All this is logically and historically indisputable. The Southerners
were the conservative party, and had the letter of the Constitution on
their side; the Northerners were the reformers, the innovators.
Entrenched in the theory of State Sovereignty, the South denied the
right of the North, acting through the Central Government, to interfere
with its "peculiar institution;" and even those who deplored the
existence of slavery felt themselves none the less bound to assert and
defend the right of their respective States to manage their own
affairs.[I] It was a conflict as old as the Revolution--and even, in its
germs, of still older date--between centripetal and centrifugal forces,
between national and local patriotism. The makers of the Constitution
had tried to hold the scales justly, but in their natural jealousy of a
strong central power, they had allowed the balance to deflect unduly on
the side of local independence. The North, the national majority, felt,
obscurely and reluctantly, that a revision of the Constitution in the
matter of slavery was essential to the national welfare.[J] The South
maintained that the States were antecedent and superior to the Nation,
and said, "If your Nation, in virtue of its mere majority vote, insists
on encroaching on State rights which we formally reserved as a condition
of entering the Nation, why then, we prefer to withdraw from this Nation
and set up a nation of our own, in which the true principles of the
Constitution shall be preserved.
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