of sectionalists, it was also
because the interests of his constituents, the cotton and tobacco
planters of the South, had become identified with particularism, that
is, States rights.

And corollary to these assumptions is the further fact that public men
usually determine what line of procedure is best for their constituents,
or for what are supposed to be the interests of those constituents, and
then seek for "powers" or clauses in State or Federal Constitutions
which justify the predetermined course. This being, as a rule, true, the
business of the historian is to understand the influences which led to
the first, not the second, decision of the Representative or Senator or
President or even Justice of the Supreme Court. Hence long-winded
speeches or tortuous decisions of courts have not been studied so
closely as the statistics of the cotton or tobacco crops, the reports of
manufacturers, and the conditions of the frontier, which determined more
of the votes of members of Congress than the most eloquent persuasion of
great orators.

Thus the following pages utterly fail of their purpose if they do not
picture the background of congressional and sectional conflicts during
the period from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln. But, to be sure, in
so brief a book all the contributing elements of the growing national
life cannot be fully described or even be mentioned. Still, it is the
hope of the author that all the greater subjects have been treated. What
has been omitted was omitted in order to devote more space to what
seemed to be more important, not in order to suppress what some may
consider to be of primary significance. Three hundred short pages for
the story of the great conflict which raged from 1828 to 1865 do not
offer much latitude for explanations and diversions along the way. Nor
is it possible for any one to describe this conflict satisfactorily even
to all historians, to say nothing of the participants who still live and
entertain the most positive and contradictory convictions. Hence one
must present one's own narrative and be content if open-mindedness and
honesty of purpose be acknowledged.

The book is intended for the maturer students in American colleges and
universities and for readers who may be desirous of knowing why things
happened as they did as well as how they happened. And by the employment
of collateral readings suggested in the short bibliographies at the
close of each chapter, both th