Republican party neither aim nor profess to aim at this object. And
when we consider the flood of wrath which would have been poured out
against them if they did, by the very writers who now taunt them with
not doing it, we shall be apt to think the taunt a little misplaced.
But though not an Abolitionist party, they are a Free-soil party. If
they have not taken arms against slavery, they have against its
extension. And they know, as we may know if we please, that this
amounts to the same thing. The day when slavery can no longer extend
itself, is the day of its doom. The slave-owners know this, and it is
the cause of their fury. They know, as all know who have attended to
the subject, that confinement within existing limits is its
death-warrant. Slavery, under the conditions in which it exists in the
States, exhausts even the beneficent powers of nature. So incompatible
is it with any kind whatever of skilled labor, that it causes the
whole productive resources of the country to be concentrated on one or
two products, cotton being the chief, which require, to raise and
prepare them for the market, little besides brute animal force. The
cotton cultivation, in the opinion of all competent judges, alone
saves North American slavery; but cotton cultivation, exclusively
adhered to, exhausts in a moderate number of years all the soils which
are fit for it, and can only be kept up by travelling farther and
farther westward. Mr. Olmsted has given a vivid description of the
desolate state of parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, once among the
richest specimens of soil and cultivation in the world; and even the
more recently colonized Alabama, as he shows, is rapidly following in
the same downhill track. To slavery, therefore, it is a matter of life
and death to find fresh fields for the employment of slave labor.
Confine it to the present States, and the owners of slave property
will either be speedily ruined, or will have to find means of
reforming and renovating their agricultural system; which cannot be