Abby Howland Woolsey to Benjamin Mintorn Woolsey
When we were all children and spending, as usual, our summer with Grandfather Woolsey at Casina there arrived one day a new and charming cousin, Benjamin Minthorn Woolsey, from Alabama. He belonged to the Melancthan Taylor branch of the family, and none of us had ever seen him before. A warm friendship began and was continued until the mutterings of secession were heard. Abby, unwilling to give him up, argued and entreated in vain. The letter from which the following extracts are taken was probably her last to him and will give an idea of her clear and forcible thinking and writing. Many families decided at this point to meet again only as enemies.
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My dear Cousin: I hasten to answer your letter, for, as events march, mail facilities may soon be interrupted between North and South. When the great separation is a recognized fact postal treaties, along with others, may be arranged. Meantime, it is one of the curious features of your anomalous position that you are making use of a “foreign government” to carry your mails for you, on the score of economy. Congress may cut off the Southern service and occasion some inconvenience and delay, but I am told it will save the government about $26,000 weekly, that being the weekly excess of postal expenditure over revenue in the six seceding states.
I thank you very sincerely for your letter. It was very kind in you to write so promptly and fully and in so sedate a tone. But what a sober, disheartening letter it was! We have been slow to believe that the conservative men of the cotton states have been swept into this revolution. I could not believe it now but for your assurance as regards yourself and your state. “Not a hundred Union men” as we understand it, in Alabama! We had supposed there were many hundreds who would stand by the Union, unconditionally if need be, and uphold the Constitution, not according to any party construction, but as our fathers framed it, as the Supreme Court expounds it, and as it will be Mr. Lincoln’s wisest policy to administer it. Not a hundred Union men in your state! Truly not, if Mr. Yancey speaks for you and Alabama when he avows himself as “utterly, unalterably opposed to any and all plans of reconstructing a Union with the Black Republican states of the North. No new guarantees, no amendments of the Constitution, no repeal of obnoxious laws can offer any the least inducement to reconstruct our relations.” Then compromisers in Congress, in convention, everywhere, may as well cease their useless efforts. Not a hundred Union men in Alabama! Who then burned Mr. Yancey himself in effigy? Have those delegates who refused to sign the secession ordinance yet done so? and what constituencies do they represent? Why was it refused to refer the action of convention to the people?
Whatever the Border states may have suffered, and, as in the case of the John Brown raid, have swiftly and terribly avenged, you of the Gulf states can hardly think that your wrongs have been so intolerable as to make revolution necessary. True, you describe us as standing with a loaded pistol at your breast, but the heaviest charge we have ever put in is non-extension of slavery in the territories. If slavery cannot stand that; if, surrounded by a cordon of free states, like a girdled tree it dies, then it cannot have that inherent force of truth and justice—that divine vitality which has been claimed for it. This is as favorable a time as we could have to meet the issue and settle it peacefully, I trust, forever. And here comes up the subject of compromises, the Crittenden measures particularly. How does it happen that the Southern demands have increased so enormously since last year? Then the Senate declared by a vote of 43 to 5 that it was not necessary to pass a law to protect slavery in the territories. Now, you “secede” because you cannot get what Fitzpatrick, Clay, Benjamin, Iverson, and others declared you did not need. Then you asked the Democratic convention at Charleston to put a slavery code into the party platform, and you split your party about it. Now you come to the opponents who fairly outvoted you and your platform and ask them to put the same protective clause,—where?—into the Constitution! We can never eat our principles in that way, though all fifteen of the states secede. The right of eminent domain, by which South Carolina claims Fort Sumter, inapplicable as it is, is a respectable demand compared with what has been practiced further south—the right of seizure. If you attack Sumter you may precipitate a collision. Meantime, never was a people calmer than ours here, in the face of great events. We have scarcely lifted a finger, while the South has been arming in such hot haste and hurrying out of the Union, in the hope of accomplishing it all under Floyd’s guilty protectorate. We all hope much from the new administration. We think well of a man who for so long has managed to hold his tongue. We shall try to help him and hold up his hands, not as our partisan candidate but as the President of the Nation. If we become two confederacies we shall not shrink from this race with your Republic, which in the heart of christian America and in the middle of the Nineteenth Century lays down slavery as its corner stone, and finds its allies in Spain, Dahomey, and Mohammedan Turkey.