thirty years, the 'Reply to Hayne' became a northern classic, a text for schools, a part of northern thought.

Jackson brought much of the West to accept this view by his vigorous treatment of 'nullification.' Elected as the spokesman of the frontier democrats in 1828, he realised their feeling for the general government, forestalled nullification by a threat of force, and served both his own party and the nation by his policy. By 1830 the generation of men that controlled America was forgetting the separatism that dated from the colonial period. The last of the framers of the Constitution to die was Madison, who lived until 1837. Men who knew neither British rule nor State freedom were coming into control; and every act of the general government served to strengthen it as the kernel of American life. The opposition to the nascent nationalism came from a region just beginning to realise itself as possessing special economic interests and at variance with half the States.

Calhoun of South Carolina, twice Vice-President and long a senator for his State, was among the earliest to notice this sectional divergence and to prepare a political remedy to meet it. In his youth he had been as national as any. He was one of the young enthusiasts who forced the English war. He had advocated a Federal Bank, internal improvements at the public cost, and a tariff so adjusted as to afford protection to American manufactures. He had warned his colleagues in Congress against a narrow and restricted view of public powers. So late as 1824 he favoured these things, but in the next four years he became aware of the sectional drift that was separating the North and the South. As between the nation and his State, he was for the latter; and during the years of Adams's presidency he formulated the philosophic basis of separatism and nullification. When, in 1828, the tariff was again revised under the influence of northern manufacturers and Clay's western converts to the American System,' Calhoun used every strategy to defeat the measure, and failing in this undertook to organise his State in opposition to it. He might have precipitated the nullification episode in this year had not the probable election of Jackson to the presidency induced him to give the government one more chance. From his angle the tariff had become a sectional measure,

enacted by a corrupt alliance of its beneficiaries, in defiance of the Constitution and to the damage of the South. He hoped that under Jackson the policy would change peaceably; but change it must, if his section was to receive fair play.

The forces of nature had much to do with the sectional unity of the South and its divergence in character from the North. Here was the region of America's distinctive exports, tobacco and cotton. The cultivation of the former staple had been profitable for many generations and had induced a type of life based upon it and its source of labour. The negro slave was introduced into America at a time when ethical opinion had nothing to say against the institution of slavery, and when the great nations of Europe were ready to derive a profit from either the use of the slaves or the traffic in them. Slavery had existed in every colony, but it had been generally unprofitable in a society in which the pioneer was the typical member. The work of the pioneer was individual, calling for strength, enterprise, initiative, and a degree of industry not to be expected from a half-savage who worked under compulsion for a master. Save as house-servants, slaves had little value in most regions. The cost of supervising the negroes and keeping them to their tasks was so great that only where their labour could be administered wholesale was their employment profitable. In pioneer agriculture nothing was done wholesale. Only in the culture of tobacco or rice, in the early days, could profits be found large enough to justify the use of labour so inexpert; and in these only could plantations be organised large enough to systematise the labour and use the negroes cheaply.

In the tobacco plantations of Virginia was devised the best method for the utilisation of the slaves; but even here, in the generation after the Revolution, public opinion had regarded slavery as a misfortune. The democratic humanitarianism of the 18th century made it hard for those who demanded the rights of man for themselves to justify the holding of human chattels. The 19th century began in the United States with the belief that slavery was 'in the course of ultimate extinction,' but with forces at work that already threatened to

reverse the course. The invention of Whitney's machine for cleaning cotton opened a new vista of cheap clothing for the masses and brought prosperity to those quarters of the globe where cotton could be raised. So great were the profits that no labour was too costly to be used, while negro labour appeared to be at its best in the cottonfields. The cotton plantations grew rapidly, increasing the price of slaves and piling up accumulations of capital for reinvestment in lands and slaves. The South was started on a new career.

The first phase of the American occupation of the continent was pioneering; and, while the pioneer generation lasted, there was substantial uniformity, North or South. The sectional divergence began with the second phase. Throughout the second English war there was a western solidarity that stretched from the outposts at Detroit to those at New Orleans. Jackson's democracy was the expression of the simple aspirations of this region and this generation. But, as the area in which cotton could be raised passed out of its pioneer chapter, it changed its character.

The pioneer was poor. He had little capital and few slaves, and reclaimed his farm with the work of his own hands. Behind him came the cotton-grower with a stock of slaves and free capital for investment in the cleared land. It was unusual for the planter to clear his land himself; he bought instead of the original pioneers, consolidating the clearings of several, and put his slaves to work. In many sections of the South it is possible to trace in the recorded deeds the process of occupation. Small holdings, many in number, with a free white working population, come first. Large holdings, with slave labour directed by a few white owners and overseers, come next. So long as the plantation flourished, it inevitably tended to grow in size, for the profits from slaves depended upon the degree of organisation and division of labour that prevailed; and, other things being equal, the larger the plantation the greater the profit.

But the effect of the plantation upon the plantation community was inevitable. It could not support a dense population. Its owners were surrounded by their negro labourers, in fear of whom they always lived. The cultivation of the soil was wasteful, with single cropping

and no fertilisation. The planters' capital was immobile because it was tied up in the ownership of the labour supply. As years went on, a social organisation of landed gentry appeared, which controlled the economic system of its region and monopolised the fields of government and law. The poorer whites lived in the social shadow of their superiors. It was a charming aristocracy and an omnipotent one. Uncontaminated by trade, based upon land, used to big ventures, and independent in mind, its political leaders could speak with a twofold authoritythat which came by election and that which they attained at birth.

By 1830 the cotton region had pushed across the Old South (east of the Alleghanies) into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and even Texas. Slave labour, with all its limitations, was its chief support; and whatever attacked its labour threatened its very existence. In the debate over the admission of Missouri in 1820 the plantation region had shown a disposition to demand more territory into which to take its slaves, and had served notice that the institution of slavery, far from being 'in the course of ultimate extinction,' was the financial foundation of the South. As the institution became more prosperous the South ceased to talk of its abandonment, came to defend it as a lamentable necessity, and ended by proclaiming it as a divine institution provided for the benefit of both races. Calhoun had seen this prosperity, had foreseen that it would invite attack, and had sought to organise a political machine upon it, to protect it. The census showed that the plantation was less effective in developing population and wealth than was the free industry of the North. Exactly half of the States (of which there were twenty-four in 1830) permitted slavery within their limits, but these were falling behind the other half that rejected it. Control by majority vote would leave the South in hopeless minority; the tariff, which was subject to majority control, warned the South what it might expect. For the benefit of the populous northern States all were compelled to bear the burden of a protective tariff. The South marketed its crop abroad and bought its supplies outside the tariff wall. Calhoun and his allies attributed the prosperity of the North to the tribute thus exacted, and were not placated by the

argument that whatever benefited one section benefited all, at least indirectly. Calhoun hoped that under Jackson, elected by an alliance of the West and South, the tariff policy would be reversed, and so in 1828 he put off the application of his theory of redress.

North or South the generation of the pioneer was the same, and brought solidarity throughout the West until the middle 'twenties. The successors of the pioneer gave to each region its permanent character; and the investment of the surplus savings of each region shaped its growth. In the South capital went into plantations and slaves. Further north cotton could not be grown; no crop was profitable enough to carry the burden of slaves; and the surplus went into dwellings, barns, stock, roads, towns, and all the other paraphernalia of a diversified industrial community.

Every year carried the North-West farther from the South-West in character. The prosperous northern farmer used his savings to pay off his mortgage, then to build him a better home than the log house in which his first children were invariably born. He perhaps bought more fields and enlarged his agricultural plant; but, as he passed into later middle life, he was more likely to turn his farm over to a son to cultivate-the other sons could find cheap land for themselves everywhere-and to retire to the country seat where he lived upon his income, talked politics, and devoted himself to the development of his community. The southern planter was prone to build up his great plantation and then, as wasteful methods brought its soil to the margin of declining crops, to sell it and buy newer and fresher land. He spent less on permanent improvements than the northern farmer because he knew that cotton culture consumed the land itself. In the wake of the large plantations, at their zenith of prosperity, came sales of land, breaking up the large estates into smaller holdings, cultivated by poorer men who lacked the capital or initiative to become planters and could afford no better lands. When the southern region was beginning to decline through soil-exhaustion and the emigration of the great planters, their northern contemporaries were replacing the log houses with finer dwellings, building barns, beginning to fertilise their acres, and developing