tamely to the abuse of the Abolitionists; and that they in their turn lost their heads.  Unfortunately, however, the consequence of their wrong-headedness was more disastrous than it was in the case of the Abolitionists, because they were powerful and domineering, as well as angry and unreasonable.  They were in a position, if they so willed, to tear the Union to pieces, whereas the Abolitionists could only talk and behave as if any legal association with such sinners ought to be destroyed.

The Southern slaveholders, then, undoubtedly had a grievance.  They were being abused by a faction of their fellow-countrymen, because they insisted on enjoying a strictly legal right; and it is no wonder that they began to think of the Abolitionists very much as the Abolitionists thought of them.  Moreover, their anger was probably increased by the fact that the Abolitionists could make out some kind of a case against them.  Property in slaves was contrary to the Declaration of Independence, and had been denounced in theory by the earlier American democrats.  So long as a conception of democracy, which placed natural above legal rights was permitted to obtain, their property in slaves would be imperiled:  and it was necessary, consequently, for the Southerners to advance a conception of democracy, which would stand as a fortress around their “peculiar” institution.  During the earlier days of the Republic no such necessity had existed.  The Southerners had merely endeavored to protect their negro property by insisting on an equal division of the domain out of which future states were to be carved, and upon the admission into the Union of a slave state to balance every new free commonwealth.  But the attempt of the Abolitionists to identify the American national idea with a system of natural rights, coupled with the plain fact that the national domain contained more material for free than it did for slave states, provoked the Southerners into taking more aggressive ground.  They began to identify the national idea exclusively with a system of legal rights; and it became from their point of view a violation of national good faith even to criticise any rights enjoyed under the Constitution.  They advanced a conception of American democracy, which defied the Constitution in its most rigid interpretation,—­which made Congress incompetent to meddle with any rights enjoyed under the Constitution, which converted any protest against such rights into national disloyalty, and which in the end converted secession into a species of higher Constitutional action.

Calhoun’s theory of Constitutional interpretation was ingeniously wrought and powerfully argued.  From an exclusively legal standpoint, it was plausible, if not convincing; but it was opposed by something deeper than counter-theories of Constitutional law.  It was opposed to the increasingly national outlook of a large majority of the American people.  They would not submit to a conception of the American political