Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/149

 worked themselves into one another's coats. Byron Paine won the election and took his seat in the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. But it is a significant fact that, only two years later, when the bulk of the Slave States, then again repudiating the supremacy of the Federal power, had carried the States' rights doctrine to the logical length of secession, those who but yesterday had shouted and voted for “Byron Paine and States' rights,” rushed to arms to maintain the supreme authority of the Federal Government and to put down the pretensions of States' rights which were made in favor of slavery. Byron Paine himself, in the course of the Civil War, left the Supreme Bench of Wisconsin to join the army.

Thus in the North as well as in the South men's sympathies with regard to slavery shaped and changed their political doctrines and their Constitutional theories. In the South, it was States' rights or the supremacy of the Federal power as one or the other furthered the interests of slavery. In the North, it was States' rights or the supremacy of the Federal power as one or the other furthered the interests of freedom. This inconstancy of men's minds as to very important political doctrines can, indeed, be psychologically explained in view of the circumstances under which it then occurred. But it has also manifested itself under circumstances far less anxious, and it may, in a democracy, become a grave danger to the stability of political institutions. As to the perplexing conflict between moral sentiment and the fugitive slave law, which at that period troubled many a conscientious and dutiful citizen, the right way out was suggested by Mr. Durkee, a Senator of the United States from Wisconsin, who said, “I shall not obey that law, but I shall submit to the legal penalty for disobeying it.”

The Byron Paine campaign was hardly over when I was urgently called to another field. As the anti-slavery