In my first paper I endeavored to present a picture of the sunny
Southland in the ante-bellum days, when wealth and culture and
hospitality were the watchwords of the hour--before the invasion of
hostile hordes had vandalized the sacred old traditions, and crumbled
the household gods in the dust.

But long before the tocsin of civil war had sounded there were
mutterings of thunder in the halls of Congress, and the cloud, at first
no bigger than a man's hand, was yearly gathering force, till it finally
burst in a cyclone of passion and prejudice and tyranny, and swept all
before it in one besom of destruction. That the question of slavery
lay at the root of the dissension cannot be doubted by any who are
conversant with the political history of the United States. The tariff
rulings had their weight, as did the unfair division of new territory:
but the main issue was negro slavery, which, always a stumbling-block
to the North, had most violently agitated the whole country for eleven
years before the appeal to arms.

Negro laborers were brought to Virginia and sold as slaves, fifty years
after the first cargo landed at Jamestown. In the year 1619, a Dutch
vessel brought over twenty negroes to be thus held in bondage. To the
men who watched the landing of this handful of Africans it was doubtless
an unimportant matter, yet it was the beginning of a system that had
an immense influence upon our country. In those days few persons in
the world opposed slavery. Even kings and queens made money out of the
traffic. But for tobacco slavery would not have taken such a hold on
America. When it was found that the negro made the cheapest laborer
for cultivating the plantation many more were imported.