Yet as extreme as the above is, it is quite probable that the extravagance and injustice of the declaration against slavery in the Southern States, had exasperated those supporting it to utterances as extravagant. In the opening of the year 1850 a resolution of the Legislature of Vermont was introduced in Congress which recited: “That slavery is a crime against humanity, and a sore evil in the body politic, that was excused by the framers of the Federal Constitution as a crime entailed upon the country by their predecessors, and tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.”[76] How Southern men must have felt this it is almost impossible for us to appreciate today. It was not only an indictment of the South at a bar where there was no provision for a trial; but it ended in a hypocritical falsehood; for slavery had not been, “tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.” Existing in every State except Massachusetts, the question whether the existing condition could be affected by permission to increase the slaves for a period by importation was committed with the clauses relating to taxes on exports and to a Navigation Act, that these things might “form a bargain between the Northern and Southern States.” This motion by Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, was adopted by the vote of seven of the eleven States in Convention, against three opposing and one abstaining from voting, one of the delegates whereof seconded the motion of Pinckney to increase the period permitting importation, which he with one of the opponents of commitment voted for; so that actually slavery, with the right to increase it by the Slave Trade, was voted for by nine out of eleven States participating. The Vermont resolution accomplished nothing; but to no individual in Congress could it have inflicted such a wound as it dealt to Calhoun. To him resolutions were of enormous importance, and yet he never seemed quite ready to follow them up with acts. He was at last in the grasp of that power which overcomes all things except God. Twelve years had elapsed since he had been called upon to decide between the policy of Hayne, based upon the effort to bind together in close commercial intercourse the leading Western and Southern States, by a railroad from Ohio to South Carolina, and the resolution of Rhett, to amend the Constitution or dissolve the Union. To neither could he agree. For Hayne’s connection with Ohio through North Carolina, he substituted a connection with Arkansas through Georgia. To the warning of his closest intimate that it was “better to part peaceably than to live in the state of indecision we do,” he could only reply with the vague allusion to: “The many bleeding pores which must be taken up in passing the knife through a body politic, in order to make two of one, which had been so long bound together by so many ties, political, social and commercial.”[77]