States against the extension of Slavery, not only as a
question of politics, but of conscience and religious conviction as
well-he deems him a rash man indeed "who supposes that a feeling of this
kind is to be trifled with or despised." Said he: "It will assuredly
cause itself to be respected. It may be reasoned with; it may be made
willing--I believe it is entirely willing--to fulfill all existing
engagements and all existing duties--to uphold and defend the
Constitution as it is established, with whatever regrets about some
provisions which it does actually contain. But to coerce it into
silence, to endeavor to restrain its free expression, to seek to
compress and confine it, warm as it is, and more heated as such
endeavors would inevitably render it,--should this be attempted, I know
nothing, even in the Constitution or in the Union itself, which would
not be endangered by the explosion which might follow."

In 1840, General Harrison, the Whig candidate, was elected to the
Presidency, but died within a few weeks after his inauguration in 1841,
and was succeeded by John Tyler. The latter favored the Slave Power;
and on April 12th, 1844, John C. Calhoun, his Secretary of State,
concluded with Texas a treaty of annexation--which was, however,
rejected by the Senate. Meanwhile the public mind was greatly agitated
over the annexation and other, questions.

[In the London Index, a journal established there by Jefferson
Davis's agents to support the cause of the rebellious States, a
communication appeared during the early part of the war, Dec. 4,
1861, supposed to have been written by Mr. Mason, of Virginia, in
which he said: "To tell the Norths, the Butes, the Wedderburns of
the present day, that previous to the year 1839 the sovereign
States of the South had unalterably resolved on the specific ground
of the violation of the Federal Constitution by the tariff of
spoliation which the New England States had imposed upon them--to
secede from the Union; to tell them that in that year the leader of
the South, Calhoun, urged an English gentleman, to whom he had
fully explained the position of the South, and the intolerable
tyranny which the North inflicted upon it, to be the bearer of
credentials from the chief persons of the South, in order to invite
the attention of the British Government to the coming event; that
on his death-bed (Washing