the other hand, that the slavery of one human being to another was an exceptional relation in a political system which rested its own right to independent existence upon the doctrine of human freedom. It was not, then, unnatural that they arrived at the conclusion that to prohibit further importations of the barbarians from Africa was the only remedy for which the time was ripe. They sincerely believed that they would place themselves and their slaves in a far more advantageous position for the gradual elevation of the latter by having to deal only with negroes born and reared amid civilized surroundings, and that freedom would finally be attained by all, as the result of a gradual advancement in intelligence, morals, and industry, and would be thus attained without any shock to the civilization and welfare of the country. This appeared to the men of that day, both of the North and of the South, to be the only safe way to proceed in solving the question of the relation between the highly civilized Anglo-American race and the grossly barbaric negro race in the United States. We think now that they might have done better, and some of the more unsympathetic critics of our history affirm that they did nothing of any consequence, and that in what they did do they acted with a consciously deceptive purpose. There may have been a few to whom this criticism can be justly applied, but there is no {54} sufficient evidence that the mass of them were insincere either in act or thought. The contention that they were is more partisan than truly historical. [Sidenote: Slavery during the War of 1812, and the years just before and just after this war.] The decade between 1807 and 1817 was filled with the questions of foreign relations, of foreign war, and of the results of foreign war. The suspension, and then the almost entire destruction, of foreign commerce by the British Orders in Council, the Napoleonic decrees, the Jeffersonian embargo, and the War of 1812, reduced the exportation in cotton from about fifty millions of pounds in 1807 to less than twenty millions of pounds in 1814. The pecuniary interest in the maintenance of slavery declined thus quite materially, and the majority of the leading men, both North and South, still regarded negro slavery as only a temporary status, which would be gradually modified in the direction of freedom. [Sidenote: Slavery in the Louisiana territory.]