Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/38

 better things by taking affairs into its own hands. He preferred associations for non-consumption of eastern and western articles, and favored no project that might tend to dismember the Union. Such were the views of the conservatives.

This was in direct opposition to the sentiment of a large and respectable meeting of the inhabitants of Colleton district" at the courthouse in Walterboro, on June 12. The official addresses of the meeting to the people of the state and to the governor spoke strongly for resistance and asked that the governor convene the legislature at once to consider the situation, or call a convention to do so. The editor of the Mercury commended this as showing proper disdain for anything like a mean evasion of the law; the people of Colleton, he was glad to see, would not form associations to counteract the tariff law, nor agreements not to use northern manufactures, nor would they resort to any step whatever which, while it would circumvent the law, would be tantamount to an acknowledgment of the right