From a consideration of the wisdom, propriety and morality of importing African slaves as an article of commerce in 1787, the Negro Question in the United States had progressed to the wisdom and propriety of preventing any extension of the institution of slavery beyond those limits in which it existed in 1820, and from this, with repeated agitations, fairly shaking the Union to its foundation, followed by compromises satisfactory to none, there had flared up a consideration of the re-opening of the Slave Trade in 1856, swiftly followed by Secession and war in 1860, and Emancipation, as a war measure, in 1863, directed against the eleven Confederate States. Throughout the four years of desperate struggle between the seceding States and the consolidated Northern and Western States, the slaves, by their behavior, illustrated moral character greatly to their credit, and indisputably indicative of the civilizing influences of the institution, in which they had been trained. But peace in 1865 at once precipitated the question of the status of the freedman. In the Northern States it was an important question. In the Southern States it beggared all other questions. With a property loss running up into the billions and a loss in virile manhood almost incalculable and an indescribable uprooting and overturning of industrial conditions, the failure of Secession left the eleven States, which had constituted the Southern Confederacy, with a white population of about 5,000,000, and a colored population of about 4,000,000; but in three of them, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana the colored population exceeded the white. Was the forecast of Calhoun and de Tocqueville to be verified? In no States was the outlook as dark as in South Carolina, where there could hardly have been more than 250,000 whites to 400,000 Negroes, and in Mississippi, where the colored majority was not quite so large, the proportions there being 350,000 white to some 430,000 Negroes. Yet of the colored population in South Carolina, judging from the number of free persons of color, in 1860, some 9,914,[178] and the number of house slaves and mechanics in Charleston returned for taxation in 1859,[179] in the great mass, there were those of the Negroes, who, on account of training, education and environment, together with inherited tradition, if they had only been left unplayed upon by those who knew them not, might have been relied upon in any great emergency. These, at an estimate, might have amounted to 30,000 in South Carolina; in Mississippi, less.