There can be no doubt that the belief had been growing in those States, that they would be better off out of the Union than in it. The opposition to slavery was increasing at the North; no works were so widely read there as those setting forth its iniquities. The South, then, as in the time of the making of the Constitution, was an agricultural country, depending for its prosperity on a cheap, forced labor, and the exportation of its cotton and other products. It was strong in men, and no longer required the protection of the Eastern States, as in the days of the National Convention. In 1854, by the laws enacted by Congress, the whole territory of the United States was thrown open to the introduction of slavery, giving to the Southern States the right to carry into it their “peculiar property,” and taking away their great grievance. Then also came the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, that all laws excluding slavery from the territories were unconstitutional, and asserting that the inhabitants of those territories could not interfere with that right. The only matter the South could complain of was the hostility of the Northern States to slavery, and that some of them would not comply with the laws for the rendition of their slaves, and had passed State laws and committed acts interfering with their legal and constitutional right of seizing them on Northern territory. There was no pretence that there was any tyrannical usurpation of undelegated authority by the United States, such as the Virginia resolutions referred to. Prof. Bazil L. Gildersleeve, a confederate soldier, in the _Atlantic Monthly Magazine_, says in a paper called “The Creed of the old South,” that the cause of secession was, that “the extreme Southern States considered their rights menaced by the issue of the presidential election.”[114] [114] _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1892.