Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[41] Government the exclusive control of their international and inter-State relations;the economy of the powers of the States with which the Federal Government was endowed; the paucity of subjects and of powers, withdrawn from the States, and committed to the Federal Government. It was the recognition of the idea of Confederation — the appreciation of the value of local self-government. It was the recognition that the States were the creators and their powers were inherent, and that the Federal Government was the creature and its powers were delegated.

The two great political schools of America — that of Consolidation and that of State Rights — were founded on different estimates of the relations of the General Government to the States. All other controversies in the political history of the country were subordinate and incidental to this great division of parties. We see, at once, how it involved the question of negro-slavery in the South. The agitation of this question was a necessity of the Consolidation doctrine, which was mainly the Northern theory of the government; for duty being the correlative of power, the central government at Washington was responsible for the continuance or existence of slavery in proportion to its power over it. On the other hand, the State Rights party assented to the logical integrity of the proposition that if the government had been consolidated into one, slavery might have been abolished, or made universal throughout the whole; but they claimed that the States had retained their sovereignty, for the reason, among others, that they desired to avoid giving any pretext to the General Gov eminent for attempting to control their internal affairs; and they, therefore, contended that the Northern party could with no more reason assail the domestic institutions of the South than they could attack the similar institutions of Cuba and Brazil.

The difference between the State Rights and Consolidation schools may be briefly and sharply stated. The one regarded the Union as a compact between the States: the other regarded the Union as a national government set up above and over the States. The first adopted its doctrine from the very words of the Constitution; the seventh article for the ratification of the Constitution reading as follows:

The ratification of the Conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this constitution between the States so ratifying the same.

The great text of the State Rights school is to be found in the famous Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798. These resolutions are properly to be taken as corollaries drawn from those carefully-worded clauses of the Constitution, which were designed to exclude the idea that the separate and independent sovereignty of each State was merged into