s,
who deemed submission prudent, but who were consoled by the reflection
that slavery would afford them a far better means for breaking up the
Union than it was possible to get through the existence of any tariff,
no matter how protective it might be. All the great leaders of the first
Secession school had passed away from the earth, when Rhett "still
lived" to see the flag he hated pulled down before the fire that was
poured upon Fort Sumter from Carolina's batteries worked by the hands
of Carolinians. Calhoun, Hamilton, McDuffie, Hayne, Trumbull, Cooper,
Harper, Preston, and others, men of the first intellectual rank in
America, had departed; but Rhett survived to see what they had labored
to effect, and what they would have effected, had they not encountered
one of those iron spirits to whom is sometimes intrusted the government
of nations, and who are of more value to nations than gold and fleets
and armies. All that we have lately seen done, and more, would have been
done thirty years since, had any other man than Andrew Jackson been at
that time President of the United States. There was much cant in those
days about "the one-man power," because President Jackson saw fit to
make use of the Constitutional qualified veto-power to express his
opposition to certain measures adopted by Congress; but the best
exhibition of "the one-man power" that the country ever saw, then or
before or since, was when the same magistrate crushed Nullification,
maintained the Union, and secured the nation's peace for more than a
quarter of a century. We never knew what a great man Jackson was, until
the country was cursed by Buchanan's occupation of the same chair that
Jackson had filled,--a chair that he was unworthy to dust,--and by his
cowardice and treachery which made civil war inevitable. One man, at the
close of 1860, could have done more than has yet been accomplished by
the million of men who have been called to arms because no such man was
then in the nation's service. The "one hour of Dundee" was not more
wanting to the Stuarts than the one month of Jackson was wanting to us
but two years ago.

The powerful teaching of the Nullifiers was successful. The South, which
assumed to be the exclusive seat of American nationality, while the
North was declared given up to sectionalism, with no other lights on its
path than "blue lights," became the South so devoted to slavery that
it could see nothing else in the country. Old Union me