If avarice was induced to shake hands with injustice, from the expectation of increased direct taxation upon the South, she gained little by the bargain. With the exception of two brief periods, during the French war, and the last war with England, the revenue of the United States has been raised by _duties on imports_. The heavy debts and expenditures of the several States, which they had been accustomed to provide for by direct taxes, and which they probably expected to see provided for by the same means in time to come, have been all paid by duties on imports. The greatest proportion of these duties are, of course, paid by the free States; for here, the poorest laborer daily consumes several articles of foreign production, of which from one-eighth to one-half the price is a tax paid to government. The clothing of the slave population increases the revenue very little, and their food almost none at all.
Wherever free labor and slave labor exist under the same government, there must be a perpetual clashing of interests. The legislation required for one, is, in its spirit and maxims, diametrically opposed to that required for the other. Hence Mr. Madison predicted, in the convention which formed our Federal Constitution, that the contests would be between the great geographical sections; that such had been the division, even during the war and the confederacy.
In the same convention, Charles Pinckney, a man of great sagacity, spoke of the equal representation of large and small States as a matter of slight consequence; no difficulties, he said, would ever arise on that point; the question would always be between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding interests.
If the pressure of common danger, and the sense of individual weakness, during our contest for independence, could not bring the States to mutual confidence, nothing ever can do it, except a change of character. From the adoption of the constitution to the present time, the breach has been gradually widening. The South has pursued a uniform and sagacious system of policy, which, in all its bearings, direct and indirect, has been framed for the preservation and extension of slave power. This system has, in the very nature of the two things, constantly interfered with the interests of the free States; and hitherto the South have always gained the victory. This has principally been accomplished by yoking all important questions together _in pairs_, and strenuously resisting the passage of one, unless accompanied by the other. The South was desirous of removing the seat of government from Philadelphia to Washington, because the latter is in a slave territory, where republican representatives and magistrates can bring their slaves without danger of losing them, or having them contaminated by the principles of universal liberty. The assumption of the State debts, likely to bring considerable money back to the North, was _linked_ with this question, and both were carried. The admission of Maine into the Union as a free State, and of Missouri as a slave State, were two more of these Siamese twins, not allowed to be separated from each other. A numerous smaller progeny may be found in the laying of imposts, and the successive adjustment of protection to navigation, the fisheries, agriculture, and manufactures.