Now, a living force that brings to itself all the resources of imagination, all the inspirations of feeling, all that is influential in body, in voice, in eye, in gesture, in posture, in the whole animated man, is in strict analogy with the divine arrangement; and there is no misconstruction more utterly untrue and fatal than this: that oratory is an artificial thing which deals with baubles and trifles for the sake of making bubbles of pleasure for transient effect on mercurial audiences. -Henry Ward Beecher, ONE comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness. * * On any terms whatever, you will not regret to wander in such neighborhood for awhile. -Carlyle. INTRODUCTION. The First Territories. There was room in British America for two nations defined in their limits by the laws of climate and productions, which have ever determined the institutions of progressive peoples and endowed them with national characteristics. It is memorable that in the two climatic divisions of British America, respectively, two intensely rival political parties of England planted each a prosperous colony. The men of the older Cavalier colony soon cried out, "These Puritans are as bad as Papists and there are too many of them in Virginia;" no pioneers of the wilderness ever accepted "the goods the gods gave" with sterner content than the Puritan settlers of New England and no more unrelaxing social polity was ever established than the Puritanical regulations set up by them over themselves. But, the surprise of the epoch came. The modern law of community interest revealed itself. The colonies brought with them the same spirit of English liberty; they had a common grievance against the mother country; all prospered in the new productive agent, African labor-some by the rich commerce engaged in importing it, others by the bountiful crops it produced. Concert of social action was the logical succession of mutuality of benefits flowing from a recognized source. Thus instead of two nations the British American colonies ultimately framed a written compact as between thirteen free and independent States, in co-operation for specific objects. The principle sought to be established was the perpetuity of a federal union and social progress; and this principle was "based upon and was intended to secure abstract right in the individual and a democratic cast in the whole polity."* It is just eulogium, therefore, of the beautiful and complex American federal system, that it was, in its origin, a convenience to pre-existing, healthful and sovereign States. When in the divine economy the wants of man first required a social polity-a code to condemn theft, slander, usury, uncleanliness, to ordain marriage and to recognize manhood as the source of political life"every man by his own camp, and every man by his own standard throughout their hosts"- this first recorded social polity appeared as a national organism founded upon representative parts. Confessing affinity with the mind. of nature to be the test of human endeavor, our federal system is vindicated in the prototype of government fixed by nature. The most intimate co-operation of atoms, productive of greatest results, proves the indistructibility of atoms. Hence, it may not be exaggeration to claim that the highest refinement of social polity which the experience of intellect has evolved, our federal system - maintaining the validity of its constituents and definiteness in their spheres has its prototype in the eternal methods of organized nature. To William Lowndes Yancey, more than any other individual, is due the responsibility of organizing Southern political opinion to undertake, in 1861, the erection of a reformed federal compact. An earnest man, deep-believing, he lead to action a whole people not less free from superstition than the Jews who followed Bar Cochba to the fall of Bethar, nor less controlled by reason than the Athenians who lost Chæronea. The history of the wonderful extension of the empire of the Union, correlated to the decadence of the original theory of federal compact, demands, at the outset of this narrative, a fair statement, however brief. By treaty, Great Britain obtained from France the east bank of the Mississippi. Between the French territory, Canada, and the Spanish territory, the Floridas, the Atlantic and the Mississippi, lay the thirteen British American colonies who declared themselves free and independent States. The royal charter of Virginia fixed the boundaries of that colony, to the * Lieber's Civil Liberty and Self-government, p. 214. south one hundred miles from the mouth of the river James, to the north one hundred miles from the starting point, and west, between southern and northern limits, to the "South Sea❞— the extent of British territory. For more than an hundred years, the colonies had made unsuccessful efforts to form a confederacy, without any pre-conceived purpose of independence. The Continental Congress, in its origin, was a mere conference to combine the colonies upon certain measures of persuasion of the mother country. War broke out. Virginia insisted upon a Declaration of Independence. The Congress at length appointed two committees, one to prepare a Declaration, and the other to prepare Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union of the States. The former document was debated several days and, shorn of much of its original emphasis as presented by its author, was adopted, late in the day of July 4, 1776. All delegates present signed it, save Mr. Dickinson. The Articles of Confederation were debated two years. Dr. Witherspoon said the Union should be federal, each State preserving the weight of its own interest, thus securing civic freedom and personal liberty at the fountain head. John Adams contended for an incorporating union, where "a majority of the stock invested should control." Dr. Franklin followed Mr. Adams' view, and George Mason concurred with Dr. Witherspoon. While the debate progressed, Virginia opened a land office. So anxious was that State to foster her western interests, that her Legislature, in 1780, instructed her delegates in the Congress to vote for a treaty with Spain for the free navigation of the Mississippi to its mouth and, the better to secure this treaty, to vote to surrender South Carolina and Georgia to Great Britain as a condition of immediate recognition of the independence of the United States. Maryland, who owned no wild land, refused to accede to the Confederation, unless States, who were claimants of such property, should consent to convert it into common estate. Virginia protested. New Jersey and Delaware demanded the surrender by each State of its unoccupied lands, held beyond reasonable and prescribed limits. Having taken this position in Congress, Maryland reinforced it by an act of her General Assembly, May 21, 1779, warning her deputies not to accede to the Articles, unless these wild lands, claimed by the several |