as it must always be very difficult to determine whether the public works which the United States was constantly being urged to undertake were really of national importance, it was best to be exceedingly chary of agreeing to such outlays. He had urged in his first message the very great importance of the functions of the States in the national system of government, and had solemnly warned Congress “against all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of state sovereignty." He had in this way given emphasis to his proposal that instead of applying the surplus revenue of the federal government by the vote of Congress to the construction of public works, it should be distributed among the States, to be employed at their discretion. And this continued to be his attitude throughout the years of his presidency. The appropriations made by Congress for internal improve

"Riders."

ments during those years were large, but they

were not made by distinct Acts of appropriation for that specific purpose. They were made as items in the general Appropriation Bills, which the President must have vetoed as a whole in order to reach the obnoxious items. It was only thus that the President's opposition to such expenditures could be thwarted.

der Adams.

22. Sectional Divergence.

John Quincy Adams had been while President an outspoken and even urgent advocate of national expendiDivision un- tures for internal improvements, a firm supporter of the treaty rights of the Indians in the Gulf States, and an avowed friend of the system of protective tariffs; and his position upon these questions had completely alienated the South from him. In 1824 he had received some support in the South for the presidency; but in 1828 he had received practically none at all

outside of Maryland. All of the southern votes which had been cast for Crawford or Clay in the election of 1824 were transferred in 1828 to Jackson; and

Jackson's attitude.

in the matter of his treatment of the Indians and his attitude towards internal improvements the South had had no reason to repent of its choice. Jackson fulfilled its hopes by drawing about him a party firmly, consistently, even courageously devoted to the principle of strict construction in the interpretation of the constitutional powers of the federal government, and the South had good reason to be satisfied with the local autonomy thus secured to it.

Southern commercial interests.

But there were influences afoot which were to force sectional divergences, nevertheless. The tariff law of 1828 (Formation of the Union, § 138) had committed the country to the fullest extent to the policy of commercial restrictions in favor of domestic manufactures; and such a policy could not but subject the South to a serious, if not fatal, economic loss. For her system of slavery shut her out from the development of manufactures. Her only hope of wealth lay in the maintenance of a free commerce, which should take her agricultural products, and, most important, her cotton, to any market of the world, foreign or domestic, that might offer. The era of railway construction was just dawning, and that era was to witness vast and sudden changes in the economic condition of the country which would operate to expand and transform the industrial North and West speedily and upon an enormous scale, but which were to affect the South scarcely at all. The northern and southern groups of States, already profoundly different in life and social structure, were to be rendered still more radically unlike. A sharp and almost immediate divergence between them, both in interest and in opinion, was inevitable.

23. The Public Land Question (1829, 1830).

Jackson came to the presidency at the very moment when, for the first time since the Missouri debates, sympPolitical toms of this divergence were becoming acute. significance. During the first session of the first Congress of his term a debate upon the public land question brought out in the most striking manner possible the antagonism already existing between the two sections. The public land question had two very distinct sides. On the one hand, it was a question of administration, of the management of the national property; on the other hand, it was a question of politics, of the creation of new States and the limitation or extension of the area of settlement. From the point of view of institutions, it was also a question of the extension or limitation of slavery. It was in its latter aspect that it had provoked debate upon the occasion of the admission of Missouri to the Union; and it was in this aspect also that it called forth the "great debate" of 1830. That debate took place upon a resolution introduced by Mr. Foot of ConnecFoot's Re- ticut, who proposed that an official inquiry solution. should be instituted for the purpose of determining the expediency of the policy of rapid sales of the public lands which had been pursued hitherto, and of ascertaining whether these sales might not, at least for a period, be with advantage limited to lands already surveyed and on the market. The resolution meant that the eastern States, which were trying to foster a new industrial system of manufactures, were hostile to the policy of creating new agricultural communities in the West, at any rate rapidly and upon an unlimited scale. If the federal government continued to survey and police the western lands, and thus prepare them for settlement, inviting all classes to purchase, the while, by means of

prices meant merely to cover the actual expenses of the government in making this preparation for settlement, not only those who had capital, but also the better part of the laboring classes would be constantly drawn away from the East, and her industrial system greatly embarrassed, if not rendered impossible. What was the use of protective tariffs which shut out foreign competition, if wages were to be perpetually kept at a maximum by this drain of population towards the West? Here was a serious issue between East and West, - a serious issue also, as it turned out, between the eastern States and the South; for in this matter the South stood with the West.

It is not easy without a somewhat close scrutiny of the situation to perceive why this should have been the case. Apparently the interests of the South would not be greatly

Sympathy of South

and West.

advanced by the rapid settlement and develop

ment of the West; for it was already evident that the political interests of the South were inextricably bound up with the maintenance and even the extension of the system of slavery, and the Missouri Compromise had shut slavery out from the greater part of the Western territory. At the time of the debate on Foot's resolution, however, other considerations were predominant. The protective tariff law of 1828 had been taken by the South to mean that the eastern States intended, at whatever hazards of fortune to other portions of the Union, to control the revenue policy of the federal government in their own interest. When Foot introduced his resolution Benton had sprung forward to declare with hot indignation that such propositions were but further proof of the spirit, a spirit now of neglect and again of jealousy, which the New England States had always manifested towards the West. The South, therefore, smarting under a restrictive tariff which it

regarded as a New England measure, and the West chafing under the selfish jealousy which, it seemed to her, New England was always showing towards Western interests, it was natural that they should draw together in policy, as they had done in personal preferences when they had united to support Jackson.

24. The Debate on Foot's Resolution (1830).

But it is what was said in this memorable debate, even more than what was done for the amalgamation of parties by the feelings which it aroused, that made it one of the most significant in the annals of Congress. It brought out, for the first time on the floor of Congress, a distinct statement of the constitutional principles upon which North and South were to diverge. Senator Senator Hayne of South Carolina, speaking for his Hayne. State, and, it was feared, for the South as a whole, plainly declared that, in case of aggressions which seemed deliberate, palpable, and dangerous violations of the rights reserved to the States under the Constitution, any State would be justified, when her solemn protests failed of effect, in resisting the efforts of the federal government to put the measures complained of into execution within her jurisdiction. He appealed, for authority, to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 (Formation of the Union, § 90), which had seemed to give voice to a common sentiment when holding in their day similar doctrine. He claimed that the Constitution of the Union was a compact between the States; that to make the federal government the sole judge, through its judiciary, of the extent of its own powers was to leave the States utterly without guarantee of the rights reserved to them, and might result in destroying the federal character of the government altogether; and that if the