The African
slave-trade was carried on almost exclusively by New England merchants
and Northern ships. Mr. Jefferson--a Southern man, the founder of the
Democratic party, and the vindicator of State rights--was in theory a
consistent enemy to every form of slavery. The Southern States took the
lead in prohibiting the slave-trade, and, as we have seen, one of them
(Georgia) was the first State to incorporate such a prohibition in her
organic Constitution. Eleven years after the agitation on the Missouri
question, when the subject first took a sectional shape, the abolition
of slavery was proposed and earnestly debated in the Virginia
Legislature, and its advocates were so near the accomplishment of their
purpose, that a declaration in its favor was defeated only by a small
majority, and that on the ground of expediency. At a still later period,
abolitionist lecturers and teachers were mobbed, assaulted, and
threatened with tar and feathers in New York, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and other States. One of them
(Lovejoy) was actually killed by a mob in Illinois as late as 1837.
These facts prove incontestably that the sectional hostility which
exhibited itself in 1820, on the application of Missouri for admission
into the Union, which again broke out on the proposition for the
annexation of Texas in 1844, and which reappeared after the Mexican war,
never again to be suppressed until its fell results had been fully
accomplished, was not the consequence of any difference on the abstract
question of slavery.
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