Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 3

Bancroft, the historian, escaped from a community where a Democrat was regarded as little better than a Jacobin, and years after his removal assured a friend that it was a comfort to live in New York rather than in Boston. R. H. Dana, Jr., wrote to Sumner in 1851, ‘Boston oligarchy is confined to the pavements and Nahant.’ Prescott wrote to Sumner in 1851 of a former period in Salem similar in character: ‘Judge Story in his early days was exposed to much obloquy from the bitterness of party feeling, which becomes more intensified in proportion to the narrowness of the sphere where it is displayed. Boston is worse than New York in this respect.’

The capitalists were greatly interested in a protective tariff, and its maintenance was the one end of their politics. Mr. Nathan Appleton and Mr. Abbott Lawrence were not only wise projectors of manufacturing schemes, but they were competent to defend in argument the protective system. Both had represented Boston in Congress. It was all important to their interests to keep the Whig party, north and south, united in support of the tariff; and with reference to a market, to keep on good terms with the Southern people. A Southern slaveholder, or his son at Harvard, was more welcome in society than any guest, except a foreigner. Southern planters tarried for weeks at the Tremont House, then the favorite hostelry of the town, for the ocean air and suburban drives; and from year to year were registered among its guests the well-known names of the Allstons, Hungers, Izards, and Rhetts. It is difficult to understand this deference to Southern planters now that the marvellous expansion of the West, during, the second half of this century, has displaced the South as the principal consumer of New England products, as well as the dominant power in American politics.

These people had a keen sense of legality, sharpened at times by material interests. This made them faithful to law and government; but it also led them, at least once, to strain the Constitution for the protection of slave property, going beyond its letter as well as its spirit.¹ When their representative in Congress, separating himself from his Northern associates, voted