AN OPEN LETTER

то

DR. HEINRICH VON SYBEL.

(In lieu of the Preface.)

My Very Dear Friend:

This volume brings to a close my work on the Constitusional History of the United States, to which you gave the first impulse more than twenty years ago. It does not, as my readers will probably expect, follow the course of events up to the actual outbreak of the civil war. Although that event, for very intelligible reasons, has been considered hitherto as the end of the old Union and the beginning of the new, I have deemed it best to stop short of it. The deeper I made my studies, and the more I endeavored to comprehend the essence of things, the less could I accept that view; and still, so far as I am aware, its correctness has never yet been questioned. Naturally, there can be only a very partial justification for assigning any particular day as the boundary between the two. So far, however, as it is proper to draw such a dividing line at all, it seems to me that the grave closed over the coffin which slavery had made for the Union under the constitution of 1789, not amid the thunder of cannon of the 12th of April, but amid the festal music of the 4th of March, 1861. Yet, I see the decisive element, not in the fact that Abraham Lincoln took the place of James Buchanan, but simply in this, that by the constitutional end of the Thirty-sixth congress the way

21080