Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/80

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Nullification Advocated and Denounced
61

far more effective with the people than newspaper articles.[1]

Public dinners and barbecues came thick and fast in June and July. The toasts reported from the various campaign feasts showed a great variety of sentiment. The sentiments were nearly unanimous in their deep sense of the wrongs of the South and their determined resolution to redress them; but as to the measure of redress they differed widely. Nullification by the legislature, by state convention, secession, disunion, a convention of southern states, were all proposed. Some, however, expressed dissatisfaction with the state rights and "Carolina" doctrines. Most of them professed love for the Union, but greater love for state sovereignty to resist oppression.

  1. Hammond Papers: Pickens to Hammond, June 26, 1830: " … We are negligent in one thing, and that is that we do not take pains enough to spread information in an easy way and in such a way before the people that they would read it. Now when we get into the tariff and internal improvement country, we see, on every man's table who has the slightest influence, piles of writing in pamphlets on those subjects which are so interesting to them, and by this systematic … course [they] affect public opinion there; they keep the people united and excited. Here we have nothing of it. We have had nothing hardly but the Crisis published so that everybody would read it, and that was so blunt and coarse [with] its talk about disunion, that the people were chilled by it The people will not read in the newspapers so well and with as much impression anything, as if it were in a pamphlet before them."