Chapter 3:
- Material decline of the South in the Union. -- shifting of the numbers and enterprise of the country from the Southern to the Northern States. -- Virginia's rank among the States at the time of the Revolution. -- commercial distress of the States after the Revolution. -- how New England suffered. -- the South then reckoned the seat of future empire. -- the people and strength of America bearing Southwardly. -- emigration to the South. -- Kentucky and the vales of Frankland. -- Virginia's prosperity. -- her early land system. -- the Chesapeake. -- Alexandria. -- George Washington's great commercial project. -- two pictures of Virginia: 1789 and 1829. -- an example of the decline of the South in material prosperity. -- this decline not to be attributed to slavery. -- its true causes. -- effect of the Louisiana purchase on the tides of emigration. -- unequal Federal legislation, as a cause of the sectional lapse of the South in the Union. -- the key to the political history of America. -- a great defect of the American Constitution. -- population as an element of prosperity and power. -- how this was thrown into the Northern scale. -- two sectional measures. -- comparisons of Southern representation in Congress at the date of the Constitution and in the year 1860. -- sectional domination of the North. -- a protective tariff. -- “the bill of abominations.” -- Senator Benton on the tariff of 1828. -- his retrospect of the prosperity of the South. -- history of the American tariffs. -- tariff of 1833, a deceitful Compromise. -- other measures of Northern aggrandizement. -- ingenuity of Northern avarice. -- why the South could not use her Democratic alliance in the South to protect her interests. -- this alliance one only for party purposes. -- its value. -- analysis of the Democratic party in the North. -- the South under the rule of a numerical majority. -- array of that majority on a sectional line necessarily fatal to the Union. -- when and why the South should attempt disunion
It is not unusual in countries of large extent for the tides of population and enterprise to change their directions and establish new seats of power and prosperity. But the change which in little more than a generation after the American Revolution shifted the numbers and enterprise of the country from the Southern to the Northern States was so distinctly from one side of a line to the other, that we must account such the result of certain special and well-defined causes. To discover these
