body. It seemed to be taken for granted on all sides that, if the Southern States insisted upon cutting loose from the Union, nothing could be done but to let them go. It is true there was talk enough about swords and blood; but the wars were expected to turn upon questions of boundary and the like, after dissolution, not upon the right of states to go out. Even such a man as John Quincy Adams, not only an anti-slavery man but a statesman always inclining to strong measures, approved of the compromise as “all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard;” and then wrote in addition: “But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen states unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, — namely, that of rallying to their standard the other states by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.” Thus even this patriotic statesman thought rather of separating in order to meet again in a purer condition of existence — a remarkably fantastic plan — than of denying the right of secession, and of maintaining by a vigorous exertion of power the government of which he was a leading member,
