Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/101

 Annual Reunion of the AssocicUion of A. N. V. 93

and finally sweeping the country like a besom in 1861 to 1865 ; it ended only when Lee laid down his arms at Appomattox.

I have said that Massachusetts was the mother of secession — nor need she or any other State be ashamed to own its maternity. Its exercise has produced two of the greatest revolutions of modern times. The one gave birth to a world-great republic, the other settled at least some of its complex internal relations, let us hope forever, and both gave to the world men worthy to be ranked with the Homeric heroes of old.

THE NEGRO APPEARS UPON THE SCENE.

When in 1820 Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave State, sectional interests and animosity again obtruded them- selves into the counsels of the Union. The compatriots of Othello stalk upon the scene, and though of darker hue and utterly innocent of his crimes, they have served ever since as figure-heads upon party standards, as martyrs at whose shrine freedom must bow, as examples to " point a moral and adorn a tale " not yet ended ; for even to this day they seem to be an extremely uncomfortable element in the po- litical counsels of their self-constituted champions, whose interests prompt them to value orthodoxy more than truth. A geographical line was fixed beyond which slavery could not go, and so by the " Missouri Compromise*' the dominant section of the Union appro- priated to itself the lion*s share of the very territory against the acquisition of which it had threatened secession in 1804.

THE TARIFF AND NULLIFICATION.

But the conflict between the sections did not always run on parallel lines. The points of antagonism were as numerous and diversified as the interests that underlaid them. The Northern States were commercial and manufacturing, the Southern States agricultural. So long as the carrying trade of the South was done by the ships of the North the arrangement was beneficial to both. But when, under the constitutional provision to regulate commerce, the general govern- ment extended the broad aegis of its " protection '' over the " infant" manufacturers of the North, it raised an issue, which, antedating that of slavery and surviving its extinction, stands to-day in the full strength of aggressive manhood, asserting its assumed prerogative to tax the weak for the benefit of the strong, to tax the workman for the benefit of his master, to tax labor for the benefit of capital, in