Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 28.djvu/169

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tin view presented by Mr. Benton in his Thirty Years in the United States Semite. Referring in general U-rms to the causes <>t southern discontent, Mr. Benton says that the complaint of the South against the North existed when he came into the Senate (1821), and had commenced in the first years of the Federal Government, at the time of the assumption of the State debts, the incorporation of the first national bank and the adoptioQ of the funding system, all of which drew capital from the South to the North: " It continued to increase, and, at the period (1838) to which this chapter relates, it had reached the stage of an organized sectional expression in a voluntary con- vention of the Southern States. * * * * The changed relative condition of the two sections of the country, before and since the union, was shown in the general relative depression or prosperity since that event, and especially in the reversed condition of their respective foreign trade. * * * The convention referred the effect to a course of federal legislation unwarranted by the grants of the constitution and the objects of the union, which subtracted cap- ital from one section and accumulated it in the other; protective tariff, internal improvements, pensions, national debt, two national banks, the funding system and the paper system, the multiplication of offices, the conversion of a limited into an almost unlimited gov- ernment, and the substitution of power and splendor for what was in- tended to be a s : .mple and economical administration of that part of their affairs which required a general head. What has

been published in the South and adverted to in this view goes to show that an incompatibility of interest between the two sections, though not inherent, has been produced by the working of the gov- ernment not its fair and legitimate, but its perverted and unequal working."

Mr Benton was an authority on the statistics of Federal taxation, and Mr. Grady pronounces him an undoubtedly impartial writer. In the passaige just quoted from his Thirty Years in ///< ( 'nited Slates Senate, he describes this relative condition of the two sections of the country in 1838. Ten years before that date, discussing the "bill of abominations," he said: "Wealth has fled from the South and settled in the regions north of the Potomac, and this in the midst of the fact that the south in four staples alone, in cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo (while indigo was one of its staples), has exported produce since the revolution to the value of $800,000,000, and the north has exported comparatively nothing." And truly, adds Mr. Grady, did the South Carolina delegation say, in their address to their