According to some New England testimony, the work of the British emissaries who had been sent out to divide the Union was uphill at first. Hear the words of Representative Isaac Hill, from New Hampshire, speaking in Congress in 1836: "I have said the people of the North were more united in their opposition to the plans of the advocates of anti-slavery than on any other subject. This opposition is confined to no political party. It pervades every class of the community. They deprecate all interference with the subject of slavery because they believe such interference may involve the existence and welfare of the Union itself, and because they understand the obligations which the non-slaveholding States owe to the slaveholding States by the compact of confederation. It is the strong desire to perpetuate the Union; it is the determination which every patriotic and virtuous citizen has made in no event to abandon the 'ark of our safety' that now impels the united North to take its stand against the agitators of the anti-slavery project. So effectually has the strong public sentiment put down that agitation in New England that it is now kept alive only by the power of money which the agitators have collected and apply in the hiring of agents and in the issue from presses that are kept in their employ. "The anti-slavery movement which brings in petitions from various parts of the country, asking Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, originates with a few persons who have been in the habit of making charitable religious institutions subservient to political purposes, and who have even controlled some of those charitable associations. "Many of the clergymen who have been the instruments of the agitators have been such from no bad motive. Some of them, discovering the purpose of the agitators, discovering that their labors were calculated to make the condition of the slave worse, and to create animosity between the people of the North and the South, have paused in their course and desisted from the further application of a mistaken philanthropy."