Between the States in the North and those in the {211} South there were certain differences in interests and outlook which were very likely to lead to a quarrel. There had been some difference even in their original settlers. As already noticed, those who went to New England and the Northern States generally were for the most part of the Puritan persuasion, of a humbler social rank, and with more rigid religious views than those who settled in Virginia and other States of the South. The latter were largely of the landowning class at home, and when they came to America formed large estates and worked them by slave labour--negro slaves brought from America, or the descendants of those Africans. When Louisiana was taken over from the French, slavery was in use all over its then vast extent. In the Northern section, soon to be known as the State of Missouri, slavery was abolished. It was retained in the South. The idea of the slavery of the black races was not repugnant to the conscience of men of that day. It was not until later, and only after the great English philanthropist Wilberforce had devoted his whole life to the cause, that slavery was abolished in the British and French West Indies. The condition of the slaves, once they had arrived, was not, generally, so very bad, but the horrors that they suffered in the passage from Africa to America were unspeakable; the death-rate was terribly heavy; and the slave raids in Africa itself made the lives of the wretched negroes in their native country miserably anxious even if they evaded capture. But the consciences of white men were not alive to these miseries then, even as they were not alive to the miseries inflicted by the industrial system on many who worked under it. When consciences did begin to be stirred, it was only in accordance with human nature that expressions of disgust with the conditions of slavery should be uttered by the people of the {212} Northern States, who were not owners of slaves, and should be keenly resented by those in the South who did own slaves and whose sugar crops and cotton and maize were cultivated by slave labour. Thus came division between slave States and non-slave States, that is to say, States in which slavery was the law of the land and States in which it was not. Now and again a slave would escape, and the right claimed by the master of an escaped slave to follow him and recapture him would naturally be resented in a State which did not recognise slavery. So dissatisfaction arose, and so it grew, over this slave question, between the Abolitionists, as they were called--that is, those who favoured the abolition of slavery generally, and of the slave trade in particular--and the anti-Abolitionists. Nearly all the North was of the former, nearly all the South of the latter persuasion.