Lyle -- I think you're working from material that's way out of date.
The institution of slavery was performing beautifully and the
slaveholders had no intention of getting rid of it. I may have posted
this Fogel quote before, but I guess it bears repeating.

Henry Wiencek

From Robert Fogel, "The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990," P. 27:

"During the decade of the 1970s, the growing mountains of evidence
finally made it obvious that the profitability of slavery was
increasing, not declining, on the eve of the Civil War.  Moreover, the
sharp rise in the purchase price of slaves relative to their rental
price meant that slave owners were never more confident about the
future of their system than they were during the last half of the
1850s. . . . Far from stagnating, the per capita income of the South
was growing faster between 1840 and 1860 than that of the North."

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