as massed in the hands of a few individuals, and thus created
a moneyed interest which avariciously influenced the General Government
to the detriment of the entire community of people, who, made restive by
the exactions of this power working through the Federal Government, were
as a consequence driven to consider a possible dissolution of the Union,
and make "estimates of resources and means of defense." As a means also
of inflaming both the poor whites and Southern slave-holders by arousing
the apprehensions of the latter concerning the "peculiar institution" of
Slavery, they craftily declared that "If the maxim advanced by the
advocates of the protecting duty system will justify Congress in
assuming, or rather in empowering a few capitalists to assume, the
direction of manufacturing labor, it also invests that body with a power
of legislating for the direction of every other species of labor and
assigning all occupations whatsoever to the care of the intelligence of
mercenary combinations"--and hence untold misery to labor.

They charged as a further means of firing the Southern heart, that this
moneyed power, born of Protection, "works upon the passion of the States
it has been able to delude by computations of their physical strength
and their naval superiority; and by boasting of an ability to use the
weakening circumstance of negro slavery to coerce the defrauded and
discontented States into submission." And they declared as fundamental
truths upon which they rested that "The Federal is not a National
Government; it is a league between nations. By this league, a limited
power only over persons and property was given to the representatives of
the united nations. This power cannot be further extended, under the
pretext of national good, because the league does not create a national
government."

It was the passage of the Tariff of 1824 that gave these crafty Free
Traders their first great success in spreading their doctrine of Free
Trade by coupling it with questions of slave labor, States Rights, and
nullification, as laid down in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions.
These arguments created great excitement throughout the South
--especially in South Carolina and Georgia--which was still further
increased by the passage of the Tariff of 1828, since declared by
eminent authority to have been "the highest and most protective ever
adopted in this country."

[Mr. Greeley, in his "History of the American Co