e
conviction that the South did not mean what it said, that Webster, had
he dared offend the South, could have saved the day--from their point of
view--without making concessions. Professor Foster, always ready to do
scrupulous justice, points out the dense ignorance in each section of
the other, and there lets the matter rest. But what shall we say of a
frame of mind, which in that moment of crisis, either did not read the
Southern newspapers, or reading them and finding that the whole South
was netted over by a systematically organized secession propaganda made
no attempt to gauge its strength, scoffed at it all as buncombe! Even
later historians have done the same thing. In too many cases they have
assumed that because the compromise was followed by an apparent collapse
of the secession propaganda, the propaganda all along was without
reality. We know today that the propaganda did not collapse. For
strategic reasons it changed its policy. But it went on steadily growing
and gaining ground until it triumphed in 1861. Webster, not his foolish
opponents, gauged its strength correctly in 1850.

The clew to what actually happened in 1850 lies in the course of such an
ardent Southerner as, for example, Langdon Cheeves. Early in the year,
he was a leading secessionist, but at the close of the year a leading
anti-secessionist. His change of front, forced upon him by his own
thinking about the situation was a bitter disappointment to himself.
What animated him was a deep desire to take the whole South out of the
Union. When, at the opening of the year, the North seemed unwilling to
compromise, he, and many another, thought their time had come. At the
first Nashville Convention he advised a general secession, assuming that
Virginia, "our premier state," would lead the movement and when Virginia
later in the year swung over from secession to anti-secession, Cheeves
reluctantly changed his policy. The compromise had not altered his
views--broadly speaking it had not satisfied the Lower South--but it had
done something still more eventful, it had so affected the Upper South
that a united secession became for a while impossible. Therefore,
Cheeves and all like him--and they were the determining factor of the
hour--resolved to bide their time, to wait until their propaganda had
done its work, until the entire South should agree to go out together.
Their argument, all preserved in print, but ignored by historians for
sixty years the