Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[113] stated, this advantage no longer satisfied them; they now wanted to establish their supremacy in a way not to be disputed, by a bold stroke of policy; and they preferred threats of war, and even war itself, to compromises henceforth insufficient. They only required a pretext to draw after them their fellow-citizens who were yet faithful to the Union. We shall show how they sought this pretext in the Presidential elections of 1860. They had long used the entire power of the Federal government for the protection and extension of slavery; they had introduced it into a great number of territories which had been acquired by that government in the name of the whole community; sometimes protecting, in the name of the independence of the new States, those which, under their influence, admitted slavery; at other times, causing the central power to trace an imaginary line, south of which all the territories were to belong to the servile institution. But when they thought of separating from the North, or at least threatened the North with violent separation, they denied that the Federal government had any right to interfere in the matter. This threat was a powerful political argument, and separation seeming to be the last resort when slavery should be in danger, a constitutional theory was needed to justify it. This was found in the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of the States —a doctrine which had for its apostle, between the years 1830 and 1840, Mr. Calhoun, the foremost statesman of South Carolina, who soon came to be considered as the palladium of the peculiar institutions of the Southern States. It is sufficient to sum up this doctrine in a few words, to show how specious and dangerous it was.

The object of the Federal compact, between the colonies that had been freed by the war of independence, was to protect them against the divisions which weakened them, to unite them into one indestructible group or cluster, and to make of them a single nation, while leaving them a local independence sufficient to protect them against the despotism of centralization. Each colony, in adopting this compact, made a perpetual cession of a portion of its sovereignty in favor of the new community. The rights which were thus ceded constituted the prerogatives of the Federal power. We cannot enumerate them here, but in order to show their importance,