Council Bluffs Bugle

But there is a considerable class of slave holders, especially in the Border Slaveholding States, who do not entertain this antipathy to labor. It is composed of men of moderate means owning but a few slaves. They are the self-made men, whose industry and economy have enabled them to purchase one or more slaves, and they may often be seen at work in the same field with their own negroes. They do not sympathize with the cotton, rice and sugar planters, who reckon their slaves by hundreds, and never put their own hands to the plow, the hoe or the ax. These small slaveholders, numerically probably more numerous than the richer class, have no repugnance to being associated in a Government controlled in any part by the laboring men of the north, and they are generally faithful to the Constitution and the Union. Slavery does not make them rebels.

Cotton is a more prolific stimulant than religion, the "pride of wealth and lust for power" which have produced the rebellion though both have co-operated. Had cotton, like wheat and corn, a product of the North as well as the South, its cultivation would not have been watched with so much jealousy by the North. The North would then have been brought into direct competition for the labor of the South and little would have been said. But the South holds and misses means on the land still exist. There the invention of the cotton gin and improvements in manufacturing machinery so cheapened the preparation and manufacture of cotton as to bring it into competition, under most favorable conditions, with every other article used in clothing the human family. And the demand for it so rapidly increased that production could not keep up with it. The consequence was an increase in the price of the raw material until it has reached a point far above that of any article which can be brought in competition with it in the markets of the world. This is not the effect of slavery, but in its causes, though not in its effects, it is entirely independent of that institution. But by this intervention of the demand for cotton, the slave holders in South Carolina and a few other States were enabled to employ their negroes in a species of culture peculiar to their climate, the profits of which could not be lessened by general competition. Though there has been a prodigious increase of production, the consumption has fully kept pace with it, and up to the breaking out of the rebellion, in no part of the earth for the last thirty years and in no period of history, have the profits of agricultural labor been so great as in the cotton growing regions of the United States. But these profits would have been as great, if not greater, had the Southern production, as in the Northern manufacture, been the proceeds of hired free instead of slave labor. With the immense profits of the monopoly the cotton planters became intoxicated, and thought, that, by means of their cotton, they could rule the world. "Cotton is King," they exclaimed; and through its power they aspired to break up the Union and to compel Great Britain and France to aid them in the fratricidal operation. It has seemed strange to me that the rulers of those nations have not seen in this rebellion, or rather in the means which the leaders proposed to compass success, an insult to their sovereignty and a conspiracy against the commercial world. "Open your bays to certainly and a conspiracy against the proud alone: I power your cotton coerce you to be our allies under penalty of riot and rebellion among the operatives in your own dominions." If they have any such power it is the interest of the world it should be broken, and no one would think that the sagacious Napoleon and the proud Palmerston, instead of meditating their recognition, would say to them: Lay down your arms, and not only give us your cotton, but restore to us the market of a united and peaceful country, without which your raw material will be comparatively away of little value. But I am wandering from my line of argument, and must defer to my next one branch intended for this letter, a. AMOS KENDALL. Feb. 19, 1862.