SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 193 



to resist by force the administration of the national laws. Com- 

 munities in the North repeatedly, violently, and even boastfully, 

 opposed the local enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 

 and in turn were justly chargeable with practical nullification of 

 federal statutes. The fires of sectional hate fed on that which 

 was designed to extinguish them. 



The culmination of events, in 1860, brought the country to 

 the verge of a crisis that seriously threatened the very existence 

 of the Union. The South, unified by an appeal to endangered 

 property interests in chattel slaves, estimated at more than two 

 thousand millions of dollars, and the apparition of the hideous 

 ghost of a servile insurrection, invoked the doctrine of state 

 sovereignty and the asserted constitutional right of withdrawal 

 from the Union as its way of escape from what it believed to be 

 impending calamities. It claimed that "any state whenever 

 this shall be its sovereign will and pleasure may secede from the 

 Union in accordance with the Constitution and without any 

 violation of the constitutional rights of the other members of the 

 Confederacy; that as each became parties to the Union by votes 

 of its own people assembled in convention, so any one of them 

 may still retire from the Union in a similar manner, by the vote 

 of such convention." 



In opposition to this contention so long and so stoutly main- 

 tained, Mr. Lincoln, when he came to the presidency, held, that 

 "in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the 

 union of these states is perpetual;" that "perpetuity is implied 

 if not expressed in the fundamental law of all national govern- 

 ments; that no government ever had a provision in its organic 

 law for its own termination." The logical conclusion drawn 

 from these syllogistically stated propositions was that no state 

 can lawfully go out of the Union if by so doing it imperils the 

 existence or the integrity of the general government. Upon 

 these two points of contention the issue between the sections 

 was made up and fairly joined. 



