Excerpt from History of the United States, Vol. 2 Economically slavery was an equal evil, taking as was the superficial evidence to the contrary. No cruelty could make the slave work like a free man, while his power to consume was enormous. Infants, aged, and weak had to be supported by the owner. Even the best slaves were improvident. Everywhere slave labor tended to banish free. Upon slave soil scarcely an immigrant could be led to set foot. Poor whites grew steadily poorer, their lot often more wretched than that of Slaves. Invention, care, forethought were as good as nu known among them. Slave labor proved incom petent even for agriculture, impoverishing the rich est soil in comparatively few years, whence the perpetual impulse of the slave owners to acquire new territory. The dishonesty of blacks and the danger of slave insurrections made property insecure, at the Same time that the system dimin ished in every community the number of its natural defenders. The result was that the South, the superior of the North in natural resources, was, by 1800, rapidly becoming the inferior in every single element of prosperity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.