his
extremity, when confronting this inflexible President, Mr. Calhoun
hastened to make friends with his old opponents, Clay, Webster, and the
protectionists, the advocates of the "American system," the authors and
champions of the very policy which had been made the pretext or
justification for nullification and resistance to Federal law and the
Federal authority. This coalition of hostile factions combined in a
scheme, or compromise, where each sacrificed principles to oppose the
administration of Jackson. It was an insincere and unrighteous coalition
which soon fell asunder.

In the mean time, while nullification was hopelessly prostrate, and
before the coalition was complete, the prolific mind of the aspiring
Carolinian devised a new plan and a new system of tactics which it was
expected would sectionalize and unite the South. This new device was a
defence of slavery--a subject in which the entire South was
interested--against the impudent demands of the abolitionists. Not until
the nullifiers were defeated, and had failed to draw the South into
their nullification plan, was slavery agitation introduced into Congress
and made a sectional party question with aggressive demands for national
protection. The abolitionists were few in numbers, and of little account
in American politics. Some benevolent Quakers and uneasy fanatics, who
neither comprehended the structure of our Federal system nor cared for
the Constitution, had annually for forty years petitioned Congress to
give freedom to the slaves. But the statesmen of neither party listened
to these unconstitutional appeals until the defeated nullifiers
professed great apprehension in regard to them, and introduced the
subject as a disturbance, and made it a sensational sectional issue in
Congress and the elections.

From the first agitation of the subject as a party question, slavery in
all its phases was made sectional and aggressive by the South. Beginning
with a denial of the right to petition for the abolition of slavery, and
with demands for new and more exacting national laws for the arrest and
rendition of fugitives, the new sectional party test was followed by
other measures; such as the unconditional admission of Texas, the
extension of slavery into all the free territory acquired from Mexico,
the repeal of the Missouri compromise, a denial to the people of Kansas
of the right to frame their own constitution, and other incidental and
irritating questions t