boundary to be solved was "the Delaware, the Susquehanna, or the Potomac.”*

On the other hand De Witt Clinton, of New York, denounced the convention as "treasonable," as threatening the explosion of civil war," and simply giving vent and voice to the long-cherished designs of men who had attempted, at a previous time, to enlist Alexander Hamilton as the leader of the armies of a new Confederacy of the North.

The peace of Ghent arrested the progress of the events which must otherwise have followed from the action of the New England Convention. It was no longer necessary for the legislatures of the New England States, in the language of Governor Trumbull, of Connecticut, "to interpose their protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people, and the assumed power of the general government." The Hartford demonstration, which might have been, and threatened to be, the Jeu de Paume of the American Union, subsided into a factious and sectional manœuvre, which was considered to be more discreditable to those concerned in it than it was dangerous to the country. An "era of good feelings " set in, and men of patriotic minds congratulated themselves upon the prospect of a real and permanent consolidation of the Union in the sense of those illustrious men by whom that phrase had first been used.

But five years had not passed, when the question of preponderance in the Union was once more raised, in such a temper and upon such issues, as proved how vain had been all the efforts of statesmanship to make the principles of the American Constitution familiar, and of patriotism to make them dear to the popular mind. In the year 1819, the State of Missouri, a sovereignty erected out of the territory of Louisiana, demanded admission into the Union. The State had been largely peo

*Spark's Life of Gouverneur Morris, vol. iii., p. 319. See, also, Letter to E. Benson, lb., p. 294.

+ Messages of Governors of Connecticut.-Fowler.

pled by emigrants from the South, the institution of slavery existed within its borders, and the Southern States, no doubt, believed that its admission as a slave State would strengthen their own section in its relations with the Federal Government. This the Northern States also believed, and were determined accordingly to make the abolition of slavery a precedent condition of the admission of the new State. A sharp and positive division of Congress and of the country upon a strictly geographical line was the inevitable consequence of this antagonism. The questions of how a new State could be constituted, and of how far the interference of Congress in the domestic institutions of a new State could be lawfully pushed, were deeply considered and angrily debated at this time. But that the real issue made was an issue of sectional preponderance, is shown by the fact, that even after the question of the power of Congress had been practically settled by the passage of a resolution excluding slavery from all States to be formed out of territory lying north of 36° 30', the Northern members in the House of Representatives, by a considerable majority, still refused to assent to the admission of Missouri, which lay to the south of that line.

The State was finally admitted, after more than two years of hot and perilous controversy, by a majority of no more than four votes in a House of Representatives of nearly two hundred members.

One man, at least, in America, fully comprehended the magnitude of the danger which lowered upon his country from the clouds of this fierce controversy. "The Missouri question," wrote Jefferson, on the 13th of April, 1820, to his old friend, disciple, and correspondent, William Short, "has aroused and filled me with alarm. The coincidence of a marked principle, moral and political, with a geographical line, once conceived, I feared would never more be obliterated from the mind; that it would be recurring on every occasion, and renewing irritations, until it would kindle such mutual and mor

tal hatred as to render separation preferable to eternal discord. I have been among the most sanguine in believing that our Union would be of long duration. I now doubt it much."

So deeply impressed was Jefferson with the fears which he has here recorded, that, during the remainder of his life, he lost no opportunity of urging upon Virginia and the other Southern States the importance of preparing themselves for the exigency of a great revolutionary change.* The third President of the Union lived long enough to find in his own experience a striking illustration of the vanity of human plans and wishes. Out of his two great political achievements—the expansion of the territorial area of the Republic, and the enlargement of American democracy-had come up the fearful perils which so moved his mind and shook his heart. But for his successful diplomacy the question of the admission of Missouri had never perhaps been raised. But for his triumphant political theories that question, when raised, might have been debated in a calmer, more statesmanlike, and wiser tone. But the ranks of public life were even then filling up with recruits of a less noble type than that of the men whose counsels had originally made the Union possible. The discussion became a contest. It was marked on both sides by a more general disregard of mutual obligations and a more exasperating tone of sectional animosity than had ever before predominated in such a conflict. It came to an end, however, peacefully, and left the Union still unshattered.

But the little children of that time are the mature men of to-day. The earliest impressions of the generation which preceded them had been received from men who had fought together the battles of American Independence, and had labored

* He revived his favorite policy of non-intercourse, and especially warned his Southern fellow-citizens against sending their sons to the North "to imbibe opinions and principles in discord with those of their own country."-Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies of Jefferson, vol. iv., p. 342.

together at the fabric of American Union. Their own earliest impressions were to be received from men inflamed to mutual dislike and distrust by an angry sectional contest. The generation which preceded them had learned in boyhood to merge the old provincial pride of the Carolinian and the New Englander, the New Yorker and the Virginian, in the new and grander pride of the American. They in their boyhood were to learn that the Carolinian had claims which the New Englander refused to recognize, that the Virginian had been denounced by the New Yorker as an enemy of human rights and a scandal to the American name.

The process of national crystallization had thus received a shock, the effects of which must necessarily long outlast the immediate oscillation of the system.

This was the more certain, that great and profound changes were going on in the character of the American people, and in the direction of the national destinies. This was more particularly the case at the South. The development of the cotton interest, which dates from the first years only of the nineteenth century, had been most powerfully stimulated by the opening of the western territory of the State of Georgia, and by the rapid settlement of the magnificent valley of the lower Mississippi. Arkansas was already pressing for admission to the Union, and this superb State, with Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, seemed to offer to the people of the South, and to the institution of slavery, a new, imperial, and inexhaustible future. A party, small at first in numbers, but formidable by the fanatical and visionary character of the policy which it proposed to itself, began to be formed in the Southern States, which looked to disunion and to the constitution of a Southern Confederacy, precisely as the Gores and the Pickerings of an earlier day had looked to disunion and the constitution of an Eastern Confederacy.

The increasing power of the Northern States in Congress, and the development of manufactures in those States, which

naturally kept pace with the development of agriculture at the South, led the politicians of the North to afford this party of disunion at the South the immense moral assistance of a new sectional issue.

This issue was seriously raised, for the first time, in 1824, upon the right of Congress to establish a tariff for the protec tion of domestic manufactures. It was again and more seriously made in 1828, when a new tariff was introduced into Congress.

The legislatures of the Southern States protested against the act, as the legislatures of Northern States had protested against the embargo of 1807. By the legislature of Georgia the act was denounced as having "already disturbed the Union and endangered the public tranquillity, weakened the confidence of the States in the Federal government, and diminished the affection of large masses of the people to the Union itself.”

Mr. Berrien, afterwards eminent in the national councils, commented, in the legislature of the same State, upon the act as tending to precipitate the greatest trial to which the institutions of America could possibly be subjected. He implored all patriotic men to shrink from forcing upon the country "that experiment which shall test the competency of the government to preserve internal peace, whenever a question vitally affecting the bond which unites us as one people shall come to be solemnly agitated between the sovereign members of the confederacy."*

South Carolina, in which commonwealth the sentiment of dislike to the Union had, from reasons of local origin and application, made more progress than in any other State either at the South or at the North, assumed the leadership of the Southern opposition to the principle of the Federal tariff for protection.

Before the war of the Revolution, South Carolina had been

* Fowler's Sectional Controversy, p. 94.