Did these narrow fanatics stop here?  No: they hung Mary Dyer simply because she was a Quaker, and she died upon the gallows because she held a faith different from a people who they said, had devoted themselves a sacrifice on the altar of religious liberty.

When we see men exiling and hanging good, pure women because they will not conform to their ideas of religion, we do not believe that the guiding star of returning light of medieval ages has ever shone in their self-sanctified hearts. We know that in all nations where men respect women, you find gentlemen; and where gentlemen inhabit, woman rules and lifts him above his groveling nature. He in return is her slave, and with life and limb, fortune and honor, he is devoted to her wishes.

Oh, how different when you see a horde of whining New Englanders pelting and driving out a shivering and helpless woman into exile, and another one swung up by the neck until dead, all because they differed in religious faith from men and women who were run out of England for conscience sake.

We have already alluded to the Catholics having settled in Maryland and establishing perfect freedom of speech, but in 1676 some few Puritans emigrated there and were soon elected to office, and among the first of their edicts was one prohibiting public worship to Papists and Prelates.

Many of the men who signed the Constitution soon discovered that the people were not inclined to dwell together in national harmony.

George Washington sincerely desired a perpetuation of the Union, but he died in the belief that in the course of time his tomb would be the property of the South.

John Adams, next to Alexander Hamilton, was perhaps the most influential man in the Federal party. He early had a clear vision of the great rupture that would some day come.

The following from Thomas Jefferson's diary, Dec. 30, 1801, when he was president in 1801, presenting the views of Mr. John Adams, shows what the sectional feeling was at that time: "The Rev. Mr. Coffin of New England, who is now here soliciting donations for a college in Greene County, Tennessee, tells me, that when he first determined to engage in this enterprise, he wrote a paper recommending the enterprise, which he meant to get signed by clergymen, and a similar one by persons in a civil character, at the head of which he wished Mr. Adams to put his name, he then being president."

The application asking only for his name and not for a donation, Mr. Adams reading the paper and considering it, said, "He saw no possibility of continuing the union of the states, that their dissolution must necessarily take place, that he therefore saw no propriety in recommending to New England men to promote a literary institution in the South, that it was in fact, giving strength to those who were to be their enemies, and therefore he would have nothing to do with it".

The above according to the diary, was the language of a man who had taken a solemn oath to be the president of all the people. Now as Mr. Adams had proven himself not the president of the whole people, let us go into some historical facts. At the time of the first confederation, 1778, the amount of territory that the Southern States owned was.647202 square miles, and the amount owned by the Northern States 164081 square miles. In 1783, Virginia ceded to the United States for the common benefit, all of her immense territory north of the Ohio River; and in 1787, the Northern States appropriated it to their exclusive use, whereby Virginia and her sister southern States were excluded from using any part of this magnificent gift in the interest of the Negro property they had bought from the New Englander .

When the Louisiana purchase was consummated in 1803, 1,189,112 square miles of territory was added to our domain, every foot of which was, at that time, Slave holding territory, but by the passage of the Missouri Compromise Bill in 1821, 964,667 square miles of this purchase was converted into free territory.

Although the Northern States opposed bitterly the Louisiana purchase, they came in and gobbled all of it for free territory except 224,445 square miles.

Again, with the treaty with Spain in Feb. 1819, Florida, with a territory of 59,268 square miles, and Oregon with an area of 341,463 square miles was added to the American Union. Of this vast amount of new territory, Florida alone was allowed to be slave territory, about one seventh. Again, by the Mexican Cession the United States acquired 526,078 square miles of territory, and the North tried to appropriate the Whole of it under the pretense of the Mexican laws, which was prevented by the compromise of 1850, and this cut off from Texas 44,662 square miles of slave territory.

Now of all this territory that has been added, which amounts to 2,402,602 square miles, the South was only permitted to enjoy 283, 713 square miles of this immense tract of country, when every foot of it was brought into the American Union while southern men were presidents.