"Within their limits, the rights of the slave-holding States are as full to demand of the States within whose limits and jurisdiction their peace is assailed, to adopt the measures necessary to prevent the same, and, if refused or neglected, to resort to means to protect themselves, as if they were separate and independent communities."
Here, perhaps, was the clearest statement yet made, not only of the independence of States from Federal interference and of their right, on their own whim, to break the "compact," but of the right of the slaveholding States to dictate to the other States legislation on the subject of slavery.
It was at once a declaration of independence for the Southern States, and a declaration of their right to hold all the Northern States so far subject to them as to be obliged, on demand, to pass and enforce any prescribed law in the interest of slavery. The South was to be the sole judge of what law on this subject was requisite for slavery's purposes.
No duty was demanded on this question of the Federal Government; and Southern States, according to Calhoun, owed it none where slavery was concerned.
Calhoun and his committee could discover no power in the Southern
States to enforce their demands save to act as separate and
independent communities—that is, by setting up for themselves.
This led logically to disunion, the result intended.
There was much in this report setting forth and professing to believe that it was the purpose of the North to emancipate the slaves, and through the agencies of organized anti-slavery societies bring about slave insurrections. The fanaticism of the North was descanted on, and the character of slavery and its wisdom as a social institution upheld.
He further said:
"He who regards slavery in those States simply under the relation of master and slave, as important as that relation is, viewed merely as a question of property to the slave-holding section of the Union, has a very imperfect conception of the institution, and the impossibility of abolishing it without disasters unexampled in the history of the world. To understand its nature and importance fully, it must be borne in mind that slavery, as it exists in the Southern States, involves not only the relation of master and slave, but also the social and political relation of the two races, of nearly equal numbers, from different quarters of the globe, and the most opposite of all others in every particular that distinguishes one race of men from another."
The whole report was replete with accusations against the North, and full of warning as to what the South would do should its demands not be complied with. The bill brought in by the committee was more remarkable than the report itself, and wholly inconsistent with its doctrine.
The bill provided high penalties for any postmaster who should knowingly receive and put into the mail any publication or picture touching the subject of slavery, to go into any State or Territory in which its circulation was forbidden by state law.