The North said, ‘You have no right to withdraw,’ but it meant, I think,
something rather different
The North said, ‘You have no right to withdraw,’ but it meant, I think,
something rather different. It threw overboard the question of abstract,
formal, technical right, and fought primarily, no doubt, for a
humanitarian ideal, but fundamentally to enforce its instinct of the
highest political expediency. The right interpretation of a state-paper,
however venerable, would not have been a question worthy of such
terrible arbitrament. Even the emancipation of the negro, had that been
the sole object of the contest, would have been too dearly paid for in
blood and tears. The question at issue was really this: What is the
ideal political unit? The largest possible? or the smallest convenient?
What mattered abstract argument as to the _right_ to secede? Once grant
the _power_ to secede, once suffer the precedent to be established, and
the greatest democracy the world had ever seen was bound to break up,
not only into two, but ultimately into many petty republics, wrangling
and jangling like those of Spanish America. To this negation of a great
ideal the North refused its consent. National patriotism had outgrown
local patriotism. It had become to all intents and purposes a fiction
that the Federal Government derived its powers from the States; Thirteen
of them, indeed, had sanctioned the Federal Government, but the Federal
Government had sanctioned and admitted to the Union twenty-one more. In
these the sentiment of priority to the Union could not exist, while
State Sovereignty was a doctrine limited by considerations of
expediency, rather than a patriotic dogma. Immigration, and westward
migration from the north-eastern States, had produced a race of men and
women whose patriotism was divorced, so to speak, from any given patch
of soil, but was wedded to the all-embracing idea of the United States,
with the emphasis on the epithet. They thought of themselves first of
all as American citizens, and only in the second place as citizens of
this State or of that. This habit or instinct is still incomprehensible,
and almost contemptible, to the Southerner of the older generation; but
the Time-Spirit was clearly on its side.
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