He believed that it was regionalism, not differing sizes of states, that most threatened the future of the Union. “The great division of interests in the U. States,” he said, according to his notes, “did not lie between the large & small states; It lay between the Northern & Southern.”23 In the long term he was right, unfortunately. But the solutions the conventioneers devised to placate the South and keep it part of the country, especially giving constitutional protections to the institution of slavery, would seven decades later lead the nation to civil war.
