Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/325

Rh but followed, the break destined to become a lasting one.

But it is also true that, while the Jackson party taken as a whole was, at the beginning, in a chaotic state as to political principles and aims, a large and important Southern fraction of it gradually rallied upon something like a fixed programme. At a former period Southern men had been among the foremost advocates of a protective tariff and internal improvements. We have seen Calhoun almost contesting Clay's leadership as to those objects. The governmental power required, Southerners could at that time contemplate without terror. But a great change of feeling came over many of them. The struggle about the admission of Missouri had produced no open and lasting party divisions, but it had left in the Southern mind a lurking sense of danger. The slave-holding interest gradually came to understand that the whole drift of sentiment outside of the slave-holding communities was decidedly hostile to the peculiar institution; that a wall must be built around slavery for its protection; that state sovereignty and the strictest construction of the Constitution concerning the functions and powers of the general government were the bulwark of its safety; that any sort of interference with the home affairs of the Slave States, even in the way of internal improvement, would tend to undermine that bulwark; that the Slave States, owing to their system of labor, must remain purely agricultural communities; that