Up to a certain point the sense of patriotic pride in the Union had grown also in the South.  It was fostered at first by the predominant part which the South played in the political life of the country.  But for a generation past the sense of a separate interest of the South had been growing still more vigorously.  The political predominance of the South had continued, but under a standing menace of downfall as the North grew more populous and the patriotism which it at first encouraged had become perverted into an arrogantly unconscious feeling that the Union was an excellent thing on condition that it was subservient to the South.  The common interest of the Southern States was slavery; and, when the Northerners had become a majority which might one day dominate the Federal Government, this common interest of the slave States found a weapon at hand in the doctrine of the inherent sovereignty of each individual State.  This doctrine of State sovereignty had come to be held as universally in the South as the strict Unionist doctrine in the North, and held with as quiet and unshakable a confidence that it could not be questioned.  It does not seem at all strange that the State, as against the Union, should have remained the supreme object of loyalty in old communities like those of South Carolina and Virginia, abounding as they did in conservative influences which were lacking in the North.  But this provincial loyalty was not in the same sense a natural growth in States like Alabama or Mississippi.  These, no less than Indiana and Illinois, were the creatures of the Federal Congress, set up within the memory of living men, with arbitrary boundaries that cut across any old lines of division.  There was, in fact, no spontaneous feeling of allegiance attaching to these political units, and the doctrine of their sovereignty had no use except as a screen for the interest in slavery which the Southern States had in common.  But Calhoun, in a manner characteristic of his peculiar and dangerous type of intellect, had early seen in a view of State sovereignty, which would otherwise have been obsolete, the most serviceable weapon for the joint interests of the Southern States.  In a society where intellectual life was restricted, his ascendency had been great, though his disciples had, reasonably enough, thrown aside the qualifications which his subtle mind had attached to the right of secession.  Thus in the Southern States generally, even among men most strongly opposed to the actual proposal to secede, the real or alleged constitutional right of a State to secede if it chose now passed unquestioned and was even regarded as a precious liberty.