Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 26.djvu/200

 190 Southern Historical Society Papers.

that a State will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion ? The thing is a dream. It is impossible."

Massachusetts, not South Carolina, first stood sponsor for the right of secession. Nearly half a century before the convention at Charles- ton, another convention at Hartford had proclaimed secession as a rightful and desirable remedy against Federal grievances.

The impartial observer in 1861, however deep his opposition to the views of Madison and Jefferson, must declare, as did John Quincy Adams, a New England President, when combatting them: " Hold- ing the converse with a conviction as firm as an article of religious faith, I see too clearly to admit denial, that minds of the highest order of intellect and hearts of the purest integrity of purpose have been brought to different conclusions."

WAR NOT FOUGHT OVER THE JUSTICE OR MORALITY OF SLAVERY.

The sectional dissensions, which finally took on the shape of dis- putes over slavery, turned not at all on the rightfulness or morality of the institution; but were of a purely political significance. From the beginning, the Southern colonies had been foremost in resisting the establishment of slavery. Maryland, North Carolina and Vir- ginia had often protested against it. Virginia, prior to 1751, had passed more than twenty-five acts discouraging and preventing it. The Georgia colony at the outset had declared opposition to the institution. Slavery was established and continued in the Southern colonies against their wishes by the avarice of the Crown.

At the time of the Revolution, the institution was upheld in all the colonies, and though nearly one-sixth of their population were slaves, neither slavery nor its morality even remotely entered into the principles or causes which produced the separation from the mother country, or the change from the articles of confederation to the new Union. When the Constitution was formed, the only dif- ferences regarding slaves were as to the manner of their representa- tion, and whether an immediate stop should be put to their importation. The Constitution protected the institution, and gave it its sanction.

As the different sections grew in population, commerce and indus- try, and their interests conflicted, each struggled to control the government which affected those interests. The clause in the Con- stitution, allowing three-fifths representation for the slaves naturally caused the South to seek to save the balance of power in the for- mation of new slave States, and the North, on the other hand, to prevent it, just as in our times, with slavery out of the way, the