Madison held a modification of the State sovereignty theory, which has counted among its adherents the mass of the ability and influence of American authorities on constitutional law.  Holding that the Constitution was a compact, and that the States were the parties to it, he held that one of the conditions of the compact was the abandonment of State sovereignty; that the States were sovereign until 1787-8, but thereafter only members of a political state, the United States.  This seems to have been the ground taken by Webster, in his debates with Hayne and Calhoun.  It was supported by the instances in which the appearance of a sovereignty in each State was yielded in the fourteen years before 1787; but, unfortunately for the theory, Calhoun was able to produce instances exactly parallel after 1787.  If the fact that each State predicated its own sovereignty as an essential part of the steps preliminary to the convention of 1787 be a sound argument for State sovereignty before 1787, the fact that each State predicated its sovereignty as an essential part of the ratification of the Constitution must be taken as an equally sound argument for State sovereignty under the Constitution; and it seems difficult, on the Madison theory, to resist Calhoun’s triumphant conclusion that, if the States went into the convention as sovereign States, they came out of it as sovereign States, with, of course, the right of secession.  Calhoun himself had a sincere desire to avoid the exercise of the right of secession, and it was as a substitute for it that he evolved his doctrine of nullification, which has been placed in the first volume.  When it failed in 1833, the exercise of the right of secession was the only remaining remedy for an asserted breach of State sovereignty.

The events which led up to the success of the Republican party in electing Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860 are so intimately connected with the anti-slavery struggle that they have been placed in the preceding volume.  They culminated in the first organized attempt to put the right of secession to a practical test.  The election of Lincoln, the success of a “sectional party,” and the evasion of the fugitive-slave law through the passage of “personal-liberty laws” by many of the Northern States, are the leading reasons assigned by South Carolina for her secession in 1860.  These were intelligible reasons, and were the ones most commonly used to influence the popular vote.  But all the evidence goes to show that the leaders of secession were not so weak in judgment as to run the hazards of war by reason of “injuries” so minute as these.  Their apprehensions were far broader, if less calculated to influence a popular vote.  In 1789 the proportions of population and wealth in the two sections were very nearly equal.  The slave system of labor had hung as a clog upon the progress of the South, preventing the natural development of manufactures and commerce, and shutting out immigration.  As