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Besides, if we acknowledge that the national debt
was created, not to hold the States in the Union, as the taxpayers were
led to suppose, but to expel them from it and hand them over to be
governed by negroes, the moral duty to pay it may seem much less clear.
I say it may _seem_ so, for I do not admit that this or any other
argument in favor of repudiation can be entertained as sound; but
its influence on some classes of minds may well be apprehended. The
financial honor of a great commercial nation, largely indebted and with
a republican form of government administered by agents of the popular
choice, is a thing of such delicate texture and the destruction of it
would be followed by such unspeakable calamity that every true patriot
must desire to avoid whatever might expose it to the slightest danger.
The great interests of the country require immediate relief from these
enactments. Business in the South is paralyzed by a sense of general
insecurity, by the terror of confiscation, and the dread of negro
supremacy.


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