Page:The address of the people of South Carolina assembled in convention, to the people of the slaveholding states of the United States.djvu/13

Rh It cannot be believed, that our ancestors would have assented to any Union whatever with the people of the North, if the feelings and opinions now existing amongst them, had existed when the Constitution was framed. There was then, no Tariff—no fanaticism concerning negroes. It was the delegates from New England, who proposed in the Convention which framed the Constitution, to the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, that if they would agree to give Congress the power of regulating commerce by a majority, that they would support the extension of the African Slave Trade for twenty years. African slavery, existed in all the States, but one. The idea, that the Southern States would be made to pay that tribute to their Northern confederates, which they had refused to pay to Great Britain; or that the institution of African slavery, would be made the grand basis of a sectional organization of the North to rule the South, never crossed the imaginations of our ancestors. The Union of the Constitution, was a union of slaveholding States. It rests on slavery, by prescribing a Representation in Congress, for three-fifths of our slaves. There is nothing in the proceedings of the Convention which framed the Constitution, to shew, that the Southern States would have formed any other Union; and still less, that they would have formed a Union with more powerful non-slaveholding States, having majority in both Branches of the Legislature of the Government. They were guilty of no such folly. Time and the progress of things, have totally altered the relations between the Northern and Southern States, since the Union was established. That identity of feelings, interests and institutions, which once existed, is gone. They are now divided, between agricultural—and manufacturing, and commercial States; between slaveholding, and non-slaveholding States. Their institutions and industrial pursuits,