Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/102

 94 Southern Historical Society Papers,

short, to lay tribute upon every interest not identified with its own selfish self.

Upon this issue was based the nullification of South Carolina in 1832. Then for the first time in our national history the doctrine of coercion was enunciated in the proclamation of President Jackson, asserting the right to the employment of the military arm of the government to enforce the execution of its laws in the territory of a recusant State. Nullification was indefensible in law or morals, as much so as coercion itself. On the broad principles of equity no party to a com- pact can be justified in resistance to laws made in ostensible con- formity with the instrument of compact, so long as it remains a member thereof and enjoys its benefits. It was, however, in turn, asserted both North and South, and prior to the civil war the fug^i- tive slave laws of Congress were practically nullified by " personal liberty*' enactments in three-fourths of the free States of the North.

SECTIONAL INTEREST THE TRUE ISSUE.

It is safe to say, and the history of the United States during the first seventy years of their existence is conclusive on the point, that in all the great questions affecting the national legislation, sectional interests, and sectional hostility arising therefrom, were the great cen- tral and controlling facts. Upon these were based the threats of secession in New England at the time of the Louisiana purchase ; for abolition as a moral or sentimental issue in national politics had not then been born. The slave trade itself had not been abolished, and under the protecting aegis of the Federal flag, the free sailors of the free States, in their free ships, were lucratively busy in transporting the "brother in black*' from his native jungles to the plantations of the South. Nor was it less a question of sectional predominance which was involved in the Missouri embroglio of 1820, which resulted in fixing the parallel of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes as the north- ern limit of slavery in all the territory west of that State, though it existed north of that line in the States to the east.

As by this arrangement, one issue was placed temporarily in the background, another must be found to feed that insatiable monster, sectional supremacy. The tariff, as we have seen, furnished it and along with it came nearer furnishing a civil war than any other ques- tion prior to 1861.

SLAVERY A PRETEXT.

Although a tarifl for the plunder of the non -manufacturing sections of