a wand of gold, and from being a languishing, struggling system, it
quickly developed into a money-maker.

Whitney, the Connecticut mechanical genius, by the invention of the
cotton-gin, made the production of cotton a highly lucrative industry.
The price of negroes to work the cotton fields at once went up, and
yet the supply was inadequate. Northernly slave States could not
produce cotton, but they could produce negroes. They shared in the
golden harvest. Such cities as Baltimore, Washington, Richmond,
Wheeling, and Louisville became centers of a flourishing traffic in
human beings. They had great warehouses, commonly spoken of as "nigger
pens," in which the "hands" that were to make the cotton were
temporarily gathered, and long coffles--that is, processions of men
and women, each with a hand attached to a common rope or
chain--marched through their streets with faces turned southward.

The slave-owners were numerically a lean minority even in the South,
but their mastery over their fellow-citizens was absolute. Nor was
there any mystery about it. As the owners of four million slaves, on
an average worth not far from five hundred dollars each, they formed
the greatest industrial combination--what at this time we would call a
trust--ever known to this or any other country. Our mighty Steel
Corporation would have been a baby beside it. If to-day all our great
financial companies were consolidated, the unit would scarcely come up
to the dimensions of that one association. It was not incorporated in
law, but its union was perfect. Bound together by a common interest
and a common feeling, its members--in the highest sense co-partners in
business and in politics, in peace and in war--were prepared to act
together as one man.