mmonwealth of Massachusetts was of the same order as his pride in the
city of Boston; both were largely pride in the part which Boston and
Massachusetts had taken in making the United States of America. Such a
man knew well that South Carolina had once threatened secession, but, for
that matter, the so-called Federalists of New England had once threatened
it. The argument of Webster in the case of South Carolina was a classic,
and was taken as conclusive on the question of legal right. The terser
and more resonant declaration of President Jackson, a Southerner, and the
response to it which thrilled all States, South or North, outside South
Carolina, had set the seal to Webster's doctrines. There had been loud
and ominous talk of secession lately; it was certainly not mere bluster;
Northerners in the main were cautious politicians and had been tempted to
go far to conciliate it. But if the claim of Southern States were put in
practice, the whole North would now regard it not as a respectable claim,
but as an outrage.

It is important to notice that the disposition to take this view did not
depend upon advanced opinions against slavery. Some of the most violent
opponents of slavery would care relatively little about the Constitution
or the Union; they would at first hesitate as to whether a peaceful
separation between States which felt so differently on a moral question
like slavery was not a more Christian solution of their difference than a
fratricidal war. On the other hand, men who cared little about slavery,
and would gladly have sacrificed any convictions they had upon that
matter for the sake of the Union, were at first none the less vehement in
their anger at an attack upon the Union. There is, moreover, a more
subtle but still important point to be observed in this connection.
Democrats in the North inclined as a party to stringent and perhaps
pedantically legal views of State rights as against the rights of the
Union; but this by no means necessarily meant that they sympathised more
than Republicans with the claim to dissolve the Union. They laid
emphasis on State rights merely because they believed that these would be
a bulwark against any sort of government tyranny, and that the large
power which was reserved to the local or provincial authorities of the
States made the government of the nation as a whole more truly expressive
of the will of the whole people. They now found themselves entangled (as
we