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266 manufacturers to prevent a tariflf reduction, and declared that if the present session of Congress failed to modify the tariff as the South demanded, and bloodshed and disunion followed, the Union party would be responsible. They insisted that the Union party had at last disclosed its true colors by hoisting the "genuine Black Flag of Tariffism." They claimed that a review of the course followed by the Union party would show that it had continually tried to reconcile the state to the tariff, and had in fact encouraged the northern manufacturers to persist in their course.

The Union party answered that it was still, as it had been, bitterly opposed to the tariff, and wanted every possible constitutional means employed to remove it, but that it did not want the tariff lowered under the menace of the nullification ordinance. Not a few of the Union men felt as Drayton did, that if the tariff reduction then being considered were passed, and the Nullifiers in consequence thereof should suspend all further proceedings under the recent laws of the legislature, the gratification of these Union men at the partial or total repeal of the protective system