not to cure the disease, but merely to allay its
symptoms. They would not admit that slavery was a disease; and in the
end this habit of systematic drifting and shirking on the part of
moderate and sensible men threw the national responsibility upon
Abolitionist extremists, in whose hands the issue took such a distorted
emphasis that gradually a peaceable preservation of American national
integrity became impossible.

The problem of slavery was admirably designed to bring out the confusion
of ideas and the inconsistency resident in the traditional American
political system. The groundwork of that system consisted, as we have
seen, in the alliance between democracy, as formulated in the
Jeffersonian creed, and American nationality, as embodied in the
Constitutional Union; and the two dominant political parties of the
Middle Period, the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats, both believed in
the necessity of such an alliance. But negro slavery, just in so far as
it became an issue, tended to make the alliance precarious. The national
organization embodied in the Constitution authorized not only the
existence of negro slavery, but its indefinite expansion. American
democracy, on the other hand, as embodied in the Declaration of
Independence and in the spirit and letter of the Jeffersonian creed, was
hostile from certain points of view to the institution of negro slavery.
Loyalty to the Constitution meant disloyalty to democracy, and an active
interest in the triumph of democracy seemed to bring with it the
condemnation of the Constitution. What, then, was a good American to do
who was at once a convinced democrat and a loyal Unionist?

The ordinary answer to this question was, of course, expressed in the
behavior of public opinion during the Middle Period. The thing to do was
to shut your eyes to the inconsistency, denounce anybody who insisted on
it as unpatriotic, and then hold on tight to both horns of the dilemma.
Men of high intelligence, who really loved their country, and believed
in the democratic idea, persisted in this attitude, whose ablest and
most distinguished representative was Daniel Webster. He is usually
considered as the most eloquent and effective expositor of American
nationalism who played an important part during the Middle Period; and
unquestionably he came nearer to thinking nationally than did any
American statesman of his generation. He defended the Union against the
Nullifiers as decisively in on