And Americans of every generation have misunderstood the true nature of our union, and especially how it was made and how it could be unmade. The fathers were as much mistaken as to the real authorship of the declaration of independence, the articles of confederation, and the federal constitution, as Burke and many people of his time were as to the true causes of the French revolution, or as the brothers were as to those of their war. In all that the fathers did they were sure that they acted as agents solely of their respective colonies or States, which they believed to be independent and sovereign. Therefore they maintained that the authorship of the three great documents just mentioned was that of the separate States, when in truth it was that of the union. When the latter, which had been long forming its rudiments, came into something like consciousness, it at once spurred our fathers to make the declaration of independence. The declaration corresponds to the later ordinances of secession. And this union, gathering strength, led our fathers to make the old confederation; and its articles and the belonging government are closely paralleled by the constitution of the Confederate States and its belonging government. As southern nationalization brought forth the southern confederacy, so it was American nationalization that caused secession from England, the declaration of independence, and the confederation which won the Revolutionary war. To summarize the foregoing: Southern nationalization evolved the southern union, and American nationalization evolved the American union. The fathers, with the usual undiscernment of contemporaries, by a most natural _hysteron proteron_ conceived the latter union to be the work, product, and result of the constitution. In the intersectional contention, the south accepted the mistakes of the fathers and rested her cause upon them, and the north, instead of correcting them, substituted a huge and glaring mistake of her own. Advocating the maintenance of the constitution over all the States, she sought to refute the doctrine of State sovereignty urged by the south with the arguments of those who had opposed the adoption of the federal constitution. Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane--we omit the others--argued that the constitution, if ratified, would really wipe out State lines and make the central government supreme in authority over the States, and actually sovereign. Could the people of the thirteen States have been made to believe this, they would have unanimously rejected the instrument. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and many others competent to advise, stood in solid phalanx on the other side, and the people were convinced by them that adoption would have no such effect. They decided that the arguments were not good, and the constitution was ratified. But the discredited arguments were afterwards, by a very queer psychological process, taken up by Story, Webster, and a great host, and paraded as unanswerable