"The idea has been shadowed forth in the South by Mr. Ruffin; has been taken up and recommended in the Advertiser under the name of 'League of United Southerners,' who, keeping up their old relations on all other questions, will hold the Southern issues paramount, and influence parties, legislatures and statesmen. I have no time to enlarge, but to suggest merely. "In haste, yours, etc. "W. L. YANCEY. "To JAMES S. SLAUGHTER." At Jackson, Mississippi, in the fall of the same year (1858) just after the great Debate between Douglas and Lincoln had closed, Jefferson Davis had already raised the standard of Revolution, Secession and Disunion, during the course of a speech, in which he said: "If an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States, you will have presented to you the question of whether you will permit the Government to pass into the hands of your avowed and implacable enemies? Without pausing for an answer, I will state my own position to be, that such a result would be a species of revolution by which the purposes of the Government would be destroyed, and the observance of its mere forms entitled to no respect. In that event, in such a manner as should be most expedient, I should deem it your duty to provide for your safety, outside of the Union with those who have already shown the will, and would have acquired the power to deprive you of your birthright, and to reduce you to worse than the Colonial dependence of your fathers." The "birthright" thus referred to was of course, the alleged right to have Slaves; but what was this "worse than Colonial dependence" to which, in addition to the peril supposed to threaten the Southern "birthright," the Cotton States of Mississippi were reduced? "Dependence" upon whom, and with regard to what? Plainly upon the North; and with regard, not to Slavery alone--for Jefferson Davis held, down to the very close of the War, that the South fought "not for Slavery"--but as to Tariff Legislation also. There was the rub! These Cotton Lords believed, or pretended to believe, that the High Tariff Legislation, advocated and insisted upon both by the Whigs and Republicans for the Protection of the American Manufacturer and working man, built up and made prosperous the North, and elevated Northern laborers; at the expense of the South, and especially themselves, the Cotton Lords aforesaid. We have already seen from the utterances of leading men in the South Carolina, Secession Convention, "that"--as Governor Hicks, himself a Southern man, said in his address to the people of Maryland, after the War broke out "neither the election of Mr. Lincoln, nor the non-execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, nor both combined, constitute their grievances. They declare that THE REAL CAUSE of their discontent DATES AS FAR BACK AS 1833."