John C. Calhoun was not a disunionist. The nullification ordinance of South Carolina, "the Hotspur of the Union," was not secession. It was the protest of a sovereign State against unconstitutional Federal taxation levied through the tariff on the consumer, not for government revenue, but for the benefit of the manufacturer. The nation heard the manly voice of the little State, and Calhoun and Clay stood side by side in the great compromise that followed. Calhoun and his people loved the Union, but they wanted a union that was a union. True religion is that which is laid down in the Bible, not theory nor sentiment. True political union is the union formed by the Sovereign States and expressed in the Constitution. Constitutional union was the only true union. Everything else was a mere sentiment or a sham. History will yet hold that the secession of the Southern States in 1861 was itself a union movement. The Northern States had destroyed the old union. By their numerous nullification acts in State assemblies they had repudiated the legislative branch of the government; by their defiance of the Supreme Court they had virtually abolished the judiciary, the second branch; and in 1860, by the sectional platform of the dominant party and the election of a sectional president, they had denationalized the executive branch of the government. Where was the union? Gone, utterly gone. South Carolina only cut herself off from the union-breakers and attached herself to such States as clung to the Constitution and Union of the fathers. Secession in 1861 meant the preservation of the union of 1787. Coercion in 1861 was rebellion against the Federal compact and death of the old Union. The Star-Spangled Banner became the labarum of invasion, and the Southern Cross the standard of all the Union that was left. The Union that our fathers and mothers loved lay buried for twenty-five years. From March, 1861, to March, 1885, any true Southern man in the national capital found himself a stranger in a strange land, and was looked upon as a political Pariah by those in power,--an intruder even in the house of his fathers. Every government office all over the land in the hands of the Northern States. What a travesty of union! The North a dictator, the South a satrapy. The Northern man, lord; the Southern man, a vassal.