Their position was summed
up by Langdon Cheves when he said, "To secede now is to secede
from the South as well as from the Union." On the basis of this
belief they defeated Rhett and put off secession for ten years.
There is no analogous single event in the history of the North,
previous to the war, which reveals with similar clearness a
sectional consciousness. On the surface the life of the people
seemed, indeed, to belie the existence of any such feeling. The
Northern capitalist class aimed steadily at being non-sectional,
and it made free use of the word national. We must not forget,
however, that all sorts of people talked of national
institutions, and that the term, until we look closely into the
mind of, the person using it, signifies nothing. Because the
Northern capitalist repudiated the idea of sectionalism, it does
not follow that he set up any other in its place. Instead of
accomplishing anything so positive, he remained for the most part
a negative quantity.
Living usually somewhere between Maine and Ohio, he made it his
chief purpose to regulate the outflow of manufactures from that
industrial region and the inflow of agricultural produce. The
movement of the latter eastward and northward, and the former
westward and southward, represents roughly but graphically the
movement of the business of that time.
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