_The Tribune Almanac_ gives the votes by counties, while Richardson's _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_, already named in earlier notes, and the _Statutes at Large of the United States_ supply the texts of important papers, laws, and treaties. Richard Peters's _Reports of Cases Argued in the Supreme Court_ and B. C. Howard's continuation of this series supply the decisions of the Federal Supreme Court. U. B. Phillips's _Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb_, in the _Reports of the American Historical Association_ (1911), is a valuable contribution to the sources of the period. Special studies of importance are: W. E. B. DuBois's _Suppression of the African Slave Trade_ (1896); M. G. McDougall's _Fugitive Slaves_ (1891), J. C. Hurd's _Law of Freedom and Bondage_ (1858); Edward McPherson's _Political History of the United States_ (1865); John H. Latane's _Diplomacy of the United States in Regard to Cuba_, in _American Historical Association Reports_ (1907); J. M. Callahan's _Evolution of Seward's Mexican Policy_ (1909); Phillips's _Life of Robert Toombs_ (1914); and H. White's _Life of Lyman Trumbull_ (1913). Of peculiar value for the spirit of the times are: Mrs. Roger A. Pryor's _Reminiscences of Peace and War_ (1905); Mrs. James Chesnut's _A Diary from Dixie_ (1905); and William H. Russell's _My Diary North and South_ (1863). CHAPTER XIV THE APPEAL TO ARMS Though the South had voted as a unit for Buchanan in 1856 and her leaders had long acted in concert on important matters, the election of Lincoln by a "solid" North was regarded by most owners of slaves as a revolutionary act; and the Southern reply to the challenge was secession. The idea of secession was familiar in 1860. In 1794 New England leaders in Congress had discussed such a remedy when it seemed certain that the Southerners would gain permanent control of the national machinery, and Westerners contemplated the same remedy for ills they could not otherwise cure during the period of 1793 to 1801. Rather than submit to the burdensome embargo and the more burdensome second war with England, most New England men of property seem to have preferred the dissolution of a union which was formed for commercial purposes; and we have seen how Webster urged resistance to the national tariff in 1820 even to the point of advising secession. The rightful means of local self-defense was a break-up of the confederacy, until in 1830 Jackson, speaking for the West, and Webster, speaking for the rising industrial group of the Northeast, announced that the Union was indissoluble and that an attempt to sever it would be accounted treason. A sense of nationality had come into existence, and a permanent, "sacred" union of all the States was the corollary of that belief.