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are attributable to no other cause. The inhabitants of the southern states are, of all the Americans, those who are most interested in the maintenance of the Union; they would assuredly suffer most from being left to themselves; and yet they are the only citizens who threaten to break the tie of confederation. But it is easy to perceive that the south, which has given four presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, to the Union; which perceives that it is losing its federal influence, and that the number of its representatives in congress is diminishing from year to year, while those of the northern and western states are increasing; the south, which is peopled with ardent and irascible beings, is becoming more and more irritated and alarmed. The citizens reflect upon their present position and remember their past influence, with the melancholy uneasiness of men who suspect oppression: if they discover a law of the Union which is not unequivocally favourable to their interests, they protest against it as an abuse of force; and if their ardent remonstrances are not listened to, they threaten to quit an association which loads them with burdens while it deprives them of their due profits. “The tariff,” said the inhabitants of Carolina in 1832, “enriches the north, and ruins the south; for if this were not the case, to what can we attribute the continually increasing power and wealth of the north, with its inclement skies and arid soil; while the south, which may be styled the garden of America, is rapidly declining.”[1]
If the changes which I have described were gradual, so that each generation at least might have time to disappear with the order of things under which it had lived, the danger would be less; but the progress of society in America is precipitate, and almost revolutionary. The same citizen may have lived to see his state take the lead in the Union, and afterward become powerless in the federal assemblies; and an Anglo-American republic has been known to grow as rapidly as a man, passing from birth and infancy to maturity in the course of thirty years. It must not be imagined, however, that the states which lose their preponderance, also lose their population or their riches; no stop is put to their prosperity, and they even go on to increase more rapidly than any kingdom in
- ↑ See the report of its committee to the convention, which proclaimed the nullification of the tariff in South Carolina.
