be barren discussions of constitutional law. They point out that the
States--that is, the thirteen original States--preceded the Federal
Union, and voluntarily entered into it under clearly-defined conditions;
that the Federal Government actually derived its powers from the
consent of the States, and could have none which they did not confer
upon it; that the maintenance of slavery in the Southern States, and the
right to claim the extradition of fugitive slaves, were formally
safeguarded in the Constitution; that it was in reliance upon these
provisions that the Southern States consented to enter the Union; that
the right of secession had been openly and repeatedly asserted by
leading politicians and influential parties in several Northern States,
and was therefore no novel and treasonable invention of the South; and,
finally, that the right to enter into a compact implied the right to
recede from it when its provisions were broken, or obviously on the
point of being broken, by the other party or parties to the agreement.
All this is logically and historically indisputable. The Southerners
were the conservative party, and had the letter of the Constitution on
their side; the Northerners were the reformers, the innovators.
Entrenched in the theory of State Sovereignty, the South denied the
right of the North, acting through the Central Government, to interfere
with its "peculiar institution;" and even those who deplored the
existence of slavery felt themselves none the less bound to assert and
defend the right of their respective States to manage their own
affairs.[I] It was a conflict as old as the Revolution--and even, in its
germs, of still older date--between centripetal and centrifugal forces,
between national and local patriotism. The makers of the Constitution
had tried to hold the scales justly, but in their natural jealousy of a
strong central power, they had allowed the balance to deflect unduly on
the side of local independence. The North, the national majority, felt,
obscurely and reluctantly, that a revision of the Constitution in the