SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 191 



ship therein was regarded as subject to the wish or will of each 

 to exercise its sovereign right to remain in or to go out from, as 

 it saw fit. Witnesses are not wanting, individual or collective, 

 to prove that this doctrine, so perilous to natural unity and na- 

 tional permanency, permeated all sections and needed only what 

 might be regarded as a sufficient grievance to make its operation 

 manifest. The disastrous commercial results following the 

 placing of an embargo upon American shipping by President 

 Jefferson led to open threats by some leading Massachusetts 

 men with a strong popular following, to dissolve the Union. 

 The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, now, and for a long 

 time, regarded by men of all parties in all sections of the coun- 

 try as one of the master-strokes in American diplomacy and one 

 of the crowning acts of American statesmanship, was deeply 

 resented and bitterly opposed by many of the most eminent and 

 patriotic of our countrymen. One of these was a soldier of 

 excellent record in the War of the Revolution, a cabinet ojS&cer 

 in the administration of Washington, and later in that of John 

 Adams, and still later a distinguished senator in the Congress 

 of United States who, in speaking of the preponderating influence 

 the Louisiana Territory would give the South and West, said, 

 "I will not despair. I will rather anticipate a new confederacy. 

 There vdll be a separation. Our children at the farthest will 

 see it." Another distinguished son of the North was the first 

 to declare and advocate on the floor of the American Congress 

 the doctrine of secession. Just fifty years before Fort Sumter was 

 fired upon, when the bill for admission of Louisiana as a state 

 was under discussion, Mr. Josiah Quincy, then a leading mem- 

 ber of Congress and afterward for many years president of 

 Harvard College, in defending the proposition that the Con- 

 stitution had not conferred upon Congress the power to admit 

 new states except such as should be formed from territory be- 

 longing to the Union in 1787, said, 'T am compelled to declare 

 it as my dehberate opinion that if this bill passes^ the bonds of 



