But the sense of evil had faded by 1830 as the growing world demand for cotton fastened the tentacles of a booming plantation economy on the South. Abolitionist attacks on slavery placed southerners on the defensive and goaded them into angry counterattacks. By 1840 slavery was no longer a necessary evil; it was “a great moral, social, and political blessing—a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master.”
