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 i860] The southern States secede. 441 rulers. It seemed to them, too, that the North itself had of late practised nullification in its fight against them. More than a score of the States had passed "personal liberty*" laws which were confessedly intended to bar and render impracticable the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. The South Carolina legislature, which itself chose the presi- dential electors of the State, had remained in session to learn the result of the election. When it knew that Lincoln was to be President, it summoned a Constitutional Convention, which severed the State's connexion with the Union; and before Lincoln was inaugurated six other southern States had followed South Carolina out of the Union. The inevitable disintegration of the Union, by reason of the opera- tion of the institution of slavery, had worked its perfect work. The South, which did not change, had become a region apart; and it now put the Union aside in accordance with the theory with respect to its authority which it conceived to have obtained at its constitution. There was here nothing of the contradiction which seemed to lie at the heart of nullification; the South was not resisting the Union and yet purposing to remain within it. It had taken the final step of with- drawal : the partnership was dissolved. If that were revolution it was at least revolution within the original theory of the law as the South had learned it. The issue was slavery? Yes, upon the surface. Perhaps it need never have come to this, had Douglas kept his hand from the law. The movement against slavery had been weak, occasional, non-partisan until the Missouri Compromise was repealed, ten years before. It was that which had brought the Republican party into existence and set the sections by the ears. But now that the breach had come, it did not seem to men in the South merely a contest about slavery: it seemed, rather, so far as the South was concerned, a final question and answer as to the fundamental matter of self-government. There were many men in the South who, while they had no love for slavery, had a great love, a deep inherited veneration even, for the Union, but with whom the passion for the ancient principles, the ancient sentiment, of self-government was greater even than these, and covered every subject of domestic policy. It was this they deemed threatened now. Slavery itself was not so dark a thing as it was painted. It held the South at a standstill economically, and was her greatest burden, whether she felt it to be so or not. Bad men, too, could shamefully abuse the boundless powers of a master. But humane sentiment held most men steadily and effectually off from the graver abuses. The domestic slaves, at any rate, and almost all who were much under the master's eye, were happy and well cared for ; and the poor creatures who crowded the great plantations where the air was malarial and where the master was seldom present to restrain the overseer, were little worse off than free labourers would have been in a like case, or any labourers who could live there. CH. XIII.