the District of Columbia. Vermont also protested against the annexation of Texas. The legislature of Connecticut repealed the “black laws.” The anti-slavery movement began to make itself felt as a power on the political field.
At the same time the South became painfully sensible of the growing superiority of the North in population and wealth. In 1838 a “commercial convention” of the Southern States was held, which, after instituting some gloomy historical and statistical comparisons, formed the conclusion that the South was becoming impoverished and “tributary” to the North; that this was owing to the tariff, internal improvements, and abuses of government; and that, as a remedy, the South should “open a direct trade between Southern and foreign ports.” The convention did not seem to suspect that slavery was at the bottom of it all, and that they pronounced the doom of slavery by their very complaints. On the contrary, the more fatal the evil became, the more blindly and passionately they hugged it.
In December, 1837, when petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia were presented in the Senate, Clay, whose democratic instinct was keenly stirred, inquired of the Senator presenting them “whether the feeling of abolition in the abstract was extending itself” in the states from which the petitions were arriving, “or whether it was not becoming mixed up with other matters, such, for instance, as the belief that
