Slavery, even in the modified, domestic garb it wore among them, had a depressing, degrading influence upon the white common laborers. This was more obviously so with the several thousands of inert, improvident people, such as are to be found more or less in all regions, but who are apt to be more numerous where the climate is genial and a few acres of land with a poor tenement can be cheaply rented. These led an Arab sort of life, living in a log cabin and growing a crop of corn, then, not “folding their tents,” but packing up their “plunder”--the synonym for household goods--and flitting away with their children and dogs to a cabin of another proprietor. For this class, who lived “from hand to mouth,” and whose contentment was partly due to the fact that their covetousness had no incitements to indulgence, the negroes of substantial families had an unconcealed contempt. Another and better class consisted more numerously of diligent and thrifty farming people. In them slavery induced, by some subtle, indefinable influence, an industrial languor. It approximated them to the slaves, despite their difference in color and personal relation to the masters; and it barred their way to improvement of condition, by pushing them as tenants from the more fertile acres which the slaves tilled, to the thin soil of the hillsides. Now, under the reign of freedom, these small but industrious farmers have access by lease to the richer lands. The mountaineers, strictly speaking, felt no concern about the institution of slavery itself, and knew but little. Here and there among them were men of competent means, some of whom owned a few negroes. Generally they looked upon slavery as something foreign to their social life, but they had no imperative, philanthropic impulses to contend against it. They would have been displeased at its coming near their homes in the imperious majesty it wore in the cotton States. At the same time they were satisfied to let men of the South keep serfs at pleasure, but they counted it no business of theirs to help in the work. If the perpetuity of the Union or that of slavery were the question at issue, they would have no hesitation in deciding. Let slavery perish and the Union live. Yes! the Union--the Government handed down to them from Washington and his compatriots! _It_ must survive. For it they would fight, and, if necessary, die.