the living American
tradition. The Southerners had pushed the traditional worship of
Constitutional rights to a point which subordinated the whole American
legal system to the needs of one peculiar and incongruous institution,
and such an innovation was bound to be revolutionary. But when the North
proposed to put its nationalistic interpretation of the Constitution
into effect, and to prevent the South by force from seceding, the South
could claim for its resistance a larger share of the American tradition
than could the North for its coercion. To insist that the Southern
states remain in the Union was assuredly an attempt to govern a whole
society without its consent; and the fact that the Southerners rather
than the Northerners were technically violators of the law, did not
prevent the former from going into battle profoundly possessed with the
conviction that they were fighting for an essentially democratic cause.

The aggressive theories and policy of the Southerners made the moderate
opponents of slavery realize that the beneficiaries of that institution
would, unless checked, succeed eventually in nationalizing slavery by
appropriating on its behalf the national domain. A body of public
opinion was gradually formed, which looked in the direction merely of
de-nationalizing slavery by restricting its expansion. This body of
public opinion was finally organized into the Republican party; and this
party has certain claims to be considered the first genuinely national
party which has appeared in American politics. The character of being
national has been denied to it, because it was, compared to the old Whig
and Democratic parties, a sectional organization; but a party becomes
national, not by the locus of its support, but by the national import of
its idea and its policy. The Republican party was not entirely national,
because it had originated partly in embittered sectional feeling, but it
proclaimed a national idea and a national policy. It insisted on the
responsibility of the national government in relation to the institution
of slavery, and it insisted also that the Union should be preserved. But
before the Republicanism could be recognized as national even in the
North, it was obliged to meet and vanquish one more proposed treatment
of the problem of slavery--founded on an inadequate conception of
democracy. In this case, moreover, the inadequate conception of
democracy was much more traditionally American than