The Sectional Feature in American Politics. 
5 
What had destroyed the sectional equilibrium and made all the strenuous 
effort, the political finesse and the brilliant strokes of southern statesmen 
nugatory and impotent ? The answer is: emigration. 1 Next to the fact of 
sectionalism, I conceive the phenomenon of nineteenth century emigra¬ 
tion to America to be the most notable circumstance in our later history. 
It was greater numerically, than the vast barbarian migration that over¬ 
turned the Roman empire. To my mind, it has wrought in the nation 
other important results besides the transformation of the sectional ques¬ 
tion, but if none other, that alone would have been enough. The belated 
colonization of America by Ireland and Germany gave the north her nu¬ 
merical preponderance in the census; enlarged her relative strength in the 
House of Representatives; filled the places in the east of the army of 
young men going west and then followed, in renewed waves of immigra¬ 
tion, the western pioneers. Know-nothingism arose like the specter of the 
alarmed slave master — the ghost of selfish occupancy whether vested in 
human chattels or in the chattel of social, political and industrial machin¬ 
ery — but the hope of creating a sectarian instead of a sectional line of demar¬ 
cation failed. This clever expedient of the southern Whigs was futile to 
withhold the inevitable end of the equilibrium. And when the task of 
crushing the rebellion was upon the nation, the foreign born soldier was 
also thrown into the scale against the South; thousands of naturalized cit¬ 
izens were drafted into a school of patriotism which made them irre¬ 
proachably American, and thousands of the descendants of an earlier 
emigration, typified in generals like Sheridan and Rosecrans, were also 
important elements in the victory of the north. Had this emigration gone 
to the. South it would undoubtedly have counted in a different solution of 
the problem. Historians would not be able to trace a direct connection be¬ 
tween the potato rot in Ireland and the Emancipation Proclamation. The 
three or four million emigrants who destroyed the sectional equilibrium 
were tools in the hands of Providence. Yet there was nothing accidental 
in the fact that their weight was cast with the North and against the 
South. It could not have been otherwise. 
John C. Calhoun, in his last great speech in the senate, delivered in the 
year of his death, 1850, sought to explain the waning strength of the South 
by deploring the fact that slavery was shut out of the territory north of the 
Ohio river and north of the 36th parallel. He also bewailed the influence 
of the existing revenue system which he conceived to result in attracting 
the emigrant population to the North and robbing the South of her capi¬ 
tal. Under other conditions he thought that the South would have re- 
1 The growth in the tide of immigration will appear from the following figures: 
Immigrants, 1789 to 1820 (estimated). 250,000 
“ 1821 to 1830 143,439 
“ 1831 to 1840 599,125 
“ 1841 to 1850 1,713,251 
“ 1851 to 1860 2,598,214 
Sixty per cent, of the immigration up to 1860 was Irish. 
