In the eyes of a growing number of Yankees, slavery degraded labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education, and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interests of its backward institution. Slavery undermined “intelligence, vigor, and energy,” asserted New York’s antislavery Whig leader William Henry Seward in the 1840s. It had produced in the South “an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads . . . an absence of enterprise and improvement.” The institution was “incompatible with all . . . the elements of the
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