uming officiously to intermeddle
with the social institutions of the Northern States, too many of the
inhabitants of the latter are permanently organized in associations to
inflict injury on the former by wrongful acts, which would be cause of
war as between foreign powers and only fail to be such in our system
because perpetrated under cover of the Union.

Is it possible to present this subject as truth and the occasion require
without noticing the reiterated but groundless allegation that the
South has persistently asserted claims and obtained advantages in the
practical administration of the General Government to the prejudice of
the North, and in which the latter has acquiesced? That is, the States
which either promote or tolerate attacks on the rights of persons and of
property in other States, to disguise their own injustice, pretend or
imagine, and constantly aver, that they, whose constitutional rights are
thus systematically assailed, are themselves the aggressors. At the
present time this imputed aggression, resting, as it does, only in the
vague declamatory charges of political agitators, resolves itself into
misapprehension, or misinterpretation, of the principles and facts of
the political organization of the new Territories of the United States.

What is the voice of history? When the ordinance which provided for the
government of the territory northwest of the river Ohio and for its
eventual subdivision into new States was adopted in the Congress of the
Confederation, it is not to be supposed that the question of future
relative power as between the States which retained and those which did
not retain a numerous colored population escaped notice or failed to
be considered. And yet the concession of that vast territory to the
interests and opinions of the Northern States, a territory now the seat
of five among the largest members of the Union, was in great measure the
act of the State of Virginia and of the South.

When Louisiana was acquired by the United States, it was an acquisition
not less to the North than to the South; for while it was important to
the country at the mouth of the river Mississippi to become the emporium
of the country above it, so also it was even more important to the whole
Union to have that emporium; and although the new province, by reason of
its imperfect settlement, was mainly regarded as on the Gulf of Mexico,
yet in fact it extended to the opposite boundaries of the United