but which left each State a sovereign body with an indefeasible right to secede if in the last resort it judged that the painful necessity had come.  In a few border States there was division and doubt on this subject, a fact which must have helped to hide from each side the true strength of opinion on the other.  But, setting aside these border States, there were in the North some who doubted whether it was expedient to fight for the Union, but none of any consequence who doubted that it was constitutionally correct; and there were in the South men who insisted that no occasion to secede had arisen, but these very men, when outvoted in their States, maintained most passionately the absolute right of secession.

The two sides contended for two contrary doctrines of constitutional law.  It is natural when parties are disputing over a question of political wisdom and of moral right that each should claim for its contention if possible the sanction of acknowledged legal principle.  So it was with the parties to the English Civil War, and the tendency to regard matters from a legal point of view is to this day deeply engrained in the mental habits of America.  But North and South were really divided by something other than legal opinion, a difference in the objects to which their feelings of loyalty and patriotism were directed.  This difference found apt expression in the Cabinet of President Buchanan, who of course remained in office between the election of Lincoln in November and his inauguration in March.  General Cass of Michigan had formerly stood for the Presidency with the support of the South, and he held Cabinet office now as a sympathiser with the South upon slavery, but he was a Northerner.  “I see how it is,” he said to two of his colleagues; “you are a Virginian, and you are a South Carolinian; I am not a Michigander, I am an American.”

In a former chapter the creation of the Union and the beginnings of a common national life have been traced in outline.  Obstacles to the Union had existed both in the North and in the South, and, after it had been carried, the tendency to threaten disruption upon some slight conflict of interest had shown itself in each.  But a proud sense of single nationality had soon become prevalent in both, and in the North nothing whatever had happened to set back this growth, for the idea which Lowell had once attributed to his Hosea Biglow of abjuring Union with slave owners was a negligible force.  Undivided allegiance to the Union was the natural sentiment of citizens of Ohio or Wisconsin, States created by the authority of the Union out of the common dominion of the Union.  It had become, if anything, more deeply engrained in the original States of the North, for their predominant occupation in commerce would tend in this particular to give them larger views.  The pride of a Boston man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was of the same order as his pride in the city of Boston; both