But long before the tocsin of civil war had sounded there were mutterings of thunder in the halls of Congress, and the cloud, at first no bigger than a man’s hand, was yearly gathering force, till it finally burst in a cyclone of passion and prejudice and tyranny, and swept all before it in one besom of destruction.  That the question of slavery lay at the root of the dissension cannot be doubted by any who are conversant with the political history of the United States.  The tariff rulings had their weight, as did the unfair division of new territory:  but the main issue was negro slavery, which, always a stumbling-block to the North, had most violently agitated the whole country for eleven years before the appeal to arms.

Negro laborers were brought to Virginia and sold as slaves, fifty years after the first cargo landed at Jamestown.  In the year 1619, a Dutch vessel brought over twenty negroes to be thus held in bondage.  To the men who watched the landing of this handful of Africans it was doubtless an unimportant matter, yet it was the beginning of a system that had an immense influence upon our country.  In those days few persons in the world opposed slavery.  Even kings and queens made money out of the traffic.  But for tobacco slavery would not have taken such a hold on America.  When it was found that the negro made the cheapest laborer for cultivating the plantation many more were imported.

They were also employed in the New England and Middle States, largely as household servants, the soil not being favorable to the production of rice, indigo, cotton and sugar, which were the staples of Southern agriculture.  Moreover, the African is not physically adapted to the northern climate.  He was especially liable to tubercular disease—­hence he was sold to the Southern planters, except in a few cases where the Puritan spirit caused his emancipation.

In the year that Harvard College was erected, 1636, the first slave ship built in America was launched at Marblehead, Mass.  It brought a large cargo of slaves to be sold to the settlers.  During the one hundred years preceding 1776, millions of slaves had been imported to the States.  King George III favored the institution, and forbade any interference with the colonies in this matter.  The horrors of slavery in Massachusetts, as recorded by reliable documents of the period, far exceed all that has been charged against the South, by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or any other records of fact or romance.  The Encyclopedia of Political Economy and United States History, Vol. 3, page 733, has the following taken from the New York Evening Post: