the intent of the authors of the Constitution than its mere absence from the Constitution would have been. It is a clear indication that they did not mean to give any countenance to the idea that the government which they organized was a consolidated nationality instead of a confederacy of sovereign members. The question of secession was first raised by men of Massachusetts, the birthplace of secession. Colonel Timothy Pickering was one of the leading secessionists of his day. He had been an officer in the Revolution; afterwards Postmaster General, Secretary of War, Secretary of State in the cabinet of General Washington and senator from Massachusetts. Writing to a friend on December 24, 1803, he says: "I will not despair. I will rather anticipate a new confederacy exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South. There will be (and our children, at farthest, will see it) a separation. The white and black population will mark the boundary."[96] In another letter, written in January 29, 1804, he said: "The principles of our Revolution point to the remedy--a separation. This can be accomplished and without spilling one drop of blood, I have little doubt. It must begin in Massachusetts."[96] [96] Life of Cabot, p. 491. In 1811, on the bill for the admission of Louisiana as a state of the Union, the Hon. Josiah Quincy, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, said: "If this bill pass, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the states from other moral obligations, and as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some definitely to prepare for a separation, amicably, if they can, violently if they must." The war between the North and the South produced an abundant crop of bitter prejudices against the mother country. This sentiment was shared by the South as well as by the North. Each imagined it had been unfairly treated by the British Government.