Life^ Services and Character of Jefferson Davis, 139
ment for the unskilled labor of the African, and under its genial skies he found a fittinj^ home. Hence natural causes ejected him from the North and propelled him southward ; and as the institution of slavery decayed in northern latitudes it thrived and prospered in the southern clime.
The demand for labor in the North was rapidly supplied by new accessions of Europeans, and as the population increased their opin- ions were moulded by the body of the society which absorbed and assimilated them as they came; while on the other hand the presence of masses of black men in the South, and the reliance upon them for labor, repelled, in both social and economical aspects, the European immigrants who eagerly sought for homes and employment in the New World. More than this, Northern manufacturers wanted high tariffs to secure high prices for their products in Southern markets, and Southern farmers wanted low tariffs that they might buy cheaply. Ere long it appeared that two opposing civilizations lay alongside of each other in the United States ; and while the roof of a common government was over both of them,. it covered a household divided against itself in the very structure of its domestic life, in the nature of its avocations, in the economies of its labor, and in the very tone of its thoughts and aspiration.
Revolution was in the air. An irrepressible conflict had risen.
TWO REVOLUTIONS RISING ON PARALLEL LINES— THE REVOLU- TION OF THE NORTH AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION.
There were indeed two revolutions forming in the American republic. The one was a Northern revolution against a Constitution which had become distasteful to its sentiments and unsuited to its needs. As the population of the East moved westward across the continent, the Southern emigrant to the new territories wished to carry with him his household servants, while the Northerner saw in the negro a rival in the field of labor which cheapened its fruits, and degraded, as he conceived, its social status.
Thus broke out the strife which raged in the territories of North- ern latitudes, and as it widened it assailed slavery in every form, and denounced as " a covenant with death and with hell * ' the Constitution which had guaranteed its existence.
The formula of the Northern revolution was made by such men as Charles Sumner, who took the ground of the higher law, that the Constitution itself was unconstitutional, and that it was not in the
