That intensely patriotic feeling of nationality was all pervasive, except in so far as the slavery controversy impaired it as it did, both North and South. If that one cause of disagreement had not existed, if there had been no negro slaves in the United States, the sentiment of union and nationality which had grown with the Nation's growth and strengthened with its strength, would unquestionably have overborne all the quibbles and all the logical refinements of the earlier time. The decisions of the Supreme Court, especially those of John Marshall, which in effect rewrote the Constitution and successfully claimed for the courts the right to annul any and all acts of Congress that were not in accordance with the Constitution, had created a new and effective barrier against possible aggression by the Federal power upon the autonomy of the states and had at the same time established the Federal authority securely. When Marshall decided in Marbury vs. Madison, that an act of Congress assuming to do by national authority anything reserved to the states in the constitutional grant of power to the General Government, is no law at all but an act null and void, which the courts will on no account enforce, there was an end of all danger of wanton Federal encroachment upon the reserved rights of the states. And, as we have seen, that fear died out of men's minds, except in so far as questions relating to slavery from time to time revived it. But for those questions it need never again have arisen to vex the Republic and set its people by the ears. But slavery involved questions of prejudice, questions of passion, questions of morality, questions of labor, questions of principle, and questions of pride, of sentiment, of conscience, of religion, of conviction. It stirred the passions of men, excited their prejudices, and appealed to their interests as no other question of policy has done in our modern times. Incidentally it revived, as no other issue could have done, all the old jealousies between the Union and the several states which the progress of the Republic had so strongly tended to allay. It set the history of the formation of the Union against the history of the Union itself as implacably antagonistic historical arguments in behalf of conflicting contentions. Let us see how all this came about. When the colonies achieved their independence, slavery existed, in greater or less degree, in all of them. The negro was then nowhere regarded as a man, so far at least as the generalizations of the Declaration of Independence and other formal settings forth of human rights were concerned. There was a strong desire to be rid of slavery, a deep seated conviction of the impolity of that institution, but, except among the Quakers and a very few others, there seems to have been no thought anywhere that the holding of negroes in bondage was a violation of that fundamental doctrine of human rights upon which the Republic had been established.