Book Description

Excerpt from The Constitutional and Political History of the United States My Very Dear Friend: This volume brings to a close my work on the Constitutional History of the United States, to which you gave the first impulse more than twenty years ago. It does not, as my readers will probably expect, follow the course of events up to the actual outbreak of the civil war. Although that event, for very intelligible reasons, has been considered hitherto as the end of the old Union and the beginning of the new, I have deemed it best to stop short of it. The deeper I made ray studies, and the more I endeavored to comprehend the essence of things, the less could I accept that view; and still, so far as I am aware, its correctness has never yet been questioned. Naturally, there can be only a very partial justification for assigning any particular day as the boundary between the two. So far, however, as it is proper to draw such a dividing line at all, it seems to me that the grave closed over the coffin which slavery had made for the Union under the constitution of 1789, not amid the thunder of cannon of the 12th of April, but amid the festal music of the 4th of March, 1861. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.