The first inhabitants of the South preferred a rural life, and on large plantations. The Crown grants to early proprietors favored this, especially in the Virginia and Carolina colonies. The Puritans did not love or foster slavery as did the Cavalier of the South. Castes or classes existed among the Southern settlers from the beginning, which, with other favoring causes, made it easier for slavery to take root and prosper, and ultimately fasten itself upon and become a dominating factor in the whole social and political fabric of the South. Slavery there soon came to be considered of paramount importance in securing a high social status or a high, so-called, civilization. But we have, by this brief _resume_, sufficiently shown that the responsibility for the introduction and maintenance of slavery and the slave trade does not rest exclusively on any of our early colonies, North or South, nor on any one race or nationality of the world; it remains now to show, in a summary way, how slavery and the slave trade were treated and regarded by the different sections of the United States after allegiance to England was thrown off. While slavery died out from local and natural causes, if not wholly for moral, social, and religious reasons, in the States north of Maryland, it flourished and ripened into strength and importance in States south, casting a controlling influence and power over the whole of the United States socially, and for the most part dominating the country politically. The greatest statesmen and brightest intellects of the North, though convinced of the evils of slavery and of its fatal tendencies, were generally too cowardly to attack it politically, although but about one fifth of the whole white population of the slave states in 1860, or perhaps at any time, was, through family relationship, or otherwise, directly or indirectly interested in slaves or slave labor. Old political parties were in time disrupted, and new ones were formed on slavery issues. The slavery question rent in twain the Methodist Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. The followers of Wesley and Calvin divided on slavery. It was always essentially an aristocratic institution, and hence calculated to benefit only a few of the great mass of freemen. In 1860, there was in the fifteen slave States a white population of 8,039,000 and a slave population of 3,953,696. Of the white population only 384,884 were slaveholders, and, including their families, only about 1,600,000 were directly or indirectly interested in slaves or their labor. About 6,400,000 (80 per cent.) of the whites in these States had, therefore, no interest in the institution, and yet they were wholly subordinated to the few who were interested in it.