A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle,
moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry
passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation
will mark it deeper and deeper." [Footnote: Jefferson, Writings
(Ford's ed.), X., 157.]
John Quincy Adams relates a contemporaneous conversation with
Calhoun, in which the latter took the ground that, if a dissolution
of the Union should follow, the south would be compelled to form an
alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain, though he
admitted that it would be returning pretty much to the colonial
state. When Adams, with unconscious prophecy of Sherman's march
through Georgia, pressed Calhoun with the question whether the
north, cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, "would fall
back upon its rocks bound hand and foot, to starve, or whether it
would not retain its powers of locomotion to move southward by
land," Calhoun answered that the southern states would find it
necessary to make their communities military.
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