determination at whatever hazard to maintain their rights, led our fathers to enter on the trial of revolution.  Having achieved the separation, they did what was in their power for the development of commerce.  They secured free trade between the States, without surrendering State independence.  Their sons, not only free, but beyond the possibility of future interference in their domestic affairs, now seek the closest commercial connection with the country from which their fathers achieved a political separation.

Had the proposition been made to consolidate the States after their independence had been achieved, all must know it would have been rejected—­yet there are those who now instigate you to sectional strife for the purpose of sectional dominion and the destruction of the rights of the minority.  Do they mean treason to the Constitution and the destruction of the Union?  Or do they vilely practice on credulity and passion for personal gain?  The latter is suggested by the contradictory course they pursue.  At the same time they proclaim war upon the slave property of the South, they ask for protection to the manufactures of the staple which could not be produced if that property did not exist.  And while they assert themselves to be the peculiar friends of commerce and navigation, they vaunt their purpose to destroy the labor which gives vitality to both; whilst they proclaim themselves the peculiar friends of laboring men at the North, they insist that the negroes are their equals; and if they are sincere they would, by emancipation of the blacks, bring them together and degrade the white man to the negro level.  They seek to influence the northern mind by sectional issues and sectional organization, yet they profess to be the friends of the Union.  The Union voluntarily formed by free, equal, independent States.

We of the South, on a sectional division, are in the minority; and if legislation is to be directed by geographical tests—­if the constitution is to be trampled in the dust, and the unbridled will of the majority in Congress is to be supreme over the States; we should have the problem which was presented to our Fathers when the Colonies declined to be content with a mere representation in parliament.

If the constitution is to be sacredly observed, why should there be a struggle for sectional ascendency?  The instrument is the same in all latitudes, and does not vary with the domestic institutions of the several States.  Hence it is that the Democracy, the party of the constitution, have preserved their integrity, and are to-day the only national party and the only hope for the preservation and perpetuation of the Union of the States.