for the indoctrination which the South had received in 1832.

Not alone Calhoun but nearly every other southerner of great influence,
at least from the day of the Missouri Compromise, had been inculcating
the supreme authority of the State as compared with the Union. The
southern States were all large, and, as travelling in or between them
was difficult and little common, they retained far more than those at
the North each its original separateness and peculiarities. Southern
population was more fixed than northern; southern state traditions were
held in far the deeper reverence. In a word, the colonial condition of
things to a great extent persisted in the South down to the very days of
the war. There was every reason why Alabama or North Carolina should,
more than Connecticut, feel like a separate nation.

This intense state consciousness might gradually have subsided but for
the deep prejudices and passions begotten of slavery and of the
opposition it encountered from the North. Their resolution, against
emancipation led Southerners to cherish a view which made it seem
possible for them as a last resort to sever their alliance with the
North. It was this conjunction of influences, linking the slave-holder's
jealousy and pride to a false but natural conception of state
sovereignty, which created in southern men that love of State, intense
and sincere as real patriotism, causing them to look upon northern men,
with their different theory, as foes and foreigners.

A very imposing historical argument could of course have been built up
for the Calhoun theory of the Union. The Union emerged from the
preceding Confederacy without a shock. Most who voted for it were
unaware how radical a change it embodied. The Constitution, one may even
admit, could not have been adopted had it then been understood to
preclude the possibility of secession. Doubtless, too, the gradual
change of view concerning it all over the North, sprung from the
multiplication of social and economic ties between sections and States,
rather than from study of constitutional law. We believe that the
untruth of the central-sovereignty theory in no wise follows from these
admissions, and that its correctness might be made apparent from a
plenitude of considerations.

Champions of the northern side deemed it the less necessary to expatiate
upon this question, since, admitting the South's basal contention, the
right in question depended upon sufficiency of