Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/313

294 determine on secession, the Union party would declare its determination to support the United States to the last extremity. Thus while the Unionists had previously stood merely against nullification, declaring that if the state should secede they would go with her, they now gave grounds for an expectation that they would oppose the state if secession developed out of nullification. They would have fought with the state had she openly voted for secession in the preceding fall, but they would not support secession now if it was voted by the state convention elected to adopt nullification as a "peaceable" measure. Some of them said, in fact, that the state had not declared for secession officially, and that if it were adopted it would be the result of deception on the part of the nullification leaders.

But because the time appointed for the meeting of the convention fell at a season when the "substantial yeomanry" of the state, of whom the Union men claimed to have the majority, were starting their crops, and because the belief was general that nullification was "in its last agonies" by reason of the tariff adjustment, and because a party convention was not essential to the cause