The report concluded:
"Should such be your decision, by refusing to pass this bill, I shall say to the people of the South, look to yourselves.
"But I must tell the Senate, be your decision what it may, the South will never abandon the principles of this bill. . . . We have a remedy in our own hands."
Clay, Webster, Benton, and others ably and effectually combated both the report and the bill, and the latter failed (25 to 19) in the Senate.
Besides denying the doctrine of the report, they showed the evil was not in mailing, but in taking from the mails and circulating by their own citizens the supposed objectionable publications.
Benton, himself a slaveholder, then and in subsequent years assailed and pronounced the doctrine of this report as the "birth of disunion." He has also shown that Calhoun delighted over the agitation of slavery more than he deprecated it; that he profoundly hoped that on the slavery question the South would be united and a Slave-Confederacy formed.(50)
In support of this Mr. Benton quotes from a letter of Mr. Calhoun to a gentleman in Alabama (1847) in which he says:
"I am much gratified with the tone and views of your letter, and concur entirely in the opinion you express, that instead of shunning, we ought to court the issue with the North on the slavery question. I would even go one step further and add that it is our duty to force the issue on the North. We are now stronger relatively than we shall be hereafter, politically and morally. Unless we bring on the issue, delay to us will be dangerous indeed. . . . Something of the kind was indispensable to the South. On the contrary, if we should not meet it as we ought, I fear, greatly fear, our doom will be fixed."(51)
Comment is unnecessary, but the letter, almost exultantly, mentions as fortunate that the Wilmot Proviso was offered, as it gave an opportunity to unite the South.
It proceeds: