Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 9.djvu/20

10 The Federal laws were nullified by governor and legislature and in 1814, at the darkest period of the war, the legislature declared that "it was as much the duty of the State authorities to watch over the rights reserved, as of the United States to exercise the powers which are delegated, and that States which have no common umpire must be their own judges and execute their own decisions." A mere reference to the Hartford Convention is sufficient to indicate the extent to which these sentiments prevailed in New England.

As time progressed and the profits of the slave trade fell off, and when the Northern slave States had sold their human chattels to the Southern planters, a two-fold system of oppression began, the successful execution of which required a relinquishment of such constitutional views and a revival of the Federalism which Mr. Jefferson had overthrown. The protective tariff system was devised as a special process by which one section of the country would build itself up at the expense of the other and grow wealthy under an unequal form of taxation but little short of legalized robbery. The South protested and pleaded against this discrimination, but except in one instance, in the case of South Carolina in 1832, there was never action other than in the form of legislative or party protest, and no overt act of war. The other form of hostility and unconstitutional action on the part of the Northern States against the South was in the nullification of the express provisions of the Constitution of the United States which recognized slavery in three articles and required slaves to be delivered up to their owners when they should escape into another State. This assertion of the "higher law" first took the form of fanatical agitation, and was condemned by such men as Edward Everett, who, in addition to the obligation which the Constitution enjoined, held that "the great relation of servitude in some form or other, with greater or less departure from the theoretic equality of men, is insepar-