a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.  I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.  It is hushed, indeed, for the moment.  But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence....  I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way.  The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle that would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be."[1] For the time being, however, the South was concerned mainly about immediate dangers; nor was this section placed more at ease by Denmark Vesey’s attempted insurrection in 1822.[2] A representative South Carolinian,[3] writing after this event, said, “We regard our Negroes as the Jacobins of the country, against whom we should always be upon our guard, and who, although we fear no permanent effects from any insurrectionary movements on their part, should be watched with an eye of steady and unremitted observation.”  Meanwhile from a ratio of 43.72 to 56.28 in 1790 the total Negro population in South Carolina had by 1820 come to outnumber the white 52.77 to 47.23, and the tendency was increasingly in favor of the Negro.  The South, the whole country in fact, was more and more being forced to consider not only slavery but the ultimate reaches of the problem.

[Footnote 1:  Writings, XV, 249.]

[Footnote 2:  See Chapter VII, Section 1.]

[Footnote 3:  Holland:  A Refutation of Calumnies, 61.]

Whatever one might think of the conclusion—­and in this case the speaker was pleading for colonization—­no statement of the problem as it impressed men about 1820 or 1830 was clearer than that of Rev. Dr. Nott, President of Union College, at Albany in 1829.[1] The question, said he, was by no means local.  Slavery was once legalized in New England; and New England built slave-ships and manned these with New England seamen.  In 1820 the slave population in the country amounted to 1,500,000.  The number doubled every twenty years, and it was easy to see how it would progress from 1,500,000 to 3,000,000; to 6,000,000; to 12,000,000; to 24,000,000.  “Twenty-four millions of slaves!  What a drawback from our strength; what a tax on our resources; what a hindrance to our growth; what a stain on our character; and what an impediment to the fulfillment of our destiny!  Could our worst enemies or the worst enemies of republics, wish us a severer judgment?” How could one know that wakeful and sagacious enemies without would not discover the vulnerable point and use it for the country’s overthrow?  Or was there not danger that among a people goaded from age to age there might at length arise some second Toussaint L’Ouverture, who, reckless of consequences, would array a force and