He went so far as to say a mysterious Providence had brought together two races from different portions of the globe and placed them together in equal numbers in the southern portion of the Union. To which Clay forcibly replied, “to call a generation of slave-hunting pirates (who brought the negroes to this country) a mysterious Providence, was an insult to the Supreme Being.”[96] [96] Oliver Dyer’s _Great Senators_, pp. 183, 184. Calhoun and many of the leaders and politicians of the cotton-raising States saw that they were losing their relative importance in population and wealth; they believed that, with free trade bringing to them everything they consumed at a lower price, their products and profits would be increased. South Carolina with Calhoun as the master spirit was the leader in this matter; the existing protective tariff bearing hardly on the plantation States was in their opinion the great hindrance to their prosperity. It was not difficult for them to come to the conclusion it was a tyrannical and palpable violation of the Constitution. Seeing that they could not bring the majority in Congress to their belief, the South Carolinian politicians revived and developed the doctrine of the Kentucky resolutions of the sovereignty of each State, and of its right as a sovereign to judge of the constitutionality of an act of the United States. A convention of the people of the State was called, and under the claimed right of sovereignty the convention, on the 24th of November, 1832, passed an ordinance in which it was declared the tariff laws of the United States were null and void, and that no duties imposed by the United States should be collected after the first of February, A. D. 1833. The convention further declared that they would resist any acts of the United States to collect its duties or to coerce the State into paying them, and that such acts of the United States would absolve the people of the State from any political connection with the people of the other States, and that the State would organize as a sovereign independent government. Thus South Carolina, more than forty years after the adoption of the Constitution, was the first State that assumed to act as a distinct sovereign power. To such a degree did the confidence of the State in its own prowess and a spirit of rash defiance of the United States exist, that upon Governor Haynes’ return to Charleston from the State Capital, the horses were taken from his carriage and the citizens dragged him in triumph through the streets.