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The existence of slavery in the Southern States had been a cause for agi-
tation and trouble for many years preceding Secession, and that it was
the real cause of the war is not a matter of doubt whatever to me. If
slavery had not existed at the South there never would have been war between
the two sections at that time, and had not the slaveholding interest been
the most active one in bringing about secession, there was no other interest
either influential and powerful enough or sufficiently menaced by any
agitation at the North to have given success to such a movement.

It may seem strange for me to be making this assertion, but I do it because
it is the fashion of the day to deny that slavery was the cause of the war.
People appear to have become ashamed of having once owned slaves, and
consequently attribute the war to some other cause, but with me there is no-
thing in the fact of my having been an owner of slaves of which I am now
ashamed. The slaves were first brought to the colony of South Carolina
under British rule, when all the European States that had American
colonies imported negroes from Africa, without considering that there was
any wrong in it, and their introduction into the tropical and sub-tropical
possessions of England was absolutely necessary to the starting of their
prosperity. Without negroes from equatorial Africa, accustomed to the
malarious atmosphere of the banks of the Congo, the swamps of the rice
region of the two Carolinas never would have been cleared, and the colony
of Georgia which, under Oglethorpe, was started with the intention of excluding
slavery, made such slow progress that repeated petitions were sent to
England asking that the slave trade be permitted before it was finally allowed.
During the 50 or 60 years that followed the revolution the slave power had
rizen to great proportions, and while it is generally admitted that, if it had
not been agreed at the formation of the government that the trade should
be allowed to continue until 1808, certain Southern States would not have
adopted the federal constitution, it is nevertheless true that the money
value of the slaves then was not large, and that the area in which their em-
ployment was profitable was small also. It was the discovery of the cotton
gin and the possibility thus created of furnishing to England especially,
the raw material which she required for her cotton factories, that gave
an impetus to the cultivation of that staple, and in all of the States
south of Virginia made it the leading industry.

At the same time the tobacco planters of Virginia and N Carolina, the rice
planters of the Carolinas and Georgia and the sugar planters of Louisiana
all competed for the ownership of additional slaves, and, as new lands
were being cleared for cotton culture in the cotton belt west of Georgia
the larger prices which could be offered for slaves there induced many
planters in the older States to part with their surplus labor.

The money value of the slaves at the South, in consequence of all the im-
portant industries being agricultural and depending on slave labor,
therefore became very great, and in South Carolina alone was estimated
at $400.000.000. The slaveholders possessed most of the wealth of
the South and were necessarily the leading and most important class.
When their property was jeapordised by the determination of the North
to restrict them to a limited area, and by tampering with the slaves in
the border States, induce a disposition to insurrection, and thus render their
ownership insecure, it cannot be a matter of surprise that the slaveowners,
when Lincoln was elected, were ready for secession, and that South Carolina
where more slaves were owned in proportion to the whites than
in the other States, should have been the first to take that important step.
With these facts thus briefly stated, and so clearly and undeniably true, I cannot
see how for a moment it can be doubted that the existence of slavery at the
South and the dangers that menaced that property were the real and only
cause of the war.