Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/333

 greed the propelling power? A liberty to be corrupt! Death and decay have that. Was it not natural for "practical politicians" who had this matter at heart to ponder, by what common bond the States once assembled at Harrisburg might be massed again in more formidable phalanx and for the answer to flash—"are we not the States called free, the other, the States called "slave?" Freedom against slavery—could battle cry be more sublime than that? Lifting up their eyes, they looked across the Potomac, the Monongahela, the Ohio and whispered with burning breath—"Lo Naboth's Vineyard." FREEDOM AND PROFITS. They who might so easily be solid for the name of freedom, why not also for the reality of profits ? All that was needed was a swap of the moral force of freedom for the material force of empire, brutalizing and diabolizing; all the more infernal, because masquerading under the name of love for others—taking in vain that holy name. The dangerous enemies of a republic are not the men who make open war upon it; but the men who insidiously undermine. Events were moving on toward completion, when Andrew Jackson, in his message of January 2, 1835, found it needful to denounce the use of the United States mails for the circulation of inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of slaves. In such use of the mails, the hero of New Orleans could see but one object, viz.: "To produce all the horrors of servile war." Mr. William Chauncey Fowler, in his book, "The Sectional Controversy" (published in 1864), when the author was a member of the Connecticut legislature) says, that some fifteen or twenty years earlier, as a leading member of congress, who afterwards became a member of a presidential cabinet, was coming out from a heated debate, he was asked by the writer, an old college friend: "Will you inform me, what is the real reason why Northern men encourage these petitions?" (For the abolition of slavery.) He said to me: "The real reason is, that the South will not let us have a tariff; and we touch them where they will feel it." It was as if, in the darkness, a voice was heard which only the wisest then knew how to translate, saying: "Go