differences gradually were concentrated around fundamentally
different conceptions of labor--of slave labor in the South, of
free labor in the North.

Nothing, however, could be more fallacious than the notion that
this growing antagonism was controlled by any deliberate purpose
in either part of the country. It was apparently necessary that
this Republic in its evolution should proceed from confederation
to nationality through an intermediate and apparently reactionary
period of sectionalism. In this stage of American history,
slavery was without doubt one of the prime factors involved, but
sectional consciousness, with all its emotional and psychological
implications, was the fundamental impulse of the stern events
which occurred between 1850 and 1865.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the more influential
Southerners had come generally to regard their section of the
country as a distinct social unit. The next step was inevitable.
The South began to regard itself as a separate political unit.
It is the distinction of Calhoun that he showed himself toward
the end sufficiently flexible to become the exponent of this new
political impulse. With all his earlier fire he encouraged the
Southerners to withdraw from the so-called national parties, Whig
and Democratic, to establish instead a single Southern party, and
to formulate, by means of popular conventions, a single concerted
policy for the entire South.

At that time such a policy was still regarded, from the Southern
point of view, as a radical idea. In 1851, a battle was fought
at the polls between the two Southern ideas--the old one which