The equality of the States in the upper branch of the National
Legislature, taken in connection with the right of the slave States to
count five slaves as three freemen in the apportionment of
representatives to the lower House of Congress, gave the Southern
section an almost immediate ascendency in the Federal Government. To the
South was thus opened by an unexpected combination of circumstances a
wide avenue for the acquisition of fabulous wealth, and to Southern
public men an incomparable arena for the exercise of political abilities
and leadership. An institution, which thus ministered to two of the
strongest passions of mankind--avarice and ambition--was certain to
excite the most intense attachment. Its safety naturally, therefore,
became among the slave class an object of prime importance. Southern
jealousy in this regard ultimated inevitably in Southern narrowness,
Southern sectionalism, which early manifested themselves in the
exclusion from lead in national affairs of Northern public men, reputed
to be unfriendly to slavery. Webster as late as 1830, protested warmly
against this intolerance. Like begets like. And the proscribing of
anti-slavery politicians by the South, created in turn not a little
sectional feeling at the North, and helped to stimulate there a
consciousness of sectional differences, of antagonism of interests
between the two halves of the Union.

Discontent with the original basis of the Union, which had given the
South its political coign of vantage, broke out first in New England.
The occasion, though not the cause, of this discontent was, perhaps, the
downfall of the Federal party, whose stronghold was in the East. The
commercial and industrial crisis brought on by the embargo, and which
beggared, on the authority of Webster, "thousands of families and
hundreds of thousands of individuals" fanned this Eastern
dissatisfaction into almost open disaffection towards a government