s we have seen, one of them
(Georgia) was the first State to incorporate such a prohibition in her
organic Constitution. Eleven years after the agitation on the Missouri
question, when the subject first took a sectional shape, the abolition
of slavery was proposed and earnestly debated in the Virginia
Legislature, and its advocates were so near the accomplishment of their
purpose, that a declaration in its favor was defeated only by a small
majority, and that on the ground of expediency. At a still later period,
abolitionist lecturers and teachers were mobbed, assaulted, and
threatened with tar and feathers in New York, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and other States. One of them
(Lovejoy) was actually killed by a mob in Illinois as late as 1837.

These facts prove incontestably that the sectional hostility which
exhibited itself in 1820, on the application of Missouri for admission
into the Union, which again broke out on the proposition for the
annexation of Texas in 1844, and which reappeared after the Mexican war,
never again to be suppressed until its fell results had been fully
accomplished, was not the consequence of any difference on the abstract
question of slavery. It was the offspring of sectional rivalry and
political ambition. It would have manifested itself just as certainly if
slavery had existed in all the States, or if there had not been a negro
in America. No such pretension was made in 1803 or 1811, when the
Louisiana purchase, and afterward the admission into the Union of the
State of that name, elicited threats of disunion from the
representatives of New England. The complaint was not of slavery, but of
"the acquisition of more weight at the other extremity" of the Union. It
was not slavery that threatened a rupture in 1832, but the unjust and
unequal operation of a protective tariff.

It happened, however, on all these occasions, that the line of
demarkation of sectional interests coincided exactly or very nearly with
that dividing the States in which negro servitude existed from those in
which it had been abolished. It corresponded with the prediction of Mr.
Pickering, in 1803, that, in the separation certainly to come, "the
white and black population would mark the boundary"--a prediction made
without any reference to slavery as a source of dissension.

Of course, the diversity of institutions contributed, in some minor
degree, to the conflict of interests. There is an