upheld separate state independence, and the new one which
virtually acknowledged Southern nationality. The issue at stake
was the acceptance or the rejection of a compromise which could
bring no permanent settlement of fundamental differences.

Nowhere was the battle more interesting than in South Carolina,
for it brought into clear light that powerful Southern leader who
ten years later was to be the masterspirit of secession--Robert
Barnwell Rhett. In 1851 he fought hard to revive the older idea
of state independence and to carry South Carolina as a separate
state out of the Union. Accordingly it is significant of the
progress that the consolidation of the South had made at this
date that on this issue Rhett encountered general opposition.
This difference of opinion as to policy was not inspired, as some
historians have too hastily concluded, by national feeling.
Scarcely any of the leaders of the opposition considered the
Federal Government supreme over the State Government. They
opposed Rhett because they felt secession to be at that moment
bad policy. They saw that, if South Carolina went out of the
Union in 1851, she would go alone and the solidarity of the South
would be broken. They were not lacking in sectional patriotism,
but their conception of the best solution of the complex problem
differed from that advocated by Rhett. Their position was summed
up by Langdon Cheves when he said, "To secede now is to secede
from the South as well as from the Union." On the basis of this
belief they defeated Rhett and put off secession for ten years.

There is no analogous single event in the history of the North,
previous to the war, which reveals with similar clearness a
sectional consciousness. On the surface the life of the people