Those of the South had no material cause of complaint; but,
actuated by sympathy for their Northern brethren, and a devotion to the
principles of civil liberty and community independence, which they had
inherited from their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and which were set forth in
the Declaration of Independence, they made common cause with their
neighbors, and may, at least, claim to have done their full share in the
war that ensued.
By the exclusion of the South, in 1820, from all that part of the
Louisiana purchase lying north of the parallel of thirty-six degrees
thirty minutes, and not included in the State of Missouri, by the
extension of that line of exclusion to embrace the territory acquired
from Texas; and by the appropriation of _all_ the territory obtained
from Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, both north and south
of that line, it may be stated with approximate accuracy that the North
had monopolized to herself more than three fourths of all that had been
added to the domain of the United States since the Declaration of
Independence. This inequality, which began, as has been shown, in the
more generous than wise confidence of the South, was employed to obtain
for the North the lion's share of what was afterward added at the cost
of the public treasure and the blood of patriots. I do not care to
estimate the relative proportion contributed by each of the two
sections.
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