The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

Here are the few paragraphs from the book,

African Servitude.—A Retrospect.—Early Legislation with Regard to the Slave-Trade.—The Southern States foremost in prohibiting it.—A Common Error corrected.—The Ethical Question never at Issue in Sectional Controversies.—The Acquisition of Louisiana.—The Missouri Compromise.—The Balance of Power.—Note.—The Indiana Case.

Inasmuch as questions growing out of the institution of negro servitude, or connected with it, will occupy a conspicuous place in what is to follow, it is important that the reader should have, in the very outset, a right understanding of the true nature and character of those questions. No subject has been more generally misunderstood or more persistently misrepresented. The institution itself has ceased to exist in the United States; the generation, comprising all who took part in the controversies to which it gave rise, or for which it afforded a pretext, is passing away; and the misconceptions which have prevailed in our own country, and still more among foreigners remote from the field of contention, are likely to be perpetuated in the mind of posterity, unless corrected before they become crystallized by tacit acquiescence.