Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/13

Rh purposes were heard up there. (12) The State of Louisiana was admitted in 1812, despite the celebrated threat of Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, on the floor of Congress in 1811, that such admission of a new Southern State from a part of the Louisiana purchase would constitute adequate cause for secession by some of the Northern States, "amicably if they can, violently if they must." (13)

But conditions soon changed. The war of 1812 cut us off from Europe, whence we had theretofore obtained most of our manufactured goods; and New England, her sea-trade interrupted by the war, with commendable energy and enterprise now began to manufacture. During this war the famous Hartford Convention, of New England, met, with a large sized list toward secession. (14) After the war New England and the North generally began to find the union a good thing for them; it furnished a free market—the Southern States—for buying the manufacturers' raw materials; it furnished a "protected" market—still largely the Southern States—for selling the manufactured goods.

But New England and the rest of the North were still painfully jealous of new Southern and Western or Southwestern States. They opposed the admission of Missouri, 1819, and now first raised seriously the question of Negro slavery as a sectional issue. Thomas Jefferson was himself, like many other Southerners, in favor of the abolition of slavery; a peaceable abolition. But he could see further into the future than could most men. So now, when this Missouri-slavery issue was raised by New England and the North, for the purpose of keeping the new lands of the West for themselves as against the South, the aged Jefferson wrote that it roused him as a fire-bell in the night, and portended a disastrous sectional struggle. (15)

But to return to the tariff. The tariff question, as a serious sectional issue, first came to a head about 1830. Having once gotten hold of the nursing bottle of "protection," so called, in 1816 and 1820, New England and the North cried ever for more. The tariff of 1820 was followed by that of 1824, and that in