constitutional questions is to be effected, when certain desired ends are to be accomplished?

The Supreme Court also legitimated the creation of a new State from the territory of another State in flagrant disregard of a clear constitutional inhibition, and of the known will of the spoliated State.

In addition to the action of the States, nullifying a law of Congress, and proclaiming their determination to expunge from the Constitution one of its essential stipulations, there occurred, on the 16th of October, 1859, an invasion of the Commonwealth of Virginia by a band of armed conspirators, who seized upon Harper's Ferry, and were proceeding to execute a deliberately concocted plan to arouse the negroes to insurrection, to plunder and murder, and to overthrow the Government of one of the original thirteen States. Such an act of unparalleled audacity, of open treason, of levying war against a State of the Union, should have aroused universal execration. On the contrary, Victor Hugo pleaded for the remission of the just punishment of the traitor, and Hughes, in his Manliness of Christ, places John Brown almost on a level with the Son of God. Edward Everett and others in Boston had the courage and patriotism to denounce the diabolical purpose of the conspirators, but the fanatical leader has been canonized at the North, and his name heads the roll of martyrology.

During the whole period from 1789 to 1860 the predominant sentiment of the South was that of intense loyalty to the Union. For the flag, the Union's symbol in peace and war, it had made incessant and willing sacrifices. The strong, pertinacious defence of the Constitution, the resistance to encroachments upon it, were the best and only means for the preservation and perpetuity of the Union. State interposition, as advocated in 1828-1832, was in no sense a disunion measure; it was designed to arrest the operation of oppressive and unconstitutional taxation, until the sober second thought of the people of the States could be consulted, and the creators of the Constitution, in the most legitimate and authoritative manner, could decide whether the questioned power had been, or should be conferred. It was an appeal to a convention of the States, the paramount power in our federative system, "the most august and imposing embodiment of political authority known to the American system of Government." What the South has uniformly held is that the best preservative of the Union is a faithful adherence to the Constitution, and that to vest in Congress, in the President, in the Supreme Court, the right of determining finally and exclusively the extent of powers delegated to the Government, is incompatible with the integrity and the rights of the States, and the limitations of the Constitution. It seems, says an able lawyer, a truism

too palpable for argument, that rights of the States are as incapable of violation without a violation of the Constitution as rights delegated to the General Government. The United States is sovereign as to all matters delegated to it by the Constitution; it is without any sovereignty, jurisdiction, power, or function as to all matters not placed within its power by the Constitution. The topics which lie outside of national legislation greatly exceed the number to which the power of State legislation does not extend.' State power and jurisdiction embrace the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, guardian and ward, master and servant, and can arrest, imprison, try, condemn, and execute citizens of the United States

infringing State laws. The people of each State compose a State, having its own Government, and endowed with all the functions essential to separate and independent existence, and without the States in Union there could be no such political body as the United States. The preservation of the States and the maintenance of their Governments are as much within the care and design of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National Government." As Henry Clay said: "Our Government is not to be maintained, or our Union preserved, by invasions of the rights and powers of the several 27 Wallace, 700, 755.

1 Mich. Lect., 244.

States." Robert C. Winthrop closed his great Centennial Fourth of July oration, "GOD SAVE THESE AMERICAN STATES."

1 It may be pertinent to append the opinions of some distinguished Northern men as to the value of States Rights. Mr. Bancroft says:

.

Aside of the sphere of the Federal Government, each State is in all things supreme, not by grace, but of right. This supremacy of the States in the powers which have not been granted is as essentially a part of the system as the supremacy of the General Government in its sphere. The States are at once the guardians of the domestic security and the happiness of the individual, and they are the parents, the protectors, and the stay of the Union. The States and the United States are members of one great whole; and the one is as needful as the other. The powers of Government are not divided between them; they are distributed; SO that there need be no collision in their exercise. But

for State rights the Union would perish from the paralysis of its limbs. The States, as they gave life to the Union, are

necessary to the continuance of that life."

Alexander Hamilton wrote :

"The State Governments are essentially necessary to the form and spirit of the general system. With the representative system a very extensive country may be governed by a confederacy of States in which the Supreme Legislature has only general powers, and the civil and domestic concerns of the people are regulated by the laws of the several States. State Governments must form a leading principle. They can never lose their powers till the whole people of America are robbed of their liberties."

George Clinton used equally strong language:

“The sovereignty of the States he considered the only stable security for the liberties of the people against the encroachments of power."

2 Banc., Const., 332, 343, 344.

CHAPTER XIII.

THESE principles made the Southern States the true defenders and friends of the Constitution and the Union. So far from being revolutionary, their doctrines were regarded as the only solid foundation of our system and of the Union itself. The doctrine which denied to the States "the right of protecting their reserved powers, and which would vest in the Government (it matters not through what department) the right of determining exclusively and finally the powers delegated to it, is incompatible with the sovereignty of the States, if the Constitution itself be considered the basis of the Federal Union."

When the election of Mr. Lincoln became an established fact, notwithstanding the formal legality of the election, it developed a sectionalism so pronounced and powerful as to be able and willing to organize the Federal Government apart from and irrespective of all Southern support. The Southern States, as previously and most solemnly announced, regarded the election as involving necessarily the perversion of the Government from its originally limited character, and the overthrow of all those guarantees which furnished the