Page:Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction.djvu/15



culmination of the differences between the sections in a definite political act occurred at a moment when the government was in the hands of that party whose principles were most susceptible of adaptation to the policy of the secessionists. Though the direct question of state or national supremacy was not met in the platform of either of the great parties in i860, all the traditions of the Democracy were on the side of a strictly limited central government. For many years, now, the accepted narcotic for quieting any nervousness caused by threats against state rights had been the soothing formula: "Each government is sovereign within its sphere." The assertion in December of i860 that South Carolina's "sphere" included the right to dissolve the Union, called for some decisive action in spherical delimitation.

President Buchanan had been with the extreme Democrats on the Territorial question. The rights and equality of all the states he had insisted on maintaining with the utmost care. But the demand that he should acknowledge what after all is only the logical conclusion of the state-rights