The work begins with a sketch of ancient slavery, showing that the introduction of the institution into the Southern States was not exceptional.  He then gives an account of slavery in the colonies, and the efforts to suppress the slave trade.  The connection of slavery with the War of 1812 and with the Hartford Convention is noted.  He then takes up the Missouri Compromise with some detail, giving almost verbatim the proceedings of Congress relative thereto.  In the same way he treats the “Repudiation of the Missouri Compromise,” the Annexation of Texas, the Wilmot Proviso, the Kansas—­Nebraska Affair, the Lincoln and Douglas Debates, John Brown’s Invasion, Secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Throughout this treatise, he carefully notes the “jealousy of sectional interest and power and the determination to maintain this power even at a cost of a dissolution of the Union,” In other words, the whole sectional struggle grew out of what he calls the effort to maintain the balance of power between two sections of the Union, with the slavery question contributing thereto.  Facts set forth bring out very clearly that the South is not to be censured as being especially hostile to the Negro when on the statute books of the North there are found numerous laws to show that persons of color were not considered desirables in those States.

He raises the question as to whether the South violated the Missouri Compromise and considers it a revolution that public functionaries disregarded the rights of the owners of slave property when the highest tribunal, the Supreme Court, had sanctioned these rights.  The act of secession is palliated too on the ground that the South had developed under the influence of that peculiar political philosophy which produced there a race that could never sanction passive obedience.  In seceding the South was not attempting to overturn the government of the United States.  It was not contemplated to interfere with the States adhering to the Union.  They sought merely to “withdraw themselves from subjection to a government which they were convinced intended to overthrow their institutions.”

The Civil War came in spite of the fact that the Convention that framed the Constitution negatived the proposition to confer on the Federal Government the authority to exert the force of the Union against a delinquent State.  It was, therefore, a mere act of coercing a section preparing for self-defense.  Reconstruction is treated very much in the same way.  The laws under which it was effected were unjust, the men who executed them were harsh, and the weaker section had to pay the price.

The book cannot be classed as scientific work.  The topics discussed are not proportionately treated, the style is rendered dull by the incorporation of undigested material, and the emphasis is placed on the political and legal phases of history at the expense of the social and economic.  In it we find very little that is new.  It merely presents the well-known political theory of the Old South.  The chief value of the work consists in its being an expression of the opinion of a distinguished man who participated in many of the events narrated.