more closely identified, and more powerful-the people of the old and the new "Free States" of the American Union, the only truly united States of our post-Revolutionary history.

A cloud hangs forever and far along the skirts of this grand march of Empire-to the southward. The "South," as such, has grown only with the growth of its negro population; its western border is fixed, half-way to the Pacific Ocean, at the line where the extension of that population was arrested, a quarter century ago, by the shock of war. The shadow of slavery still rests on the whole region that slavery blighted. The darkness of the Dark Continent lies upon the fairest, richest portion of the New World. Its forests and mineral fields are exploring-ground for the rest of the country. Africa is grafted on America. It is "the South" that it was from 1787 to 1860-a separate South, a solid South, a shadowed South, an undeveloped South-and "the South" it is doomed to remain until the causethe marked, alien, and unassimilable element of its population, that made it what it was and is; binding it together and excluding it from genuine and cordial sympathy with the life and thought and purpose and achievement of the rest of the Republic-is removed. This is plain speaking. There is need for plain speaking. We have trifled with each other and deceived ourselves long enough.

No matter, now, who is to be blamed for his

presence here, or who are responsible for his misfortunes and the misfortunes he has caused or occasioned us,-is not the fact of the ill plight of the Negro, and of the injurious effects of his presence on the conditions of the one section, and the relations of the two sections, plain and incontrovertible?

If there is any honest doubt on this subject, however, it should be satisfied. The future peace and happiness of the Republic depend on this generation of its citizens understanding the Negro Question aright, and on the right use of such understanding. Can we not then, as reasonable men, put aside personal and sectional feeling, and agree upon the bare conditions of our national existence and of the grave problem with which we are confronted?

Let the main proposition be set forth again, in the plainest terms: The Negro was the cause of the division of the United States into the two sections, the North and the South, and has been the cause of all the strife that has taken place between those sections since the independence of the colonies was established. An innocent cause, assuredly. A remote or indirect cause sometimes, it may be conceded. But the one, real, first cause, always. Let us not quibble about words. What is meant is that, but for the presence of the Negro in the United States there would have been no division of the country on sectional lines as we have known them, no North, no South, no Nulli

fication, no Secession, and probably no civil war over any question! A wide and interesting field for speculation opens to us here, but we need not enter it, for the present at least. It is enough if we can haply agree on the facts of our national history.

The main fact which is asserted is that that history has turned upon the Negro, and the Negro Question, from first to last.

The rift between the North and the South appeared plainly in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, as every one of our historians tells us, and it has steadily widened ever since. It was seen by the delegates to the Convention, whose division on the Negro question, as it was presented to them for the first time, foreshadowed the fatal division of the whole people in 1861. On the floor of the Convention Mr. Madison "contended that the States were divided into different interests, not by their difference in size, but by other circumstances; the most important of which resulted from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States. It did not lie between the large and small States; it lay between the Northern and Southern." *

This was the beginning of the trouble, but we need not trace its development step by step. It should be said, however, that difference in climate * Madison Papers, p. 1006.

did not have the importance which Mr. Madison assigned to it, or that has been assigned to it since his day. The State line between Virginia and Pennsylvania has never marked so wide a variation of climate that the Negro or slavery could thrive on but one side of it. Virginia and Ohio are in the same latitude, yet Ohio has never been identified with the South on any sectional issue. The presence of its negro population alone carried Virginia into the Southern Confederacy, when Ohio and Pennsylvania remained in the Union. Slavery alone, not slavery and climate, has marked the line of cleavage between the North and the South, from Mr. Madison's time down. The one true cause of division which he indicated in the Convention at Philadelphia was made plain enough in the Congress of 1860–61, when it was proclaimed in terms that leave no room for doubt or dispute as to its recognition, and the map of the Southern Confederacy adds demonstration to assertion.

We are told still, indeed, that the war in which our differences culminated was waged in defence of the sovereignty of the States and the right of self-government, on the one hand; and for the preservation of the Union, on the other. The dogma of State Sovereignty was asserted so strenuously by the Slave States alone, however; and only the Slave States seceded; while the States that triumphed in the struggle for the maintenance of the Union formulated their success in

additions to the organic law of the Union that were designed alone to settle the Negro Question in accordance with the views of that question which the North had upheld throughout the controversy that preceded the war. The Union is restored, and the States have resumed the relations which they formerly sustained towards each other. The amended Constitution contains no word in reference to State Sovereignty that it did not contain prior to 1861. The old controversy has been renewed on changed lines, and relates wholly to the one question of the status of the Negro. If we have regard to the substance of our former differences, then, and not to the expression of them, we see that the Negro question was the issue that divided us.

Nay, the South itself was divided, on the same question, when the final conflict was precipitated. A considerable portion of the people of the South sided with the North in the struggle that followed secession, and either held aloof from the Confederate armies, or took active part against them. This class-Union men or Union sympathizers, as they were called-were the inhabitants of the mountain region which extended from Mason and Dixon's line far down into the heart of the Confederacy. And the distinguishing feature of this central or wedge-shaped region, as compared with the rest of the South, was and is the almost entire absence of a Negro population. The apparent exception to the rule