themselves to slavery as a permanent system. Meanwhile, South
Carolina and Georgia found in the institution the source of their
economic well-being and hotly challenged the right of other sections
to speak ill of it or meddle with it in any way, lest their domestic
security be endangered. [Footnote: See Hart, Slavery and Abolition
(Am. Nation, XVI.)] When the south became fully conscious that
slavery set the section apart from the rest of the nation, when it
saw in nationalizing legislation, such as protection to manufactures
and the construction of a system of internal improvements, the
efforts of other sections to deprive the cotton states of their
profits for the benefit of an industrial development in which they
did not share, deep discontent prevailed. With but slight
intermission from the days of Washington to those of Monroe, the
tobacco planters under the Virginia dynasty had ruled the nation.
But now, when the center of power within the section passed from the
weakening hands of Virginia to those of South Carolina, the
aggressive leader of the Cotton Kingdom, the south found itself a
minority section in the Union. When it realized this, it denied the
right of the majority to rule, and proceeded to elaborate a system
of minority rights as a protection against the forces of national
development, believing that these forces threatened the foundations
of the prosperity and even the social safety of the south.

From the middle of the eighteenth century the seaboard planters had
been learning the lesson of control by a fraction of the population.
The south was by no means a unified region in its physiography. The
Blue Ridge cut off the low country of Virginia from the Shenandoah
Valley, and beyond this valley the Alleghenies separated the rest of
the state from those counties which we now know as West Virginia. By
the time of the Revolution, in the Carolinas and Georgia, a belt of