fect: The Northern and wholly free states conceded
that, while in the popular branch of the Legislature they themselves
should have a representation proportioned only to their numbers, the
slaveholders of the South should, in addition to their proportional
numbers, have a representation for three fifths of their living
property--their machinery; while the citizens of the free states have no
addition to their number of representatives on account of their
property; nor have their looms and manufactories, or their owners in
their behalf, a single representative. The consequent disproportion of
numbers of the slaveholding representation in the House of
Representatives has secured the absolute control of the general policy
of the government, and especially of the fiscal system, the revenues and
expenditures of the nation. Thus, while the free states are represented
only according to their numbers, the slaveholders are represented also
for their property. The equivalent for this privilege provided by the
constitution is that the slaveholders shall bear a heavier burden of all
direct taxation. But, by the ascendency which their excess of
representation gives them in the enactment of laws, they have invariably
in time of peace excluded all direct taxation, and thereby enjoyed their
excess of representation without any equivalent whatever. This is, in
substance, an evasion of the bilateral provision in the constitution. It
gives an operation entirely one-sided. It is a privilege of the Southern
and slaveholding section of the Union, without any equivalent whatever
to the Northern and North-western freemen. Always united in the purpose
of regulating the affairs of the whole Union by the standard of the
slaveholding interest, the disproportionate numbers of this section in
the electoral colleges have enabled them, in ten out of twelve
quadriennial elections, to confer the chief magistracy on one of their
own citizens. Their suffrages at every election have been almost
exclusively confined to a candidate of their own caste. Availing
themselves of the divisions which, from the nature of man, always
prevail in communities entirely free, they have sought and found out
auxiliaries in other quarters of the Union, by associating the passions
of parties and the ambition of individuals with their own purposes to
establish and maintain throughout the confederated nation the
slaveholders' policy. The office of Vice-President--a station of high