At the period to which this review of events has advanced, one State had
already withdrawn from the Union. Seven or eight others were preparing
to follow her example, and others yet were anxiously and doubtfully
contemplating the probably impending necessity of taking the same
action. The efforts of Southern men in Congress, aided by the
cooeperation of the Northern friends of the Constitution, had failed, by
the stubborn refusal of a haughty majority, controlled by "radical"
purposes, to yield anything to the spirit of peace and conciliation.
This period, coinciding, as it happens, with the close of a calendar
year, affords a convenient point to pause for a brief recapitulation of
the causes which had led the Southern States into the attitude they then
held, and for a more full exposition of the constitutional questions
involved.
The reader of many of the treatises on these events, which have been put
forth as historical, if dependent upon such alone for information, might
naturally enough be led to the conclusion that the controversies which
arose between the States, and the war in which they culminated, were
caused by efforts on the one side to extend and perpetuate human
slavery, and on the other to resist it and establish human liberty. The
Southern States and Southern people have been sedulously represented as
"propagandists" of slavery, and the Northern as the defenders and
champions of universal freedom, and this view has been so arrogantly
assumed, so dogmatically asserted, and so persistently reiterated, that
its authors have, in many cases, perhaps, succeeded in bringing
themselves to believe it, as well as in impressing it widely upon the
world.
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