4 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters. 
equilibrium of the sections was to be an impossibility in the future, and 
the plan of secession was broached as the ultimate sequel 1 
Webster, in his “ 7th of March speech,” alleges that up to 1859, three- 
fourths of the places of honor under the United States government were 
held by southerners. Alexander Stevens, in his famous appeal against 
secession in 1860, drew the attention of his countrymen to the fact that 
since the beginning of the government the South had eighteen out of the 
twenty-nine justices of the Supreme court; sixty years of southern presi¬ 
dents to twenty-four of northern presidents; twenty-three out of thirty- 
five speakers of the House of Representatives; and eighty-six out of one 
hundred and forty foreign ministers. The South, as represented in the 
Senate, was thoroughly alert and determined to reject any appointees un¬ 
favorable to southern interests, or tainted with free soil convictions. Mr. 
Stevens challenged his fellow southerners to answer whether they could re¬ 
ceive better treatment under any other government than they had under the 
Union, and whether they could compensate themselves for the loss of an 
advantageous partnership in any greater degree of influence and patronage* 
III. 
The South went out of the Union in 1860 not to preserve slavery, but in 
the disappointment of sectional defeat. It was not the institution of 
slavery that was threatened, but its extension as an element in the increase 
of the southern system. Even upon the threshold of his administration, 
Abraham Lincoln wanted the south to understand that the national gov¬ 
ernment did not propose to interfere with slavery where that condition 
was established; but he stood for the policy, that slavery was an evil which 
should be isolated and not extended. When Lincoln declared that the na¬ 
tion could not go on existing, half slave and half free, his meaning was 
against the strife of slave sectionalism and free soil sectionalism, competing 
for the new states, and maintaining an equilibrium of liberty and servitude. 
Secession was the southern alternative to sectional-equilibrium-destroyed. 
As soon as the south lost an equal share in the political partnership, she 
made up her mind to go out. Her proportional importance might be re¬ 
spected, and slavery might be let alone. But when fate had ordained that 
proportion to be less than an equal one, the traditional political self-esteem 
of the south rebelled. 
1 Mr. Calhoun, in his speech of March 4, 1850, argues that the union was endangered by 
reason of a widespread discontent among the people of the southern section due to a feel¬ 
ing that “ they cannot remain as things now are consistently with honor and safety in 
the Union - ”; and the “great and primary cause of this belief is in the fact that the equi¬ 
librium■ between the two sections in the government as it stood when the constitution was- 
ratified and the government put in action has been destroyed. 
