The opening of Postscript
My apology for adding a postscript, to a discussion already perhaps too protracted, is the fact that the preceding sheets were in the hands of the printer, and all but the concluding pages had gone through the press, before the passage of Mr. Calhoun's late resolutions in the Senate of the United States. A proceeding so extraordinary,--if indeed henceforward any act of Congress in derogation of freedom and in deference to slavery, can be deemed extraordinary,--should not be passed in silence at such a crisis as the present; especially as the passage of one of the resolutions by a vote of 36 to 9, exhibits a shift of position on the part of the South, as sudden as it is unaccountable, being nothing less than the surrender of a fortress which until then, they had defended with the pertinacity of a blind and almost infuriated fatuity.