If, on the
one hand, negro slavery undermined the moral unity and consequently the
political integrity of the American people, and if on the other, the
South stubbornly insisted upon its legal right to property in negroes,
the difficulty ran too deep to be solved by peaceable Constitutional
means. The legal structure of American nationality became a house
divided against itself, and either the national principle had to be
sacrificed to the Constitution or the Constitution to the national
principle.
The significance of the whole controversy does not become clear, until
we modify Webster's formula about the inseparability of liberty and
union, and affirm in its place the inseparability of American
nationality and American democracy. The Union had come to mean something
more to the Americans of the North than loyalty to the Constitution. It
had come to mean devotion to a common national idea,--the idea of
democracy; and while the wiser among them did not want to destroy the
Constitution for the benefit of democracy, they insisted that the
Constitution should be officially stigmatized as in this respect an
inadequate expression of the national idea.
Pages:
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173