her parties.

Thus was Abraham Lincoln elected President of the United States. But
many who voted for him had hardly recorded their votes before they
became a little afraid of the thing they had done. Through the whole
continent ran the ominous whisper: "What will the South do?"

And men held their breath, waiting for what was to follow.

CHAPTER IX

SECESSION AND CIVIL WAR

It is a significant fact that the news of Lincoln's election which
caused so much dismay and searching of heart throughout the Southern and
Border States was received with defiant cheers in Charleston, the chief
port of South Carolina. Those cheers meant that there was one Southern
State that was ready to answer on the instant the whispered question
which was troubling the North, and to answer it by no means in a
whisper.

South Carolina occupied a position not exactly parallel to that of any
other State. Her peculiarity was not merely that her citizens held the
dogma of State Sovereignty. All the States from Virginia southward, at
any rate, held that dogma in one form or another. But South Carolina
held it in an extreme form, and habitually acted on it in an extreme
fashion. It is not historically true to say that she learnt her
political creed from Calhoun. It would be truer to say that he learnt it
from her. But it may be that the leadership of a man of genius, who
could codify and expound her thought, and whose bold intellect shrank
from no conclusion to which his principles led, helped to give a
peculiar simplicity and completeness to her interpretation of the dogma
in question. The peculiarity of her attitude must be expressed by saying
that most Americans had two loyalties, while the South Carolinian had
only one. Whether in the last resort a citizen should prefer loyalty to
his State or loyalty to the Union was a question concerning which man
differed from man and State from State. There were men, and indeed whole
States, for whom the conflict was a torturing, personal tragedy, and a
tearing of the heart in two. But practically all Americans believed
that some measure of loyalty was due to both connections. The South
Carolinan did not. All his loyalty was to his State. He scarcely
pretended to anything like national feeling. The Union was at best a
useful treaty of alliance with foreigners to be preserved only so far as
the interests of the Palmetto State were advantaged the