England's chief efforts were bent on establishing an international right of search in time of peace to stop the illicit slave traffic, which increased from 40,000 a year in 1820 to 200,000 in 1837. In 1827 Portugal and Brazil promised to abolish the trade in 1829. A second time England interested a European congress, that of Verona in 1822, against the trade, now carried on with 352 ships. England urged a declaration in international law making the trade piracy, but secured, as at Vienna, only a general denunciation of the traffic. The United States and other Powers opposed right of search in time of peace as dishonor to the flag and a means of securing England's naval supremacy. (See Search, Right of.) Though not a party at Verona, the United States promptly favored international declaration of the slave trade as piracy, and prepared a treaty with England to this effect in 1824. But, as England was unwilling to yield her claim to search in American waters, the Senate rejected the treaty and the United States could only urge the international declaration. By 1833 Sweden, France, Denmark, the Hanse Towns, and some Italian States had agreed in part to England's contention for mutual search, but slavery had become such a delicate question in American politics at this time that the United States refused England's proposed concessions. In 1842 the United States and England agreed on joint naval cruising on the African coast to repress the trade. English statutes in 1824 and 1837 made the slave trade piracy punishable by death or life transportation. Conferees of England, France, Austria, and Prussia, in London, in 1838, proposed the Quintuple Treaty of December 29, 1841, declaring the trade piracy and admitting mutual right of search. On account of this admission France refused to ratify, and Lewis Cass (q.v.), the American Minister at Paris, denied its application as international law to the United States. Belgium joined, in 1845, in the Quintuple Treaty, and the United States, though refusing England's invitation to an international conference in 1860, completely changed attitude with the advent of Lincoln and Seward, admitted mutual right of search in 1862, and imposed the death penalty on smugglers of slaves. Suppression was organized, but until 1866 required a United States naval squadron on the African coast. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, and United States flags had protected slavers. Northerners sold to Southerners in Florida, Texas, and Cuba, but the Confederacy in 1861 declared against the trade. The Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment practically and legally completed the extinction of slavery and the slave trade in the United States. The English, inspired by Livingstone, sought to put an end to the slave trade in the Sudan, but the efforts of Baker and Gordon proved ineffective in the face of the Mahdist convulsions. Tewfik, however, prohibited the Egyptian slave trade in 1884. The Powers in the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 promised their efforts for repression, and in 1890 an act for this purpose resulted from the international conference, including Turkey, Persia, Zanzibar, and the United States, invited by Leopold of Belgium. Enforcement of the General Act of Brussels is encouraging if slow, but if conscientiously done will end a trade now connived at even by officials of the Congo Free State.
The anti-slavery sentiment and the movement aimed against the existence of the institution of slavery followed and in many cases coincided with, or were affected by, those against the slave trade from early colonial duties and taxes to steps for repression and emancipation. Promoted by the same, though a more limited and sometimes excitable public, including distinguished statesmen, authors, humanitarians, and sectarians, the movement originated and first rose to importance in North America and England. Eighteenth-century Christian sentiment, particularly among Friends, encouraged customary and legal manumission and the mitigation of slave codes. Justice Lord Mansfield's decision in 1772 freed slaves, like the negro Sommerset, brought to the soil of Great Britain. English emancipation societies arose in 1783, and French in 1788, Slaveholders like Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Mason, and Madison, and other statesmen, such as Franklin, Hamilton, and Adams, condemned slavery in principle, and emancipation was accomplished or in progress in every Northern State except New Jersey by 1799. Jefferson proposed in 1784 to prohibit slavery in the Northwest Territory, and he also advocated emancipation for Virginia in 1779. Tucker prepared another Virginia emancipation plan in 1796, New Jersey emancipated her slaves in 1804, and Congress limited the slave trade in Louisiana. The movement in its first stage rested chiefly on a moral or an economic basis, but soon became political. American anti-slavery organizations began from Pennsylvania petitioning Congress for Federal interference with slavery. Congress denied its constitutional competency to regulate the domestic institution beyond the slave trade; but petitions continued, and the sentiment of the North and South, united in the Ordinance of 1787 (see Northwest Territory), but divided in the Constitutional Convention, was increasingly committed, respectively, to an anti-slavery and a pro-slavery programme. A movement toward united sentiment and national organization to solve the slavery and free negro questions by emancipation and colonization took, tangible shape in the American Colonization Society, 1810, and its affiliated State societies. (See Colonization Society.) Though patronized by statesmen and divines, such as Madison, Harper, and Breckenridge, by many slaveholders, and by the Federal Government, this movement, which resulted in the establishment of a negro colony in Liberia, was viewed by extreme anti-slavery men as a pro-slavery reaction.
From 1818 to 1820 political anti-slavery sentiment became more prominent, opposing particularly slavery extension. Dissatisfaction in the North with the Missouri Compromise (q.v.) laid the basis of abolitionism. William Goodell with his Investigator in Rhode Island, and Benjamin Lundy (q.v.) with his Genius of Universal Emancipation, established in 1821, began an anti-slavery press, while Lundy went on lecture tours, and endeavored to find a slave asylum in Texas and Mexico. John Rankin formed an abolition society in Kentucky, and William Lloyd Garrison (q.v.), supported by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, established the Liberator at Boston in 1831. The era of expansion and reformation, mechanical, moral, and political, then beginning, favored the increasing anti-slavery societies and press, such as Griswold and Leavitt's New York Evangelist and Goodell's Genius of Temperance (1830) and Emancipator (1833), the New England Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1832, and the New York City and the American anti-slavery societies, founded in 1833. The last resulted from a National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia representing every Northern State. These agencies distributed broadcast tracts, books, pamphlets, and business labels denouncing slavery. The abolitionists denounced slavery and slaveholding as crimes, demanded immediate and unconditional abolition without compensation, encouraged breach of slave laws and unconstitutional measures, and affirmed natural equality of persons. Garrison, Lovejoy, Phillips, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, Hutchinson, Storrs, and Birney became leaders. Channing, Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, Lowell, and Longfellow gave literary and moral support to reasonable anti-slavery methods, but less conservative men in border free States manipulated an ‘underground railway’ to Canada for fugitive slaves. (See Underground Railway.) John Quincy Adams and others fought for the right of petition concerning slavery and constitutional abolition. Southern apologists, such as Dew, Dabney, Smith, and Fitzhugh, answered the polemics culminating in Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, a protest against the Fugitive Slave Law; and the paper war raged till Lincoln's election assured the anti-slavery victory and made actual war inevitable. President Lincoln issued his famous emancipation proclamations on September 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) practically and legally secured the success of the abolitionists by Federal abolition.
Great Britain, where Clarkson and Wilberforce had been the most prominent leaders in the anti-slavery movement, pursued a less radical method of abolition, providing by law in 1833 for future and progressive emancipation in her West Indian colonies and compensating slaveholders by purchase and an apprenticeship subsequently limited to 1839. In 1843 she abolished slavery in India. Sweden followed with colonial abolition in 1840; France in 1848; Holland in 1859; Brazil with progressive emancipation in 1871, and total emancipation in 1888; Spain in Porto Rico in 1873, and in Cuba in 1880; Great Britain and Germany in their African protectorates in 1897 and 1901; the United States in the Philippines in 1902; and Egypt in the Sudan. The South American republics abolished slavery when they emancipated themselves from the yoke of Spain.
Mohammedan countries have been the last to feel this influence, and slavery exists in Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Zanzibar, Pemba, Tripoli, Morocco, and Central Africa, but in almost all steps favoring liberty or mitigation of status have been taken. Of 100,000 slaves in Zanzibar and Pemba in 1897 half that number were freed by 1903.
Slavery was chiefly a moral and economic question in the American colonies, but it appeared as a political one during the Confederation, particularly in the debates of the constitutional and ratifying conventions, when the question of submitting it and other States' rights to Federal initiative arose. The dictum of natural equality and inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, even when reappearing in bills of rights, could not be practically applied except in limited cases, as by George Wythe in Virginia, to the liberation of slaves. But Northern emancipation provisions showed that the economic and social basis in the North was to be increasingly laid in free labor and a farm system contrasting with the slavery and plantation system of the South. Economic and social sectionalism in the colonial period rapidly became political in the federal. From 1787 Mason and Dixon's Line (q.v.) had political significance; slavery as one of the basal elements of the difference of sectional interests and sentiment rose from a local State question into the most important and permanent in national politics. Controlling conditions were: (1) Increasing sectionalism from localization of industrialism in the North; (2) constitutional compromise provisions granting Federal legislation in regard to the slave trade and fugitive slaves, and representation for slaves on the three-fifths basis; (3) a Federal domain increasing by cession, purchase, treaty, and conquest and subject to Federal organization and representation in Congress; (4) the growth of political parties opposed as to constitutional construction; (5) sectionalized anti-slavery sentiment, and (6) development and expansion of Southern staples adapted to slave labor, especially cotton after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The Constitution purposely avoided the use of the terms ‘slave’ and ‘slavery,’ yet the bargain of South Carolina and Georgia with commercial New England riveted upon it recognition of the institution. Slavery had thus two connected phases: (1) As to its existence in the States, a State right, a local question, involved in national politics in the general States' rights struggle; (2) as to its existence and extension in Federal territory, a national question, constitutionally subject to Federal legislation. National expansion necessarily brought it into politics. Support of members from the slave States in Congress secured the ordinances of 1784 and 1787, prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory and preparing the way for new free States. In 1793 Congress passed almost unanimously a fugitive slave law to secure owners in their property. (See Fugitive Slave Law.) The bill abolishing the slave trade renewed sectional debate and showed predominant anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Between 1803 and 1817 four States, two free (Ohio and Indiana) and two slave (Louisiana and Mississippi), were admitted into the Union, and the theory of balance of power between slave and free States was established. But the further organization of the Louisiana territory in 1818-20 drew the issue sharply on slavery extension. Only temporary political adjustment of slavery followed the Missouri Compromise (q.v.) prohibiting slavery north of 36° 30' N. latitude, except in Missouri. From 1820 to 1830 tariff and public land policy were, together with slavery, the issues conditioning the life and expansion of the Southern and Northern economic systems. Non-extension was interpreted as eventual extinction of slavery. Discussion of tariff bills in 1824 and 1828, dogmas of nullification. State rights, and abolition, and the Hayne-Webster debate of 1830, greatly increased the importance of slavery in sectional politics and made it the leading question after the tariff compromise of 1833. Anti-slavery men who believed in attaining their ends through constitutional methods and abolitionists organized the Liberty Party (q.v.), and twice in 1840 and 1844, nominated J. G. Birney (q.v.) for President. The annexation of Texas in 1845, and the Mexican War in 1846-48, were pro-slavery victories, the latter adding territory from which the unsuccessful Wilmot Proviso (q.v.) failed to exclude slavery. There now arose over the question of slavery a controversy destined to split both Whigs and Democrats, to bring about new party alignments, and eventually to hasten, if not cause, a great civil conflict between the North and the South. By 1848 Oregon (q.v.) was organized without slavery, and the Free Soilers, who strove for the exclusion of slavery from the Territories (see Free Soil Party; Territories), had taken the place of the Liberty Party. The anti-slavery cause won in the Compromise of 1850 in free California, and slave trade prohibition in the District of Columbia, but lost in a fugitive slave law federally executed. (See Compromise Measure of 1850.) Douglas's mistake in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and his substitution for the arrangement then effected of ‘squatter sovereignty’ by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (q.v.) in 1854, precipitated a sectional struggle for possession of Territories by colonization and border warfare. (See Kansas.) The free-State settlers practically won in 1857, and the Republican Party, absorbing Anti-Nebraskans, Free Soilers, Abolitionists, and Anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats, completed the victory, though the Dred Scott decision opened the Territories to slavery. Cuban annexation, which had been a pro-slavery policy since 1841, was defeated in 1859, and Lincoln's election following the John Brown raid of 1859 was the signal for the secession, 1860-61, of a South jealous of her State rights, and resentful of interference in slavery. Congressional acts in 1862 and Lincoln's emancipation proclamation in 1863 (a war measure), and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, legally destroyed the institution of slavery, while the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave freedmen full civil rights. Consult: Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery (New York, 1853); Hurd, Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (Boston, 1858-1862); Wilson, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power (ib., 1872-79); Wallon, Hisioire de l'ésclavage (1879); Richter, Die Sklaverei im griechischen Altertume (1886); Ingram, History of Slavery (London, 1895); Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States (New York, 1896); Documents relatifs à la répression de la traité des esclaves (Bruxelles, 1901); Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 11th, 13th, 14th, 17th series, and extra volumes (Baltimore, 1889-1902); Tillinghast, The Negro in America and Africa (New York, 1902); Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902); Von Holst, Constitutional and Political History of the United States (8 vols., new ed., Chicago, 1889), which gives an excellent account of the history of the slavery question in American politics; W. H. Smith, A Political History of Slavery (2 vols., New York, 1903); Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom (2 vols., New York, 1861); and id., Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York, 1856), which give an interesting account of slavery in the Southern States.