The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866, page 229 by Various Authors
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ears, represented only a section of the country, that section was alone bound by its measures. The moment it is admitted that the national legislature, as now constituted, is an incomplete body, and that it needs Southern "loyal men" to make its laws operative over the South, a whole brood of deductive reasoners will spring up in that region, eager to carry the principle out to its remotest logical consequences. After two or three of those cotton crops on which some persons rely so much to make the South contented have given it the requisite leisure to follow long trains of reasoning, it will by degrees convince itself that the whole national legislation during the war, including the debt and the Anti-Slavery Amendment, was unconstitutional, and that, as far as it concerns the Southern States, it is void, and should be of no effect. Persons who are accustomed to nickname as "radicals" all those statesmen who do not consider that the removal of an immediate inconvenience exhausts the whole science of practical politics, are wont to make merry over this possibility of Southern repudiation, or to look down upon its fanatical suggesters with the benevolent pity of serenely superior intelligence; but nobody who has watched the steps by which Calhoun's logic was inwrought into the substance of the Southern mind,--nobody who has noted the process by which the justification of one of the bloodiest rebellions in the history of the world was deduced from the definition of an abstraction,--nobody who explores the meaning of the phrase, common in many mouths, that "the South thought itself in the right,"--will doubt that the seeming bugbear may turn out a dreadful reality. It is impossible, in fact, for the most far-sighted mind to predict all the evils which may flow from the heedless adoption of a vicious principle; if the war has not taught us this, it has taught us nothing.
But it is not to be supposed that Congress will yield, for to yield would be to commit suicide. There is not an interest in the nati