[53] The following extract, from the _Charleston Mercury_, shows the feeling of the South. "Pursuant to a call, a meeting of the citizens of Orangeburg District was held to-day, 6th November, in the court-house, which was well filled on the occasion.... Gen. D. F. Jamison then rose, and moved the appointment of a committee of twenty-five, to take into consideration the continued agitation by Congress of the question of slavery;... the committee, through their chairman, Gen. Jamison, made the following report:-- "The time has arrived when the slaveholding States of the confederacy must take decided action upon the continued attacks of the North against their domestic institutions, or submit in silence to that humiliating position in the opinions of mankind, that longer acquiescence must inevitably reduce them to.... The agitation of the subject of slavery commenced in the fanatical murmurings of a few scattered abolitionists, to whom it was a long time confined; but now it has swelled into a torrent of popular opinion at the North; it has invaded the fireside and the church, the press and the halls of legislation; it has seized upon the deliberations of Congress, and at this moment is sapping the foundations, and about to overthrow the fairest political structure that the ingenuity of man has ever devised. "The overt efforts of abolitionism were confined for a long period to annoying applications to Congress, under color of the pretended right of petition; it has since directed the whole weight of its malign influence against the annexation of Texas, and had wellnigh cost to the country the loss of that important province; but emboldened by success and the inaction of the South, in an unjust and selfish spirit of national agrarianism it would now appropriate the whole public domain. It might well have been supposed that the undisturbed possession of the whole of Oregon Territory would have satisfied the non-slaveholding States. This they now hold, by the incorporation of the ordinance of 1787 into the bill of the last session for establishing a territorial government for Oregon. That provision, however, was not sustained by them from any apprehension that the territory could ever be settled from the States of the South, but it was intended as a gratuitous insult to the southern people, and a malignant and unjustifiable attack upon the institution of slavery.