Alabama.

Slave soil unlike free soil, is incapable of sustaining a dense
population. Slave labor calls for large spaces within which to multiply
and prosper. The purchase of Louisiana and the acquisition of Florida
met this agrarian necessity on the part of the South. Immense, unsettled
areas thus fell to the lot of the slave system at the crisis of its
material expansion and prosperity. The domestic slave-trade under the
impetus of settling these vast regions according to the plantation
principle, became an enormous and spreading industry. The crop of slaves
was not less profitable than the crop of cotton. A Southern white man
had but to buy a score of slaves and a few hundred acres to get "rich
beyond the dreams of avarice." So at least calculated the average
Southern man.

This revival of slavery disappointed the humane expectation of its
decline and ultimate extinction entertained by the founders of the
republic. It built up instead a growing and formidable slave class, and
interest in the Union. With the rise of giant slave interests, there
followed the rise of a power devoted to their encouragement and
protection.

Three far-reaching concessions the slave States obtained in the
convention of 1787, viz., the right to import slaves from Africa until
1808; the rendition of fugitive slaves escaping into the free States,
and the three-fifths slave representation clause of the
Constitution--all of which added vastly to the security and value of
this species of property, and as a consequence contributed to the slave
revival.