I need not repeat at large the general topics of the honorable
gentleman's speech. When he said yesterday that he did not attack the
Eastern States, he certainly must have forgotten, not only particular
remarks, but the whole drift and tenor of his speech; unless he means
by not attacking, that he did not commence hostilities, but that
another had preceded him in the attack. He, in the first place,
disapproved of the whole course of the government, for forty years, in
regard to its disposition of the public lands; and then, turning
northward and eastward, and fancying he had found a cause for alleged
narrowness and niggardliness in the "accursed policy" of the tariff, to
which he represented the people of New England as wedded, he went on
for a full hour with remarks, the whole scope of which was to exhibit
the results of this policy, in feelings and in measures unfavorable to
the West. I thought his opinions unfounded and erroneous, as to the
general course of the government, and ventured to reply to them.