But the President informs us that threatening and ominous clouds impend over the country; and he fears that if Kansas is not admitted under the Lecompton constitution, slavery agitation will be revived in a more dangerous form than it has ever yet assumed.  There may be grounds for that opinion, for aught I know; but it seems to me that if any of the States of the South have taken any position on this question which endangers the peace of the country, they could not have been informed of the true condition of affairs in Kansas, and of the strong objections which may be urged on principle against the acceptance by Congress of the Lecompton constitution.  And I have such confidence in the intelligence of the people of the whole South, that when the history and character of this instrument shall be known, even those who would be glad to find some plausible pretext for dissolving the Union will see that its rejection by Congress would not furnish them with such a one as they could make available for their purposes.

When the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was under discussion, in 1854, in looking to all the consequences which might follow the adoption of that measure, I could not overlook the fact that a sentiment of hostility to the Union was widely diffused in certain States of the South; and that that sentiment was only prevented from assuming an organized form of resistance to the authority of the Federal government, at least in one of the States, in 1851, by the earnest remonstrance of a sister State, that was supposed to sympathize with her in the project of establishing a southern republic.  Nor could I fail to remember that the project—­I speak of the convention held in South Carolina, in pursuance of an act of the legislature—­was then postponed, not dropped.  The argument was successfully urged that an enterprise of such magnitude ought not to be entered upon without the co-operation of a greater number of States than they could then certainly count upon.  It was urged that all the cotton-planting States would, before a great while, be prepared to unite in the movement, and that they, by the force of circumstances, would bring in all the slaveholding States.  The ground was openly taken, that separation was an inevitable necessity.  It was only a question of time.  It was said that no new aggression was necessary on the part of the North to justify such a step.  It was said that the operation of this government from its foundation had been adverse to southern interests; and that the admission of California as a free State, and the attempt to exclude the citizens of the South, with their property, from all the territory acquired from Mexico, was a sufficient justification for disunion.  It was not a mere menace to deter the North from further aggressions.  These circumstances made a deep impression on my mind at the time, and from a period long anterior to that I had known that it was a maxim with the most skillful tacticians among those who desire separation, that the slaveholding States must be united—­consolidated into one party.  That object once effected, disunion, it was supposed, would follow without difficulty.