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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: their own masters. But it would be difficult to apply this
method in the South. To declare that all the negroes born after
a certain period shall be free, is to introduce the principle and
the notion of liberty into the heart of slavery; the blacks whom
the law thus maintains in a state of slavery from which their
children are delivered, are astonished at so unequal a fate, and
their astonishment is only the prelude to their impatience and
irritation. Thenceforward slavery loses, in their eyes, that
kind of moral power which it derived from time and habit; it is
reduced to a mere palpable abuse of force. The Northern States
had nothing to fear from the contrast, because in them the blacks
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