Enactment of the Wilmot Proviso would yield ten new free states, warned James Hammond of South Carolina. The North would then “ride over us rough shod” in Congress, “proclaim freedom or something equivalent to it to our slaves and reduce us to the condition of Hayti. . . . Our only safety is in equality of POWER. If we do not act now, we deliberately consign our children, not our posterity, but our children to the flames.”
