effect that the country
would in time be "all free." The only logical deduction was that he, and
the Republican party which had agreed with him sufficiently to make him
president, believed that the South had no lawful recourse by which this
result, however unwelcome or ruinous, could in the long run and the
fullness of time be escaped. Under such circumstances Southern political
leaders now decided that the time for separation had come. In speaking
of their scheme they called it "secession," and said that secession was
a lawful act because the Constitution was a compact revocable by any of
the parties. They might have called it "revolution,"[130] and have
defended it upon the general right of any large body of people,
dissatisfied with the government under which they find themselves, to
cast it off. But, if the step was _revolution_, then the burden of proof
was upon them; whereas they said that _secession_ was their lawful
right, without any regard whatsoever to the motive which induced them to
exercise it.[131] Such was the character of the issue between the North
and the South prior to the first ordinance of secession. The action of
South Carolina, followed by the other Gulf States, at once changed that
issue, shifting it from pro-slavery versus anti-slavery to union versus
disunion. This alteration quickly compelled great numbers of men, both
at the North and at the South, to reconsider and, upon a new issue, to
place themselves also anew.

It has been said by all writers that in the seven seceding States there
was, in the four months following the election, a very large proportion
of "Union men." The name only signified that these men did not think
that the present inducements to disunion were sufficient to render it a
wise measure. It did not signify that they thought disunion unlawful,
unconstitutional, and treasonable. When, however, state conventions
decided the question of advisability against their opinions, and they
had to choose between allegiance to the State and allegiance to the
Union, they immediately adhered to the State, and this none the less
because they feared that she had taken an ill-advised step. That is to
say, at the South a "Union man" _wished_ to preserve the Union, whereas
at the North a "Union man" recognized a supreme _obligation_ to do so.

While the South, by political alchemy, was becoming solidified and
homogeneous, a corresponding change was going on at the North. In that
section t