192 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



this Union are virtually dissolved, that the states which compose 

 it are free from their moral obligations, and as it will be the 

 right of all so it will be the duty of some to prepare definitely 

 for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must." 



When the nation was in the midst of its second war with 

 Great Britain and while the issue was still in doubt the Hartford 

 convention, largely representing the New England states, was 

 convened to discuss not the right — that seemed to be taken for 

 granted — but the expediency of secession. With closed and 

 sentineled doors they sought, among other things, to determine 

 the advisability of forming a new confederacy with the Hudson 

 River as its western boundary. 



The proposition to admit the territory of Missouri as a state 

 into the Union without slavery evoked the most violent and 

 foreboding discussion, not only in Congress but by the press and 

 people throughout the country. In that discussion it was held 

 by the South that to prohibit slavery in Missouri was a dangerous 

 and despotic measure and one that would infringe upon the 

 sovereignty of the states. Her indignant protests against the 

 exclusion of slavery from the proposed new state were attended 

 by serious threats to dissolve the Union. It was during this 

 discussion, more than forty years before the outbreak of the 

 Civil War, that a southern member of Congress uttered the 

 portentous prophecy that in the agitation of the slavery question a 

 fire was being kindled which could only be extinguished by blood. 



Because of what was claimed to be an unconstitutional and 

 oppressive protective tariff, advantageous to the manufacturing 

 states of the North and East and disadvantageous to the agri- 

 cultural interests of the South and West, several states in the 

 cotton-growing belt of the Union threatened to nullify the laws 

 of the federal government, while South Carolina went so far as 

 to declare the ''tariff acts null, void, and no law, nor binding 

 upon that state, its officers, or citizens." She seriously purposed 

 to withdraw from the Union, and within her borders prepared 



