Prof. DuBois declares that “although such hot-heads as Spratt were not able, as late as 1859, to carry a substantial majority of the South with them, in an attempt to reopen the trade at all hazards, yet the agitation did succeed in sweeping away nearly all theoretical opposition to the trade, and left the majority of Southern people in an attitude, which regarded the opening of the African slave trade as merely a question of expediency.”[164] This he attempted to sustain by quotations from the Charleston _Standard_, Richmond _Examiner_, New Orleans _Delta_, and other Southern papers, intimating that Johnston Pettigrew’s minority report cost him his re-election to the Legislature of South Carolina. As had been shown, it did not, however, stand in the way of his elevation to a high command of the forces South Carolina furnished for the War between the States; while Senator Hammond, who had risen to the highest honor his State could bestow, declared unequivocablly in 1858, with regard to the re-opening of the slave trade: “I once entertained the idea myself, but on further investigation abandoned it. I will not now go into the discussion of it further than to say that the South is itself divided on that policy, and from appearances, opposed to it by a vast majority.”[165] James Chesnut, the other senator from South Carolina, also announced himself publicly against it in the same year. But it was in the profoundly thoughtful and admirably thorough argument of Harper of Georgia, that the opponents of re-opening found the best representation. Southern to the core, it is a defense of slavery “as it existed in the South,” that cannot be improved upon. Harper knew that slave labor was not by any means cheap labor. Like Hammond and other students of affairs, he knew that free labor was cheaper both in Great Britain and the United States, but that the reports of the parliamentary commission of 1842 had indicated that the laboring classes of the United Kingdom were in a more miserable condition, and were more degraded morally and physically than the slaves of the South. He realized that capital would inevitably reach out for cheap labor, which while a benefit to the employer and the consumer, would slowly undermine the foundations of the republic, bringing all labor down, while it built up a privileged class of idle rich. He heard in this cry for the re-opening of the slave trade, the same demand for cheap labor with all the ills which the South had freed herself from, in the years in which she had trained and elevated her expensive laboring class. He saw this cheap imported slave labor invading the province of the remnant of the white working class of the South, and rendering it inimical to the institution. But above and beyond all this, he saw the slave trade, as his forbears had seen it in the days the South produced her strongest men, and without any reserve he declared: