to the mechanism of the new Government it was
the same as the old except for a few changes of detail. The
presidential term was lengthened to six years and the
President was forbidden to succeed himself. The President
was given the power to veto items in appropriation bills.
The African slave-trade was prohibited.

The upper South was thus placed in a painful situation. Its sympathies
were with the seceding States. Most of its people felt also that if
coercion was attempted, the issue would become for Virginia and North
Carolina, no less than for South Carolina and Alabama, simply a matter
of self-preservation. As early as January, in the exciting days when
Floyd's resignation was being interpreted as a call to arms, the
Virginia Legislature had resolved that it would not consent to the
coercion of a seceding State. In May the Speaker of the North Carolina
Legislature assured a commissioner from Georgia that North Carolina
would never consent to the movement of troops "from or across" the State
to attack a seceding State. But neither Virginia nor North Carolina
in this second stage of the movement wanted to secede. They wanted to
preserve the Union, but along with the Union they wanted the principle
of local autonomy. It was a period of tense anxiety in those States of
the upper South. The frame of mind of the men who loved the Union but
who loved equally their own States and were firm for local autonomy is
summed up in a letter in which Mrs. Robert E. Lee describes the anguish
of her husband as he confronted the possibility of a divided country.

The real tragedy of the time lay in the failure of the advocates of
these two great principles--each so necessary to a far-flung democratic
country in a world of great powers!--the failure to coordinate them
so as to insure freedom at home and strength abroad. The principle for
which Lincoln stood has saved Americans in the Great War from playing
such a trembling part as that of Holland. The principle which seemed
to Lee even more essential, which did not perish at Appomattox but
was transformed and not destroyed, is what has kept us from becoming a
western Prussia. And yet if only it had been possible to coordinate the
two without the price of war! It was not possible because of the stored
up bitterness of a quarter century of recrimination. But Virginia made
a last desperate attempt to preserve the Union by calling the Peace
Convention. It assembl