Jefferson Davis' reply in the Senate to William H. Seward

Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, February 29, 1860

"...Who has been more industrious, patient, and skillful, as a sapper and miner against the foundations of the Constitution, than the Senator himself [William Henry Seward]? Who has been in advance of him in the firey charge on the rights of the States, and in assuming to the Federal Government the power to crush and to coerce them? Even to-day he has repeated his doctrines. He tells us this is a Government which we will learn is not merely a Government of the States, but a Government of each individual of the people of the United States; and he refers to that doctrine of coercion which the great mind of Hamilton (the mighty intellect of New York, which, in his day, like a lens, gathered in all which could illuminate the subject upon which his mind was concentrated) said was a proposition not to provide for a union of the States, but for their destruction. Such was the view which he who led the forces of the strong Government party took of this idea of enabling the Federal Government to coerce a State. Here the Senator, in advance of that, still mistaking the fundamental principles on which our Government rests, talks about the individual masses coercing the sovereign States of this Union. Sir, when it comes to that, there will be an "irrepressible conflict" indeed; and I have now the faith I have before announced, that, when it comes to that, he will find men loyal to the Government and true to its institutions, residing around his own home, who will arrest his footsteps, and hold him prisoner in the name of liberty and the Constitution..."

Basically Davis complaint of the future under a Republican Government would be the total loss of states rights and submission to a powerful Federal Government at this point had never been known in the United States. The protection of slavery was one of the issues, but this fear also covered taxes, economics, sectional favoritism, trade, grants, judicial rulings, civil rights, territory control, etc. A Federal Government powered and controlled by Northern capitalist bent on the control of the agrarian South by judicial interpetation and modifying the U.S. Constitution not following the U.S. Constitution as written.

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David Upton