Daughter of General Duff Green, of Georgia, and daughter-in-law
of John C. Calhoun, the statesman, of South Carolina.
This picture was taken when Mrs. Calhoun was 71 years of age.
This is not to justify slavery. Slavery was forced upon this country over Colonial protests, particularly from Southern sections fearing negroisation of territory; the slave-trade was profitable to the English Crown; our forefathers, coming into independence, faced a problem of awful magnitude in the light of Santo Domingo horrors; New England’s slave-ships and Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin complicated it; it is curious to read in the proceedings of the Sixth Congress how Mr. John Brown, of Rhode Island, urged that this Nation should not be deprived of a right, enjoyed by every civilised country, of bringing slaves from Africa[14]—particularly as transference to a Christian land was a benefit to Africans, a belief held by many who believed that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Through kindliness of temperament on both sides and the clan feeling fostered by the old plantation life of the South, the white man and the negro made the best they could of an evil thing. But the world has now well learned that a superior race cannot afford to take an inferior into such close company as slavery implies. For the service of the bond-slave the master ever pays to the uttermost in things precious as service, imparting refinements, ideals, standards, morals, manners, graces; in the end he pays that which he considers more precious than service; he pays his blood, and in more ways than one.
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