ton and New York as well as in Richmond or Savannah. The Declaration of Independence, written by Jefferson, who was opposed to slavery, and concurred in by the committee of which Adams, Sherman, Livingston and Franklin, all Northern men, were members, made no declaration against slavery and no allusion to it, except to charge the King of Great Britain with the crime of exciting domestic insurrection. In framing the Constitution all sectional differences, including the subject of slavery, were compromised. "The compromises on the slavery question inserted in the Constitution were," as Mr. Elaine correctly remarks, "among the essential conditions upon which the Federal government was organized. " (Twenty Years, vol. i, p. i.)
Sectional conflicts, subsequent to the formation of the Constitution from which the Union resulted, were also mainly caused by similar commercial rivalries and ambitions for political advantage. The maintenance of the political equilibrium between the North and the South occupied at all times the anxious thought of patriotic statesmen. In the contests which threatened this equality slavery was not the only nor at first the main disturbing cause. It was not the question in the war of 1812 upon which the States were divided into sections North and South, nor in the purchase of Louisiana Territory, as the debates show ; the real ground of opposition being the fear that this vast territory would transfer political power southward, which was evidenced by Josiah Quincy’s vehement declaration of his "alarm that six States might grow up beyond the Mississippi. Nor was the acquisition of Florida advocated or opposed because of slavery. The tariff issue, out of which the nullification idea arose, was decidedly on a question of just procedure in raising revenue, and not on slavery. The question was made suddenly and lamentably prominent in the application of Missouri to be admitted into the Union, but the agitation which then threatened the peace of the
