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as did no other, the democratic idea.
His instinct taught him when to fear and when to hope.
He had hoped for a rule whose force would be justice.
He now forsaw a reign whose justice would be force.
The sanguine labor of his life seemed lost at the close.
Events seemed to say: ‘Aha,
Jefferson, we have thee on the hip at last.’
Realizing in his old age the triumph which had come to stay of nominal over real, he turned his face to the wall.
John Quincy Adams noted in his diary: ‘The discussion disclosed a secret.
It revealed the basis for a new organization of parties.’
The Bill of Abomination.
The convention of Northern States which met at
Harrisburg to outline the tariff of 1828, known as the ‘Bill of Abomination’ was the confirmation of
Jefferson's forebodings.
Had parliament granted to the colonies the right to appear by representatives (easily outnumbered by the rest of the commons), how nugatory would have been the colonial vote.
So specious was the scheme to make the
South the
milch cow for the
North.
Real consent of the governed would be violated at the threshold.
‘I will,’ said
John Randolph, ‘put it in the power of no man or set of men who ever lived, or who ever shall live, to tax me without my consent.
It is wholly immaterial whether this is done, without my having any representation at all, or, as it was done in the case of the tariff law, by a phalanx, stern and inexorable, who, have the majority and having the power, prescribe to me the law I shall obey * * * The whole slave-holding country, the whole of it from the
Potomac to
Mexico, was placed under the ban and anathema of a majority of two.’
The logic of liberty thus spoke.
That wizzard glance, flashing with a supernatural insight into the heart of things, saw in this the shadow of a stroke which would one day fall with destructive force; and which destructively has fallen.
The ounce of prevention would have saved what whole cargoes of cure are powerless to remedy.
The power which buys legislation wholesale is sequence from this antecedence.
The injury of the many for the profit of the few cannot well have other sequence.
Once more, the issue between good government and bad government; between free government and slave government turns on this—Is public good or selfish
