is,” said Webster, “the people’s Constitution, the people’s government; made for the people; made by the people; and answerable to the people.  The people of the United States have declared that this Constitution shall be the supreme law.”  When a state questions the lawfulness of any act of the federal government, it cannot nullify that act or withdraw from the union; it must abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.  The union of these states is perpetual, ran Lincoln’s simple argument in the first inaugural; the federal Constitution has no provision for its own termination; it can be destroyed only by some action not provided for in the instrument itself; even if it is a compact among all the states the consent of all must be necessary to its dissolution; therefore no state can lawfully get out of the union and acts of violence against the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary.  This was the system which he believed himself bound to defend by his oath of office “registered in heaven.”

All this reasoning Southern statesmen utterly rejected.  In their opinion the thirteen original states won their independence as separate and sovereign powers.  The treaty of peace with Great Britain named them all and acknowledged them “to be free, sovereign, and independent states.”  The Articles of Confederation very explicitly declared that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.”  The Constitution was a “league of nations” formed by an alliance of thirteen separate powers, each one of which ratified the instrument before it was put into effect.  They voluntarily entered the union under the Constitution and voluntarily they could leave it.  Such was the constitutional doctrine of Hayne, Calhoun, and Jefferson Davis.  In seceding, the Southern states had only to follow legal methods, and the transaction would be correct in every particular.  So conventions were summoned, elections were held, and “sovereign assemblies of the people” set aside the Constitution in the same manner as it had been ratified nearly four score years before.  Thus, said the Southern people, the moral judgment was fulfilled and the letter of the law carried into effect.

[Illustration:  JEFFERSON DAVIS]

=The Formation of the Confederacy.=—­Acting on the call of Mississippi, a congress of delegates from the seceded states met at Montgomery, Alabama, and on February 8, 1861, adopted a temporary plan of union.  It selected, as provisional president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a man well fitted by experience and moderation for leadership, a graduate of West Point, who had rendered distinguished service on the field of battle in the Mexican War, in public office, and as a member of Congress.