How our forgotten great men fought to avoid the Nessus Shirt! Who remembers that Hamilton was big enough to be made Secretary of the Navy? Under the great upas tree of South Carolina all other greatness languished and by 1840 the property interests in Negroes had become so immense, that it not only paralyzed other industries, which could by any stretch of imagination be thought to threaten its efficiency, but it affected public opinion to a degree which now seems hardly credible. Calhoun’s view in 1838, that the Negro furnished “the best substratum of population in the world and the one on which commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared”[61] was not singular in the South at that date. The great meeting of Southern business men at Augusta, Ga. in 1838 put on record its belief: “That of all the social conditions of man, the most favorable to the development of the cardinal virtues of the heart and the noblest faculties of the soul, to the promotion of private happiness and public prosperity, is that of slave holding communities under free political institutions.”[62] Even Hayne, himself, despite his realization of South Carolina’s wasteful cultivation of her soil, was so affected by the tremendous interests involved in slavery, and the fearful shock of any such disturbance as the Abolitionists threatened in 1835, as to declare at that time: “Slavery, as it now exists in the Southern States, which we all feel and know to be essential to the prosperity and welfare—nay to the very existence of the States—is so little understood in other portions of the Union that it has been lately assailed in a spirit which threatens, unless speedily arrested, to lead eventually to the destruction of the Union and all the evils which must attend so lamentable an occurrence.”[63] By 1838, conditions had reached such a development that the abolition of slavery could come but in one of two ways, either peacefully, through the slow process of changing industrial conditions, or swiftly and forcibly, as a war measure; therefore, when Calhoun withdrew his support from Hayne’s railroad to the Northwest in 1838, the sensible course would have been to prepare for the inevitable conflict. Allusion has been made to the Black Laws of Ohio, which had their counterpart in Indiana and Illinois, and reference had to the Report of the Massachusetts Legislative Committee in 1821, as indicative of feeling in the North and Northeast, concerning the Negro as a citizen, and, if we consider conditions in the Middle States at this period, we will find them hardly different. As depicted by the most highly educated member of the Negro race today in the United States, in Philadelphia conditions were as follows: