The petitioners were citizens of Pennsylvania and Delaware, but they constituted only a small fraction of the people of those states and unquestionably their proposal, if put to a vote in Pennsylvania and Delaware, would have been buried under a mountainous majority of adverse ballots. Yet the petitioners deliberately assumed to be and to speak for "the inhabitants" of those states, and their petition was undoubtedly accepted at the South as representing popular opinion in the region whence it came, if not indeed in the entire North. It was the mischief of such things that, while they were the work of a fanatical few, they managed to pass themselves off as utterances representative of public sentiment in the quarter from which they emanated. The petition was as follows: We, the undersigned, inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Delaware, believing that the Federal Constitution, in pledging the strength of the whole nation to support slavery, violates the Divine Law, makes war upon human rights, and is grossly inconsistent with republican principles; that its attempt to unite freedom and slavery in our body politic has brought upon the country great and manifold evils, and has fully proved that no such union can exist but by the sacrifice of freedom and the supremacy of slavery, respectfully ask you to _devise and propose, without delay, some plan for the immediate, peaceful dissolution of the American Union_. Daniel Webster fitly exposed the character and significance of this petition by moving that it be prefaced with a preamble as follows: Whereas, at the commencement of the session, you and each of you took your solemn oaths, in the presence of God and on the Holy Evangelists, that you would support the Constitution of the United States; now, therefore, we pray you to take immediate steps to break up the Union, and overthrow the Constitution of the United States as soon as you can. So repulsive was this proposal of disunion that only three senators voted even to receive the petition embodying it and in the House a like refusal was made. But those three senators were Mr. Seward, of New York, Mr. Chase of Ohio, and Mr. Hale of New Hampshire--three great leaders of Northern thought who were destined soon to become three men of dominant influence in the new party of Free-soil and leaders in antagonism to the Southern claim to a share in the new territories. There might have been a score of other votes for the petition which would have had far less significance. The votes of these three senators meant clearly that the Free-soil party looked upon disunion just as the extreme pro-slavery men of the South did, as a legitimate and always available remedy for existing ills or a prophylactic against evils anticipated. As early as 1847 Mr. Calhoun had set forth the Southern contention with regard to the territories in a series of carefully worded resolutions which read as follows: