exceptions are the prohibitions (1) of the payment of bounties,
(2) of the levying of duties to promote any one form of industry,
and (3) of appropriations for internal improvements. Here was a
monument to the battle over these matters in the Federal
Congress. As to the mechanism of the new Government it was the
same as the old except for a few changes of detail. The
presidential term was lengthened to six years and the President
was forbidden to succeed himself. The President was given the
power to veto items in appropriation bills. The African
slave-trade was prohibited.

The upper South was thus placed in a painful situation. Its
sympathies were with the seceding States. Most of its people felt
also that if coercion was attempted, the issue would become for
Virginia and North Carolina, no less than for South Carolina and
Alabama, simply a matter of self-preservation. As early as
January, in the exciting days when Floyd's resignation was being
interpreted as a call to arms, the Virginia Legislature had
resolved that it would not consent to the coercion of a seceding
State. In May the Speaker of the North Carolina Legislature
assured a commissioner from Georgia that North Carolina would
never consent to the movement of troops "from or across" the
State to attack a seceding State. But neither Virginia nor North
Carolina in this second stage of the movement wanted to secede.
They wanted to preserve the Union, but along with the Union they
wanted the principle of local autonomy. It was a period of tense
anxiety in those States of the upper South. The frame of mind of
the men who loved the Union but who loved equally their own
States and were firm for local autonomy is summed up in a letter
in which Mrs. Robert E. Lee describes the anguish of her husband