He had himself, as a young man,
been brought up to do toilsome manual labour. He would not admit that
there was anything in manual labour that ought to impair the respect of
the community for the labourer or the worker's respect for himself. Not
the least of the evils of slavery was, in his judgment, its inevitable
influence in bringing degradation upon labour and the labourer.
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act made clear to the North that the
South would accept no limitations for slavery. The position of the
Southern leaders, in which they had the substantial backing of their
constituents, was that slaves were property and that the Constitution,
having guaranteed the protection of property to all the citizens of the
commonwealth, a slaveholder was deprived of his constitutional rights as
a citizen if his control of this portion of his property was in any way
interfered with or restricted. The argument in behalf of this extreme
Southern claim had been shaped most eloquently and most forcibly by John
C. Calhoun during the years between 1830 and 1850. The Calhoun opinion
was represented a few years later in the Presidential candidacy of John
C. Breckinridge. The contention of the more extreme of the Northern
opponents of slavery voters, whose spokesmen were William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James G.
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