Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/163

 Rights Gazette, which was established in Charleston in the early fall of 1831, was an avowed pro-tariff paper. The Southern Patriot denied that this sheet printed the doctrines of the Union party, but a Mercury writer said that it looked very much as though it must be an orthodox Union paper. "A Party Concerned" answered the Patriot's hasty denial and contended that the paper was what it purported to be, a collection of essays from the daily Union papers, reprinted for convenient circulation in the country to combat the heresy of nullification; and that the Patriot was apparently yielding more credence to the exaggerated misstatements of the Nullifiers about the evils of the tariff than the Union party would admit. This writer felt positive that half of the party regarded these exaggerated misstatements as mere humbug.

For instance, he asked, who believed the nonsense that the planters were plundered by the government of forty bales of cotton out of every hundred ? Who believed that the hard times of 1823 were caused by the tariff of 1824? "Who