Page:Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction.djvu/74

60 Side by side with the assumption by the national government of unlimited control over the rights of the people, the process of gathering in powers that had hitherto been left to the states went steadily on during the war. The association of the doctrine of state rights with that of secession was too close to permit of much resistance to this process. Centralization was the order of the day. Conspicuous among the illustrations of this fact appear the substitution of a national for a state system of banking and currency; the creation of a national militia system to occupy the field once held by the state systems; and the sweeping jurisdiction conferred by the Habeas Corpus Act upon the national judiciary at the expense of the state courts. The legislation by which these results were achieved was opposed on constitutional grounds which in earlier times would have been universally recognized as unassailable. But under existing circumstances, the territorial unity of the nation was held to outweigh all other considerations, and nothing could stand that either positively obstructed or even failed most effectively to promote this end.

It has sometimes been said that January 1, 1863, marks the most distinct epoch in the history of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation is assumed as the dividing line between the old system and the new. This view is more appropriate to the state of affairs in the South than to that in the