anything enhancing the price of those things which the agriculturists had to buy would be injurious to the planter, and that, therefore, a protective tariff raising the prices of manufactured goods must be rejected as hostile to the interests of the South.
This was a tangible and consistent policy. The spirit animating it early found an opportunity for asserting itself by a partisan demonstration in the extreme position taken by President Adams in his first official utterances concerning the necessary functions of the national government. These utterances, which gave the Jackson men a welcome occasion for raising against Adams the cry of Federalism, startled many old Republicans of the Jeffersonian school. This was especially the case in the South. The reason was not that the North had been less attached than the South to the cause of local self-government. On the contrary, home rule in its democratic form was more perfectly developed and more heartily cherished in New England, with her town-meeting system, than in the South, where not only a large part of the population, the negroes, were absolutely excluded from all participation in self-government, but where the aristocratic class of slave-holders enjoyed immense advantages of political influence over the rest of the whites. But in New England, and in the North generally, local self-government was felt to be perfectly compatible with a vigorous national authority, while at the South there was constant
