would be sufficient to satisfy the South, because the interests of the South had come to demand the propagation of slavery as a Constitutional right, and if necessary in defiance of local public opinion.  Unionists were consequently given to understand that the South was offering them a choice between a divided Union and the nationalization of slavery; and they naturally drew the conclusion that they must de-nationalize slavery in order to perpetuate the Union.  The repeal, consequently, hastened the formation of the Republican party, whose object it was to prevent the expansion of slavery and to preserve the Union, without violating the Constitutional rights of the South.  Such a policy could no longer prevail without a war.  The Southerners had no faith in the fair intentions of their opponents.  They worked themselves into the belief that The whole anti-slavery party was Abolitionist, and the whole anti-slavery agitation national disloyalty.  But the issue had been so shaped that the war could be fought for the purpose of preserving American national integrity; and that was the only issue on which a righteous war could be fought.

Thus the really decisive debates which preceded the Civil War were not those which took place in Congress over states-rights, but rather the discussion in Illinois between Lincoln and Douglas as to whether slavery was a local or a national issue.  The Congressional debates were on both sides merely a matter of legal special pleading for the purpose of justifying a preconceived decision.  What it was necessary for patriotic American citizens and particularly for Western Democrats to understand was, not whether the South possessed a dubious right of secession, because that dispute, in case it came to a head, could only be settled by war; but whether a democratic nation could on democratic principles continue to shirk the problem of slavery by shifting the responsibility for it to individuals and localities.  As soon as Lincoln made it plain that a democratic nation could not make local and individual rights an excuse for national irresponsibility, then the Unionist party could count upon the support of the American conscience.  The former followers of Douglas finally rallied to the man and to the party which stood for a nationalized rather than a merely localized democracy; and the triumph of the North in the war, not only put an end to the legal right of secession, but it began to emancipate the American national idea from an obscurantist individualism and provincialism.  Our current interpretation of democracy still contains much dubious matter derived from the Jacksonian epoch; but no American statesmen can hereafter follow Douglas in making the democratic principle equivalent to utter national incoherence and irresponsibility.