The identification of American moral Christianity, its undefined national religion, with democracy made slavery come to seem both and offense against God and an offense against the nation. Ultimately the American religious impulse and slavery were incompatible. Hence the Second Great Awakening, with its huge intensification of religious passion, sounded the death-knell of American slavery just as the First Awakening had sounded the death-knell of British colonialism.
The Founding Fathers from Virginia who owned slaves, like Jefferson and Madison, and who hated slavery, had taken consolation from their belief that it was an outmoded and inefficient institution which would die out naturally or be easy to abolish. Madison spoke often and anxiously of slave property as the worst possible for profit.
It was Clay's view that, in God's good time, slavery would go anyway, and developing the West using the American System (of state intervention) - under which state and federal governments would build roads, canals and harbors to hasten industrialization - would hasten the day.
