It is interesting and instructive to analyze the vote upon this bill. In the House of Representatives the {119} members from the New England section were nearly evenly divided, pro and con. The majority of the New Yorkers voted against it. The Pennsylvanians were nearly balanced. The Marylanders voted for it. The Virginians were against it by a decided majority. The North Carolinians were indifferent. The South Carolinians and Georgians abandoned their high national ground of 1817, and voted unanimously against it. The Representatives from the Northwest went unanimously for it; and those from Kentucky now wheeled into line with them. Lastly, while the Tennesseeans still maintained their attitude of indifference, the members from the Commonwealths south of Tennessee, and west of Georgia, all voted for the bill. In the Senate the majority in favor of the measure was very large. Only the Senators from the Carolinas and Alabama, and one Senator from Missouri, voted against it. There is somewhat more of an appearance of slavery influence in the vote upon this bill than upon the bill of 1817, in that South Carolina showed herself practically a unit against this bill. Still it is probable that this opposition rested upon other grounds. Certainly when we read in the "Annals of Congress," that so stanch a friend of free labor, so eminent a lawyer, and so honorable a man as John W. Taylor, of New York, said of this bill that it was so important in its character, and proposed such a violation of the Constitution, that he felt obliged to call for the yeas and nays upon it, we must concede that other motives may have influenced the statesmen of South Carolina than such as might have sprung from subserviency to the interests of slavery. [Sidenote: The bill in the interests of the West.] If we review the analysis of the vote in the House of Representatives we shall see that the entire {120} West--taking the Appalachian range as the dividing line, for that period, between the East and the West--was for the bill, while the whole East, with the exception of Maryland, which was specially interested in the road, was either against it or indifferent to it. The Eastern Commonwealths had made their roads with Commonwealth money, and did not wish to assist the Western Commonwealths to make theirs by giving them national money with which to do it. The West, on the other hand, was new and comparatively poor, and wanted the nation to help it out of the mud. This is unquestionably the plain statement of the situation from the point of view of interests. The interests of slavery played but little part, if any at all, in the distribution of the vote. [Sidenote: President Monroe's veto, and communication of May 4th, 1822.]