mendacity, too?) to say, after the war, that he never at any moment of his life had "imagined that a single State, or a dozen States, could rightfully dissolve the Union." Comment is surely unnecessary.
On November the 9th, 1860, the New York Herald said:
"Each State is organized as a complete government, holding the purse and wielding the sword; possessing the right to break the tie of the confederation as a nation might break a treaty, and to repel coercion as a nation might repel invasion. . . . Coercion, if it were possible, is out of the question."
Both President Buchanan and his Attorney-General, the afterwards famous Edwin M. Stanton, decided about the same time that there was no power under the Constitution to coerce a seceding State.
SENTIMENT IN THE NORTH.
But this "Massachusetts heresy," as the writer before quoted from calls the right of secession, was not only entertained, as we have shown, at the North before the war, but has been expressed in the same section in no uncertain terms long since the war. In an article by Benjamin J. Williams, Esq., a distinguished writer of Massachusetts, entitled "Died for Their State," and published in the Lowell Sun of June 5th, 1886, he says, among other things:
"When the original thirteen Colonies threw off their allegiance to Great Britain, they became independent States, independent of her and of each other." ..." The recognition was of the States separately, each by name, in the treaty of peace which terminated the war of the Revolution. And that this separate recognition was deliberate and intentional, with the distinct object of recognizing the States as separate sovereignties, and not as one nation, will sufficiently appear by reference to the sixth volume of Bancroft's History of the United States. The Articles of Confederation between the States declared, that 'each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence.' And the Constitution of the United States, which immediately followed, was first adopted by the States in convention, each State acting for itself, in its sovereign and in--
