Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[59] representation. This had been at first 33,000; in the census of 1860, it was raised to 127,381. In the first House of Representatives, Virginia had ten members to six from New York; the proportion under the last census was, Virginia eleven to New York thirty. South Carolina, which originally had one-thirteenth of the popular representation in Congress, would only return, under the census of 1860, four members in a house of two hundred and thirty-three. The representative power in the North had become enormously in excess, and whenever it chose to act unanimously, was capable of any amount of oppression upon the rival section.

Under this sectional domination grew up a system of protections and bounties to the North without parallel in the history of class legislation and of unequal laws in a common country. Virginia had accepted the Constitution in the hope that the General Government, having “power to regulate commerce,” would lift the restrictions from her trade. This consideration was held out as a bribe for votes in the Convention. She was bitterly disappointed. In the Virginia Convention of 1822, Mr. Watkins Leigh declared: “Every commercial operation of the Federal Government, since I attained manhood, has been detrimental to the Southern Atlantic slaveholding, planting States.”

The South had no protection for her agriculture. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the manufacturing interest was a very unimportant one in the country. But manufactures soon became a prominent and special branch of industry in the North; and a course of sectional legislation was commenced to exact from the South a large portion of the proceeds of her industry, and bestow it upon the North in the shape of bounties to manufacturers and appropriations in a thousand forms. “Protection” was the cry which came up from every part of the North. Massachusetts, although unwilling to be taxed on the importation of molasses, wanted protection for the rum she made from it, and contended that it should be fenced in by high duties from a competition with the rum of Jamaica. Pennsylvania sought protection for her manufactures of steel and her paper mills. Connecticut had manufactures of woollens and manufactures of cordage, which she declared would perish without protection. New York demanded that every article should be protected that her people were able to produce. And to such clamours and demands the South had for a long time to submit, so helpless indeed that she was scarcely treated as a party to common measures of legislation. The foundation of the protective tariff of 1828-“the bill of abominations,” as it was styled by Mr. Calhoun--was laid in a Convention of Northern men at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and from this Convention were excluded all sections of the country intended to be made tributary under the act of Congress.

Of the tariff of 1828 Senator Benton remarked: “The South believed ”