sectional consciousness, with all its
emotional and psychological implications, was the fundamental impulse of
the stern events which occurred between 1850 and 1865.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the more influential Southerners
had come generally to regard their section of the country as a distinct
social unit. The next step was inevitable. The South began to regard
itself as a separate political unit. It is the distinction of Calhoun
that he showed himself toward the end sufficiently flexible to become
the exponent of this new political impulse. With all his earlier fire
he encouraged the Southerners to withdraw from the so-called national
parties, Whig and Democratic, to establish instead a single Southern
party, and to formulate, by means of popular conventions, a single
concerted policy for the entire South.

At that time such a policy was still regarded, from the Southern point
of view, as a radical idea. In 1851, a battle was fought at the polls
between the two Southern ideas--the old one which upheld separate state
independence, and the new one which virtually acknowledged Southern
nationality. The issue at stake was the acceptance or the rejection of
a compromise which could bring no permanent settlement of fundamental
differences.

Nowhere was the battle more interesting than in South Carolina, for it
brought into clear light that powerful Southern leader who ten years
later was to be the masterspirit of secession--Robert Barnwell Rhett. In
1851 he fought hard to revive the older idea of state independence
and to carry South Carolina as a separate state out of the Union.
Accordingly it is significant of the progress that the consolidation
of the South had made at this date that on this issue Rhett encountered
general opposition. This difference of opinion as to policy was not
inspired, as some historians have too hastily concluded, by national
feeling. Scarcely any of the leaders of the opposition considered the
Federal Government supreme over the State Government. They opposed Rhett
because they felt secession to be at that moment bad policy. They saw
that, if South Carolina went out of the Union in 1851, she would go
alone and the solidarity of the South would be broken. They were not
lacking in sectional patriotism, but their conception of the best
solution of the complex problem differed from that advocated by Rhett.
Their position was summed up by Langdon Cheves when he said, "To secede
now