ection laid down and supported by the South in the Act of 1816,
while widening, increasing, and strengthening it. Under their
operation-especially under that of 1828, with its high duties on wool,
hemp, iron, lead, and other staples--great prosperity smiled upon the
land, and particularly upon the Free States.

In the cotton-growing belt of the South, however, where the prosperity
was relatively less, owing to the blight of Slavery, the very contrast
bred discontent; and, instead of attributing it to the real cause, the
advocates of Free Trade within that region insisted that the Protective
Tariff was responsible for the condition of things existing there.

A few restless and discontented spirits in the South had indeed agitated
the subject of Free Trade as against Protected manufactures as early as
1797, and, hand in hand with it, the doctrine of States Rights. And
Jefferson himself, although, as we have already seen, attached to the
American System of Protection and believing in its Constitutionality,
unwittingly played into the hands of these Free Traders by drawing up
the famous Kentucky Resolutions of '98 touching States Rights, which
were closely followed by the Virginia Resolutions of 1799 in the same
vein by Madison, also an out-and-out Protectionist. It was mainly in
condemnation of the Alien and Sedition Laws, then so unpopular
everywhere, that these resolutions were professedly fulminated, but they
gave to the agitating Free Traders a States-Rights-Secession-weapon of
which they quickly availed themselves.

Their drift may be gathered from the first of the Kentucky Resolutions
of '98, which was in these words: "Resolved, That the several States
composing the United States of America are not united on the principle
of unlimited submission to their General Government, but that, by a
compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United
States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government
for special purposes--delegated to that Government certain definite
powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to
their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government
assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of
no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and as an
integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party;
that the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive
o