feared as
likely to become injurious in any sense to the inhabitants of the
States. Each State fell quietly and harmoniously into its true
subordinate orbit, acknowledging gladly and without question the
supremacy of the new Government, representative of the whole of the
people, in simple accord with the spirit and intention of the
Constitution and the Government which the people had formed. At the
South, on the contrary, the United States Government was, from the
first, looked upon with a suspicion plainly expressed in the speech, for
example, of Patrick Henry, in the Virginia convention, which consented
reluctantly that the State should come into the Union, lest the National
Government might, in some unforeseen contingency, interfere with the
interests of the institution of slavery. That fear, the determination to
have it otherwise, to make the General Government, on the contrary, the
engine and supporter of slavery, the propagandist of slavery, in fine;
has been always, since, the animating spirit of Southern political
doctrine. A doctrine so inaugurated and developed has endeavored to
engraft itself by partisan alliance upon the Democratic party of the
North, but always hitherto with an imperfect success. State Rights, as
affirmed at the North, has never been a dogma of any considerable power,
because it has rested on no substratum of suspicion against the General
Government, nor of conspiracy to employ its enginery for special or
local designs. At the South it has been vital and significant from the
first, and it has grown more mischievous to the last. President Lincoln,
in his first message, discussed, ably enough, the right of secession as
a mere constitutional or legal right. Others have done the same before
and since. The opinion of the lawyer is all very well, but it has no
special potency to restrain the nocturnal activities of the burglar. All
such discussions are, for the present behalf, utterly puerile.
Secession, revolution, the bloody destruction and extinction of the
whole nation, were for years before the war foregone determinations in
the Southern mind, to be resorted to at any instant at which such
extreme measures might become necessary; not merely to prevent any
interference with the holy institution; but equally to secure that
absolute predominance of the slaveholding interest over the whole
political concerns of the country which should protect it from
interference, and give to it all the expansio