its free rival.  The South of necessity was restricted to a single industry, the tillage of the earth.  Slave labor did not possess the intelligence, the skill, the patience, the mechanical versatility to embark successfully in manufacturing enterprises.  Free labor monopolised the protected industries, and Northern capital caught all the golden showers of fiscal legislation.  What the South needed, from an economic point of view, was unrestricted access to the markets of the world for her products, and the freest competition of the world in her own markets.  The limitations imposed upon the slave States by their industrial system was in itself a tremendous handicap in their struggle for an advantageous place in the New World of the nineteenth century; in their struggle with their free sisters for political leadership in the Union.  But with the development of the protective principle those States fell into sore financial distress, were ground between the upper millstone of the protective system and the nether millstone of their own industrial system.  Prosperity and plenty did presently disappear from that section and settled in the North.  In 1828 Benton drew this dark picture of the state of the South: 

“In place of wealth, a universal pressure for money was felt; not enough for common expenses; the price of all property down; the country drooping and languishing; towns and cities decaying, and the frugal habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for the preservation of their family estates.”

He did not hesitate to charge to Federal legislation the responsibility for all this poverty and distress, for he proceeds to remark that: 

“Under this legislation the exports of the South have been made the basis of the Federal revenue.  The twenty odd millions annually levied upon imported goods are deducted out of the price of their cotton, rice, and tobacco, either in the diminished prices which they receive for those staples in foreign ports, or in the increased price which they pay for the articles they have to consume at home.”

A suffering people are not apt to reason clearly or justly on the causes which have brought them to indigence.  They feel their wretchedness and reach out for a victim.  And the law-making power usually happens to be that victim.  As the distress of the South increased, the belief that Federal legislation was responsible for it increased likewise.  The spread and deepening of this conviction in the Southern States precipitated among them an ominous crisis in their attachment to the Union.  Nullification and an embittered sectionalism was the hateful legacy bequeathed to the republic by the tariff controversy.  It left the South in a hyper-sensitive state in all matters relating to her domestic interests.  It left the North in a hyper-sensitive condition on all matters touching the peace and stability of the Union.  The silence and oblivion policy on the subject of slavery was