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The friends of the Union were slow to believe that any serious difficulty would take place. Long after the secession of South Carolina they were confident our differences could be healed without an appeal to arms. My visit to the Rocky Mountains was a professional one. During my stay in that region I supplied several Eastern journals with letters from Colorado and New Mexico.
"Now, as these two sections must continue to exist, side by side, they will go on to repel each other until either slavery ceases, or a change of feeling takes place in the non-slaveholding section. Secession and permanent division will not cure the trouble, but will increase it.
Small portions both of Virginia and of Delaware do run north of Maryland, but practically Maryland is the frontier State of the slave States. It was therefore of much importance to know which way Maryland would go in the event of secession among the slave States becoming general; and of much also to ascertain whether it could secede if desirous of doing so.
But the active exertions of Tralleyrand, who represented Louis XVIII. at the Congress, and who both hated and feared Napoleon with all the intensity of which his powerful spirit was capable, prevented the secession of any member of the Congress from the new great league against their ancient enemy.
Such, however, is the fact, for on the death of her father, Mrs. Grant inherited several Negroes and there is some evidence that Grant himself sold or attempted to sell them. But, though he was at that time no champion of the black race, Grant was always a strong Union man, opposed heart and soul to secession.
A fugitive slave law was fairly required by the Constitution and the South had a right to claim it. He, like Clay, declared peaceable secession an impossibility, and his speech, impressive throughout by the power of a lucid and massive intellect, rose at its close to lofty eloquence in a plea for the maintenance of the Union and a warning of the catastrophe which secession would precipitate.
He declared that the Secession of South Carolina was an "undoubted right," a "duty," and their "only safety" and as to himself, he would "unfurl the Palmetto flag, fling it to the breeze, and, with the spirit of a brave man, live and die as became" his "glorious ancestors, and ring the clarion notes of defiance in the ears of an insolent foe!"
Aggrieved by the action and tendencies of the Federal Government, and apprehending worse in the future, a majority of the people of the South approved secession as the only remedy suggested by their leaders.
"If we recognize the right of secession in one case, we give our assent to it in all cases; and if the few States upon the Gulf are now to separate themselves from us, and erect a barrier across the mouth of that great river of which the Ohio is a tributary, how long will it be before New York may come to the conclusion that she may set up for herself, and levy taxes upon every dollar's worth of goods imported and consumed in the Northwest, and taxes upon every bushel of wheat, and every pound of pork, or beef, or other productions that may be sent from the Northwest to the Atlantic in search of a market?"
At last supported by some sort of action in thirteen Southern states, and in nine states by appointment of delegates to his Southern Convention, he declared in the Senate, March 4, "the South, is united against the Wilmot proviso, and has committed itself, by solemn resolutions, to resist should it be adopted". "The South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession."
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