Not much effort has been made in the direction of original research. Facts deemed sufficient to illustrate salient points, which alone can be treated of in a short story, have been found in published documents, and other facts have been purposely taken, most of them, from Northern writers; and the authorities have been duly cited. These facts have been compressed into a small compass, so that the book may be available to such students as have not time for a more extended examination.
Of the results of the crusade of the Abolitionists, and the consequent sectional war, George Ticknor Curtis, one of New England's distinguished biographers, says in his "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283:
"It is cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this republic—that our theory of government and practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money."
CHAPTER I
SECESSION AND ITS DOCTRINE
John Fiske has said in his school history: "Under the government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather than united, only through their allegiance to the British Crown. Had that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they might have gone on thus disunited."
They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government improvised for the occasion. The "Articles of Confederation," the first formal constitution of the United States of America, were not ratified by Maryland, the last to ratify, until in 1781, shortly before Yorktown. In 1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to be still sovereign, came together in convention at Philadelphia and formed the present Constitution, looking to "a more perfect union." The Constitution that created this new government has been rightly said to be "the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time, by the brain and purpose of man."[1] And so it was, but it left unsettled the great question whether a State, if it believed that its rights were denied to it by the general government, could peaceably withdraw from the Union.
The Federal Government was given by the Constitution only limited powers, powers that it could not transcend. Nowhere on the face of that Constitution was any right expressly conferred on the general government to decide exclusively and finally upon the extent of the powers granted to it. If any such right had been clearly given, it is certain that many of the States would not have entered into the Union. As it was, the Constitution was only adopted by eleven of the States after months of discussion. Then the new government was inaugurated, with two of the States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, still out of the Union. They remained outside, one of them for eighteen months and the other for a year.