ct by the General Government.
Nearly every other Northern State passed personal liberty laws which
were designed to prevent the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, and
their constitutional justification was found in the supremacy of the
States and bolstered by the opinion of Judge Story, delivered in
1842,[11] which said that no private citizen need obey an
unconstitutional law, state or national, but he takes the risk of having
the courts decide it constitutional and of being punished if he acts on
his own judgment before the proper court has adjudged the act
unconstitutional.

[Footnote 11: 16 Peters' Reports of the Supreme Court, p. 536.]

It was not unnatural, then, that Charles Sumner should indorse the
abolitionist campaign against the Union, or that Benjamin F. Wade should
eulogize the Wisconsin threats to secede. Richard H. Dana, of Boston,
said that men who had called him a traitor a few years before now
stopped him on the street to talk treason. N. P. Banks, the Speaker of
the House of Representatives, said in Maine: "I am not one of the class
who cry for the perpetuation of the Union." The Worcester convention of
January 15, 1857, did actually and by big majorities pass resolutions
calling for a dissolution of the Federal Government, and its call for a
convention of all the free States, looking to the same end, was signed
by seven hundred men of all walks of life; many of them were men of
eminence. The political abolitionists and the anti-slavery men of
pronounced views were on the point of going over to the Garrison party,
which had always proclaimed that the Union was a "league with hell," and
so strong was the campaign against the Union that Governor Wise, of
Virginia, and others recommended a war upon New England in order to
bring the abolitionists to subjection.

But the darkest hour comes just before dawn. When Buchanan recommended
in the message of December, 1857, the admission of Kansas under the
Lecompton constitution, Senator Douglas, to the bewilderment of
thousands, openly denounced the President, and in the most effective
speech of his life led a secession of the Northwestern Democrats from
the dominant Southern party. He showed that the application of his
popular sovereignty doctrine in Kansas would solve the problem of
slavery in the Territories, and that the Administration was violating
the platform on which it held office in espousing the cause of the
pro-slavery men. It was a remarkabl