or collectively, they might abrogate when they pleased.  This interpretation was not admitted in the North, either by Republicans or Democrats; yet there was nothing in the letter of the Constitution which denied it, and as regards the spirit of that covenant North and South held opposite opinions.  But both were perfectly sincere, and in leaving the Union, therefore, and in creating for themselves a new government, the people of the seceding States considered that they were absolutely within their right.* (* For an admirable statement of the Southern doctrine, see Ropes’ History of the Civil War volume 1 chapter 1.)

It must be admitted, at the same time, that the action of the States which first seceded was marked by a petulant haste; and it is only too probable that the people of these States suffered themselves to be too easily persuaded that the North meant mischief.  It is impossible to determine how far the professional politician was responsible for the Civil War.  But when we recall the fact that secession followed close on the overthrow of a faction which had long monopolised the spoils of office, and that this faction found compensation in the establishment of a new government, it is not easy to resist the suspicion that the secession movement was neither more nor less than a conspiracy, hatched by a clever and unscrupulous cabal.

It would be unwise, however, to brand the whole, or even the majority, of the Southern leaders as selfish and unprincipled.  Unless he has real grievances on which to work, or unless those who listen to him are supremely ignorant, the mere agitator is powerless; and it is most assuredly incredible that seven millions of Anglo-Saxons, and Anglo-Saxons of the purest strain—­English, Lowland Scottish, and North Irish—­should have been beguiled by silver tongues of a few ambitious or hare-brained demagogues.  The latter undoubtedly had a share in bringing matters to a crisis.  But the South was ripe for revolution long before the presidential election.  The forces which were at work needed no artificial impulse to propel them forward.  It was instinctively recognised that the nation had outgrown the Constitution; and it was to this, and not to the attacks upon slavery, that secession was really due.  The North had come to regard the American people as one nation, and the will of the majority as paramount.* (* “The Government had been Federal under the Articles of Confederation (1781), but the [Northern] people quickly recognised that that relation was changing under the Constitution (1789).  They began to discern that the power they thought they had delegated was in fact surrendered, and that henceforth no single State could meet the general Government as sovereign and equal.”  Draper’s History of the American Civil War volume 1 page 286.) The South, on the other hand, holding, as it had always held, that each State was a nation in itself, denied in toto that the will of the majority, except in certain specified cases, had any power whatever;