provision for the rights
of property, when added to the personal rights of the holders,
against the will of a majority having little or no direct
interest in the rights of property? If any such provision be
attainable beyond the moral influence which property adds to
political rights, it will be most secure and permanent if made by
a convention chosen by a general suffrage, and more likely to be
so made now than at a future stage of population. If made by a
freehold convention in favour of freeholders, it would be less
likely to be acquiesced in permanently.[17]

TO GENERAL LA FAYETTE

Feb. 1, 1830.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Your anticipation with regard to the slavery among us were the
natural offspring of your just principles and laudable
sympathies; but I am sorry to say that the occasion which led to
them proved to be little fitted for the slightest interposition
on that subject. A sensibility, morbid in the highest degree, was
never more awakened among those who have the largest stake in
that species of interest, and the most violent against any
governmental movement in relation to it. The excitability at the
moment, happened, also, to be not a little augmented by party
questions between the South and the North, and the efforts used
to make the circumstance common to the former a sympathetic bond
of co-operation. I scarcely express myself too strongly in saying
that any allusion in the Convention to the subject you have so
much at heart would have been a spark to a mass of gunpowder. It
is certain, nevertheless, that time, the great "Innovator," is
not idle in its salutary preparations. The Colonization Society
are becoming more and more one of its agents. Outlets for the
freed blacks are alone wanted for a rapid erasure of the blot
from our Republican character.[18]

TO ---- ----

June 28, 1831.

But the title in the people of the United States rests on a
foundation too just and solid to be shaken by any technical or
metaphysical arguments whatever. The known and acknowledged
intentions of the parties at the time, with a prescriptive
sanction of