Page:The address of the people of South Carolina assembled in convention, to the people of the slaveholding states of the United States.djvu/14

Rh have made them, totally different peoples. That Equality in the Government between the two sections of the Union which once existed, no longer exists. We but imitate the policy of our fathers in dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates, and seeking a confederation with slaveholding States.

Experience has proved, that slaveholding States cannot be safe, in subjection to non-slaveholding States. Indeed, no people can ever expect to preserve its rights and liberties, unless these be in its own custody. To plunder and oppress, where plunder and oppression can be practiced with impunity, seems to be the natural order of things. The fairest portions of the world elsewhere, have been turned into wildernesses: and the most civilized and prosperous communities, have been impoverished and ruined by anti-slavery fanaticism. The people of the North have not left us in doubt, as to their designs and policy. United as a section in the late Presidential election, they have elected as the exponent of their policy, one who has openly declared, that all the States of the United States, must be made free States or slave States. It is true, that amongst those who aided in his election, there are various shades of anti-slavery hostility. But if African slavery in the Southern States, be the evil their political combination affirms it to be, the requisitions of an inexorable logic, must lead them to emancipation. If it is right, to preclude or abolish slavery in a Territory,—why should it be allowed to remain in the States? The one is not at all more unconstitutional than the other, according to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. And when it is considered, that the Northern States will soon have the power to make that Court what they please, and that the Constitution never has been any barrier whatever to their exercise of