The right or wrong of slavery we need not discuss, or attempt to determine who was most responsible therefor. The institution is dead beyond the possibility of resurrection, and the whole nation is glad. The later geographical limitations of slavery in the United States were determined not by conscience, but by climate. It was climate at the North and the cotton-gin in the South that regulated the distribution of slave labor. I have scant respect for a conscience too sensitive to own certain property because it is immoral, but which without compunction will sell the same to another at full market value. Had the slaveholders of the North manumitted their slaves and not sold them because their labor ceased to be profitable, there would have been more respect for their subsequent abolition zeal. It is matter of pride with us that no Southern colony or state ever had a vessel engaged in the slave trade. And several of the Southern states were the first to pass stringent laws against the importation of African slaves.
Charles Betts Galloway, Jefferson Davis: A Judicial Estimate, Southern Methodist Review, Volume 57, Issue 4 (1908).
