Moreover, the increase of the proportion of
slaves to whites, if slavery were confined to the region east of the
Mississippi, might eventually make possible a servile insurrection,
particularly if foreign war should break out. All of these
difficulties would be met, in the opinion of the south, by
scattering the existing slaves and thus mitigating the evil without
increasing the number of those in bondage.
It was seen that the struggle was not simply one of morals and of
rival social and industrial institutions, but was a question of
political power between the two great and opposing sections,
interested, on the one side, in manufacturing and in the raising of
food products under a system of free labor; and, on the other, in
the production of the great staples, cotton, tobacco, and sugar, by
the use of slave labor. Already the southern section had shown its
opposition to tariff and internal improvements, which the majority
of, the northern states vehemently favored. In other words, the
slavery issue was seen to be a struggle for sectional domination.
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