Carolina and Georgia to explore the tropics, for a variety of cotton-seed adapted to their climate. For seven years at least, and probably more, this duty was in every sense of the word a protecting duty. There was not a pound of cotton spun, no not for candlewicks to light the humble industry of the cottages of the North, which did not pay this tribute to the Southern planter. The growth of the native article, as we have seen, had not in 1794 reached a point to be known to Chief-Justice Jay as one of actual or probable export. As late as 1796, the manufacturers of Brandywine in Delaware petitioned Congress for the repeal of this duty on imported cotton, and the petition was rejected on the report of a committee, consisting of a majority from the Southern states, on the ground that "to repeal the duty on raw cotton imported would be to damp the growth of cotton in our own country." Radicle and plumule, root and branch, blossom and boll, the culture of the cotton-plant in the United States was, in its infancy, the foster-child of the protective system.

When therefore, the pedigree of "king cotton" is traced, he is found to be the lineal child of the tariff; called into being by a specific duty; reared by a tax laid upon the manufacturing industry of the North, to create the culture of the raw material in the South. The northern manufactures of America were slightly protected in 1789, because they were too feeble to stand alone. Reared into magnitude under the restrictive system and the war of 1812, they were upheld in 1816 because they were too important to be sacrificed, and because the great staple of the South had a joint interest in their prosperity. King cotton alone, not in his manhood, nor in his adolescence, not in his infancy, but in his very embryo state, was pensioned upon the treasury-before the seed from which he sprang was cast "in the lowest parts of the earth." In the book of the tariff "his members were written, which were fashioned in countenance, when as yet there were none of them."

But it was not enough to create the culture of cotton at the South, by taxing the manufactures of the North with a duty on the raw material, the extension of that culture and the prosperity which it has conferred upon the South are due to the mechanical genius of the North. What says Mr. Justice Johnson of the Supreme Court of the United States, and a citizen of South Carolina? "With regard to the utility of this discovery" (the cotton-gin of Whitney), "the court would deem it a waste of time to dwell long upon this topic. Is there a man who hears us that has not experienced its utility? The whole interior of the Southern states was languishing and its inhabitants emigrating for want of some object to engage their attention and employ their industry, when the invention of this machine at once opened views to them which set the whole country

in active motion. From childhood to age it has presented us a lucrative employment. Individuals who are depressed in poverty and sunk in idleness, have suddenly risen to wealth and respectability. Our debts have been paid off; our capitals increased, and our lands trebled in value. We cannot express the weight of obligation which the country owes to this invention; the extent of it cannot now be seen." Yes, and when happier days shall return, and the South, awakening from her suicidal delusion, shall remember who it was that sowed her sunny fields with the seeds of those golden crops with which she thinks to rule the world, she will cast a veil of oblivion over the memory of the ambitious men who have goaded her to her present madness, and will rear a monument of her gratitude in the beautiful City of Elms, over the ashes of her greatest benefactorEli Whitney.

But the great complaint of the South, and that which is admitted to be the occasion of the present revolt, is the alleged interference of the North in the Southern institution of slavery; a subject on which the sensibilities of the two sections have been so deeply and fearfully stirred, that it is nearly impossible to speak words of impartial truth. As I have already stated, the declaration by South Carolina, of the causes which prompted her to secede from the Union, alleged no other reason for this movement than the enactment of laws to obstruct the surrender of fugitive slaves. The declaration does not state that South Carolina ever lost a slave by the operation of these laws, and it is doubtful whether a dozen from all the states have been lost from this cause. pervades the popular mind at the South. aggregate escape annually; some to the recesses of the Dismal Swamp; some to the everglades of Florida; some to the trackless mountain region which traverses the South; some to the Mexican states and the Indian tribes; some across the free states to Canada. The popular feeling of the South ascribes the entire loss to the laws of the free states; while it is doubtful whether these laws cause any portion of it. The public sentiment of the North is not such, of course, as to dispose the community to obstruct the escape or aid the surrender of slaves. Neither is it at the South.

A gross error on this subject Some hundreds of slaves in the

No one, I am told, at the South, not called upon by official duty, joins in the hue and cry after a fugitive; and whenever he escapes from any state south of the border tier, it its evident that his flight must have been aided in a community of slaveholders. If the North Carolina fugitive escapes through Virginia, or the Tennessee fugitive escapes through Kentucky, why are Pennsylvania and Ohio alone blamed? On this whole subject the grossest injustice is done to the North. She is expected to be more

tolerant of slavery than the South herself; for while the South demands of the North entire acquiescence in the extremest doctrines of slave property, it is a well known fact, and as such alluded to by Mr. Clay in his speech on the compromises of 1850, that any man who habitually traffics in this property is held in the same infamy at Richmond and New Orleans that he would be at Philadelphia or Cincinnati.

While South Carolina, assigning the cause of secession, confines herself to the state laws for obstructing the surrender of fugitives, in other quarters, by the press, in the manifestoes and debates on the subject of secession, and in the official papers of the new confederacy, the general conduct of the North, with respect to slavery, is put forward as the justifying, nay the compelling cause of the revolution. This subject, still more than that of the tariff, is too trite for discussion, with the hope of saying any thing new on the general question. I will but submit a few considerations to show the great injustice which is done to the North, by representing her as the aggressor in this sectional warfare.

The Southern theory assumes that, at the time of the adoption of the constitution, the same antagonism prevailed as now between the North and South, on the general subject of slavery; that although it existed to some extent in all the states but one of the Union, it was a feeble and declining interest at the North, and mainly seated at the South; that the soil and climate of the North were soon found to be unpropitious to slave labor, while the reverse was the case at the South; that the Northern states, in consequence, having from interested motives abolished slavery, sold their slaves to the South, and that then, although the existence of slavery was recognized and its protection guarantied by the constitution, as soon as the Northern states had acquired a controlling voice in Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures, against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern states, was inaugurated and. gradually extended, in violation of the compromises of the constitution, as well as of the honor and good faith tacitly pledged to the South, by the manner in which the North disposed of her slaves.

Such, in substance, is the statement of Mr. Davis in his late message, and he then proceeds, seemingly as if rehearsing the acts of this northern majority in Congress, to refer to the anti-slavery measures of the state legistures, to the resolutions of abolition societies, to the passionate appeals of the party press, and to the acts of lawless individuals during the progress of this unhappy agitation.

Now this entire view of the subject, with whatever boldness it is affirmed, and with whatever persistency it is repeated, is destitute of foundation. It is demonstrably at war with the truth of history, and is con

tradicted by facts known to those now on the stage, or which are matters of recent record. At the time of the adoption of the constitution, and long afterwards, there was, generally speaking, no sectional difference of opinion between North and South on the subject of slavery. It was in both parts of the country regarded, in the established formula of the day, "as a social, political and moral evil." The general feeling in favor of universal liberty and the rights of man, wrought into fervor in the progress of the revolution, naturally strengthened the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the Union. It is the South which has since changed, not the North. The theory of a change in the Northern mind, growing out of a discovery made soon after 1789, that our soil and climate were unpropitious to slavery (as if the soil and climate then were different from what they had always been), and a consequent sale to the South of the slaves of the North, is purely mythical; as groundless in fact as it is absurd in statement. I have often asked for the evidence of this last allegation, and I have never found an individual who attempted even to prove it. But however this may be, the South at that time regarded slavery as an evil, though a necessary one, and habitually spoke of it in that light. Its continued existence was supposed to depend upon keeping up the African slave-trade; and South as well as North, Virginia as well as Massachusetts, passed laws to prohibit that traffic; they were, however, before the Revolution, vetoed by the royal governors. One of the first acts of the Continental Congress, unanimously subscribed by its members, was an agreement neither to import nor purchase any slave imported after the first of December, 1774. In the Declaration of Independence, as originally drafted by Mr. Jefferson, both slavery and the slave-trade were denounced in the most uncompromising language. In 1777 the traffic was forbidden in Virginia by state law, no longer subject to the veto of royal governors. In 1784 an ordinance was reported by Mr. Jefferson to the old Congress, providing that after 1800 there should be no slavery in any territory ceded or to be ceded to the United States. The ordinance failed at that time to be enacted, but the same prohibition formed a part, by general consent, of the ordinance of 1787 for the organization of the Northwestern territory. In his Notes on Virginia, published in that year, Mr. Jefferson depicted the evils of slavery in terms of fearful import. In the same year the constitution was framed. It recognized the existence of slavery, but the word was carefully excluded from the instrument, and Congress was authorized to abolish the traffic in twenty years. In 1796, Mr. St. George Tucker, Law Professor in William and Mary College in Virginia, published a treatise entitled "Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, Dedicated to the General Assembly of the people of Virginia." In the preface

to the essay he speaks of the "abolition of slavery in this state as an object of the first importance, not only to our moral and domestic peace, but even to our political salvation." In 1797 Mr. Pinckney, in the legislature of Maryland, maintained that "by the eternal principles of justice no man in the state has the right to hold his slave a single hour." In 1803, Mr. John Randolph, from a committee on the subject, reported that "the prohibition of slavery by the ordinance of 1787 was wisely calculated to promote the happiness and prosperity of the northwestern states and to give strength and security to that extensive frontier." Under Mr. Jefferson, the importation of slaves into the territories of Mississippi and Louisiana was prohibited in advance of the time limited by the constitution for the interdiction of the slave-trade. When the Missouri restriction was enacted, all the members of Mr. Monroe's cabinet-Mr. Crawford, Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Wirt-concurred with Mr. Monroe in affirming its constitutionality. In 1832, after the Southampton Massacre, the evils of slavery were exposed in the legislature of Virginia, and the expediency of its gradual abolition maintained, in terms as decided as were ever employed by the most uncompromising agitator. A bill for that object was introduced into the Assembly by the grandson of Mr .Jefferson, and warmly supported by distinguished politicians now on the stage. Nay, we have the recent admission of the Vice-President of the seceding confederacy, that what he calls "the errors of the past generation," meaning the anti-slavery sentiments entertained by Southern statesmen, "still clung to many as late as twenty years ago."

To this hasty review of Southern opinions and measures, showing their accordance till a late date with Northern sentiment on the subject of slavery, I might add the testimony of Washington, of Patrick Henry, of George Mason, of Wythe, of Pendleton, of Marshall, of Lowndes, of Poinsett, of Clay, and of nearly every first-class name in the Southern states. Nay, as late as 1849, and after the Union had been shaken by the agitations incident to the acquisition of Mexican territory, the convention of California, although nearly one half of its members were from the slaveholding states, unanimously adopted a constitution by which slavery was prohibited in that state. In fact it is now triumphantly proclaimed by the chiefs of the revolt, that the ideas prevailing on this subject when the constitution was adopted are fundamentally wrong; that the new government of the Confederate States "rests upon exactly the opposite ideas; that its foundations are laid and its corner-stone reposes upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slaverysubordination to the superior race-is his natural and normal condition. Thus our new government is the first in the history of the world based