First of all, let it be noted that his objections did not spring from any hostility to the union of the thirteen States, or from any preference for a separate union of the Southern States. Undoubtedly there had been a time, especially under the provocations connected with the Mississippi business, when he and many other Southern statesmen sincerely thought that there might be no security for their interests even under the Confederation, and that this lack of security would be even more glaring and disastrous under the new Constitution. Such, for example, seems to have been the opinion of Governor Benjamin Harrison, as late as October the 4th, 1787, on which date he thus wrote to Washington: "I cannot divest myself of an opinion that ... if the Constitution is carried into effect, the States south of the Potomac will be little more than appendages to those to the northward of it."[378] It is very probable that this sentence accurately reflects, likewise, Patrick Henry's mood of thought at that time. Nevertheless, whatever may have been his thought under the sectional suspicions and alarms of the preceding months, it is certain that, at the date of the Virginia convention, he had come to see that the thirteen States must, by all means, try to keep together. "I am persuaded," said he, in reply to Randolph, "of what the honorable gentleman says, 'that separate confederacies will ruin us.'" "Sir," he exclaimed on another occasion, "the dissolution of the Union is most abhorrent to my mind. The first thing I have at heart is American liberty; the second thing is American union." Again he protested: "I mean not to breathe the spirit, nor utter the language, of secession."[379] In the second place, he admitted that there were great defects in the old Confederation, and that those defects ought to be cured by proper amendments, particularly in the direction of greater strength to the federal government. But did the proposed Constitution embody such amendments? On the contrary, that Constitution, instead of properly amending the old Confederation, simply annihilated it, and replaced it by something radically different and radically dangerous.