It was the offspring of sectional rivalry and
political ambition. It would have manifested itself just as certainly if
slavery had existed in all the States, or if there had not been a negro
in America. No such pretension was made in 1803 or 1811, when the
Louisiana purchase, and afterward the admission into the Union of the
State of that name, elicited threats of disunion from the
representatives of New England. The complaint was not of slavery, but of
"the acquisition of more weight at the other extremity" of the Union. It
was not slavery that threatened a rupture in 1832, but the unjust and
unequal operation of a protective tariff.
It happened, however, on all these occasions, that the line of
demarkation of sectional interests coincided exactly or very nearly with
that dividing the States in which negro servitude existed from those in
which it had been abolished. It corresponded with the prediction of Mr.
Pickering, in 1803, that, in the separation certainly to come, "the
white and black population would mark the boundary"--a prediction made
without any reference to slavery as a source of dissension.
Of course, the diversity of institutions contributed, in some minor
degree, to the conflict of interests. There is an action and reaction of
cause and consequence, which limits and modifies any general statement
of a political truth. I am stating general principles--not defining
modifications and exceptions with the precision of a mathematical
proposition or a bill in chancery.
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