ely Mr. Toombs's language,--"we will meet you on the border with
the bayonet. Society cannot be kept together, unless men will keep their
compacts."

This was said without the intonation of fierceness or malignity, but
with great decision and the vigor of high spirit.

It was taking, of course, with considerable emphasis, a side in a
famous Constitutional question, familiar to all readers of American
Congressional Debates, once supported by Mr. Calhoun, and rather
strangely, too, with that philosophical leader, confusing the absurdly
asserted State right of seceding at will with the undoubted right,
when there exists no peaceful remedy, of seceding from intolerable
oppression: an entire position which Mr. Webster especially, and
subsequent statesmen, in arguments elucidating the nature and powers of
the General Government, to say nothing of the respect due to a moral
sentiment concerning slavery, which, permeating more than a majority
of the people, has the force, when properly expressed, wherever the
Constitution has jurisdiction, of supreme law, are thought by most men,
once and forever, to have satisfactorily answered. It was a complaint,
certainly, which the South had had ever since the Constitution was
formed, and which could with no plausibility be brought forward as a
justification of war, while there existed a Constitutional tribunal for
adjusting difficulties of Constitutional interpretation. Yet, as it
was almost universally asserted, of course, by the Northern partisan
presses, and by Northern Congressmen, that the Rebellion was utterly
causeless, and as the writer was therefore exceedingly anxious to
obtain, concerning their grievances, the latest opinions of the Southern
leaders, as stated by themselves, he ventured to propose, in a pause of
Mr. Toombs's somewhat rapid rhetoric, a question which, at that moment,
seemed of central importance to the candid philosophical inquirer into
the moving forces of the times:--

"Are we, then, Sir, to consider Mr. Calhoun's old complaint--the
non-recognition of slave-property under the Federal Constitution--as
constituting now the _chief grievance_ of the South?"

"Undoubtedly," was Mr. Toombs's instant reply, "_it all turns on that.
What you tax you must protect_."

This is the very strongest argument of the Southern side. But the
alleged slave-property is protected, though only under municipal law, by
the Constitution. To protect it elsewhere is against its whole