e conception of an established historic government, one
which could not be overthrown except through the nihilistic process
of revolution. So much has been written upon the exact location of
sovereignty in the American federal State that it is difficult to escape
the legalistic attitude, and to treat the matter purely as history. So
various, so conflicting, and at times so tenuous, are the theories,
that a flippant person might be forgiven did he turn from the whole
discussion saying impatiently it was blind man's buff. But on one thing,
at least, we must all agree. Once there was a king over this country,
and now there is no king. Once the British Crown was the sovereign, and
now the Crown has receded into the distance beyond the deep blue sea.
When the Crown renounced its sovereignty in America, what became of it?
Did it break into fragments and pass peacemeal to the various revolted
colonies? Was it transferred somehow to the group collectively? These
are the obvious theories; but there are others. And the others give
rise to subtler speculations. Who was it that did the actual revolting
against the Crown--colonies, parties, individuals, the whole American
people, who?

Troublesome questions these, with which Lincoln and the men of his time
did not deal in the spirit of historical science. Their wishes fathered
their thoughts. Southerners, practically without exception, held
the theory of the disintegration of the Crown's prerogative, its
distribution among the States. The great leaders of Northern thought
repudiated the idea. Webster and Clay would have none of it. But
their own theories were not always consistent; and they differed
among themselves. Lincoln did the natural thing. He fastened upon the
tendencies in Northern thought that supported his own faith. Chief among
these was the idea that sovereignty passed to the general congregation
of the inhabitants of the colonies--"we, the people"--because we, the
people, were the real power that supported the revolt. He had accepted
the idea that the American Revolution was an uprising of the people,
that its victory was in a transfer of sovereign rights from an English
Crown to an American nation; that a new collective state, the Union, was
created by this nation as the first act of the struggle, and that it was
to the Union that the Crown succumbed, to the Union that its prerogative
passed. To put this idea in its boldest and its simplest terms was the
crowning effo