Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/74

 would openly and actively support the nullification theory. Pickens agreed with Hammond that the people were not as advanced in position as were many of the leaders, particularly in their stand on disunion as a possible ultimate necessity; to educate the people up to this final point, Pickens wrote the "Hampden" numbers. But at the same time he believed that a great body of the intelligent citizens were far ahead of some of the would-be leaders, lawyers particularly, who would not risk the loss of popular favor by associating themselves with the tenet of disunion. When the people showed signs of being ready for it, these petty leaders would be in the van; but they would not declare themselves thus early, when their leadership would count for most. For such men he had only contempt, and he predicted that they would inevitably be lost "in the great struggle that must sooner or later agitate this country deeper than it has ever yet anticipated."

In reading such statements one is likely to think that the authors must have anticipated a clash of physical forces, of arms, indeed; yet nearly invariably these writers maintained, as did Pickens, that the states had under the Constitution a moral