Matthew Fontaine Maury

“ Northern people loaded the mails for the South with inflammatory publications inciting the negroes to revolt, and encouraging them to rise up, in servile insurrection, and murder their owners. Like tampering with the negroes was one among the causes which led Virginia into her original proposition to the other colonists, that they should all, for the common good and common safety, separate themselves from Great Britain and strike for independent existence. ”

“ The North was commercial, the South agricultural. Through their fast-sailing packets and steamers, Northern people were in constant communication with foreign nations; the South, rarely, except through the North. Northern men and Northern society took advantage of this circumstance to our prejudice. They defamed the South and abused the European mind with libels and slanders and evil reports against us of a heinous character. They represented Southern people as a lawless and violent set, where men and women were without shame. ”

“ More harsh still—delicate mothers and emaciated invalids with their nurses, though driven from their Southern homes, as they often are, by pestilence or plague, dared not seek refuge in the more bracing climates of the North; they were liable to be mobbed and to see their servants taken away by force, and when that was done, they found that Northern laws afforded no protection. In short, our people had no longer equal rights in a common country. ”

“ Northern statesmen did not see the case in that light; but fairness, right and the Constitution were on the side of the South. She pointed to the unfair distribution of the public lands, the unequal dispensation among the States of the Government favor and patronage, and to the fact that the New England manufacturers had gained a firm footing and were flourishing. Moreover, peace, progress and development had, since the end of the French wars, dictated free trade as the true policy of all nations. ”

“ The sacrifice thus made by the South, for the sake of the Union, will be more fully appreciated when we reflect that under the Constitution Southern gentlemen had as much right, and the same right to go into the Territories with their slaves, that the men of the North had to carry with them there their apprentices and servants. ”

“ The chief part of the enormous expenditures was made within their borders, and they, like New England, flourished and prospered at the expense of their brethren.
By the Constitution, a citizen of the South had a right to pursue his fugitive slave into any of the States, apprehend and bring him back; but so unfriendly had the North become towards the South, and so regardless of her duties under the Constitution, that Southern citizens, in pursuing and attempting to apprehend runaway negroes in the North, were thrown into jail, maltreated and insulted despite of their rights. ”

“ The Washington Government was fast drifting towards centralization, and the result of all this Federal partiality, of this unequal protection and encouragement, was that New England and the North flourished and prospered as no people have ever done in modern times. ”

“ About this time also Missouri—into which the earlier settlers had carried their slaves—applied for admission into the Union as a State. The North opposed it, on the ground that slavery existed there. The South appealed to the Constitution, called for the charter which created the Federal Government, and asked for the clause which gave Congress the power to interfere with the domestic institutions of any State, or with any of her affairs, further than to see that her organic law insured a republican form of Government to her people. ”

“ But instead of allowing us a bounty for this, you exact taxes and require protection for our Northern fellow-citizens at the expense of Southern industry and enterprise." The complaints against the tariff were, at the end of ten or twelve years, followed by another compromise in the shape of a modified tariff, by which the South again gained nothing and the North everything. The effect was simply to lessen, not to abolish, the tribute money exacted for the benefit of Northern industries. ”

“ Backed by majorities in Congress, she only became more and more aggressive. Furthermore, the magnificent country given by Virginia to the Union came to be managed in the political interests of the North. It was used for the encouragement of European emigration, and its settlement on her side of that parallel, while the idea was sought to be impressed abroad by false representations that South of 36° 30" in this country out-door labor is death to the white man, and that throughout the South generally labor was considered degrading. ”

“ Nevertheless the protection continued, and was so effectual that the manufacturers of New England began to compete in foreign markets with the manufacturers of Old England. Whereupon the South said, "Enough: the North has free trade with us; the Atlantic ocean rolls between this country and Europe; the expense of freight and transportation across it, with moderate duties for revenue alone, ought to be protection enough for these Northern industries. Therefore let us do way with tariffs for protection. They have not, by reason of geographical law, turned a wheel in the South ”

“ Under these circumstances it was thought wise to encourage manufacturing in New England, until American labor could be educated for it, and the requisite skill acquired, and Southern statesmen took the lead in the passage of a tariff to encourage and protect our manufacturing industries. ”

“ In consequence of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, the Orders in Council, the Embargo and the war which followed in 1812, the people of the whole country suffered greatly for the want of manufactured articles, many of which had become necessaries of life. ”

“ They both prefer the Charleston market, and they both, the illustration assumed, arrived by sea the same day and proceeded together, each with his invoice of one hundred bales, to the custom-house. There the Northern man is told that he may land his one hundred bales duty free; but the Southern man is required to leave forty of his in the custom-house for the privilege of landing the remaining sixty. ”

“ This grated upon the generous feelings of our people the more, because they were thus compelled in self-defence to spread hateful laws upon the statute-book of their State, and subject her fair fame to invidious criticisms by posterity, and this in consequence of the repeated attempt of the Northern people to tamper with the negroes and interfere with our domestic affairs. ”