January 16, 1861, The New York Herald
The policy which Mr. Seward’s speech of Saturday insinuates, rather than avows, foreshadowing, as it does, some germs of good, correctly indicates to what extent republicans fanaticism has begun to recoil before the avalanche of destruction which is tottering over the country. Louis XI bows low, in his craft, before the stirrup of his victorious brother of Burgundy, [….] and humbly begs for time. A little delay, only, and he will grant everything. True, if he cannot gain the sought for truce he must yield everything; instead of promises he must, if required, hand over his crown. Mr. Seward emulates his prototype and will consent to any concessions the eccentric movements of secession and disunion shall have ended – one, two or three years hence. While he may, he reiterates now; only calmness shall have resumed its accustomed sway over the public mind, then, and not until then is he prepared to yield those which the changes of society and alternations of empire require. ‘Sagacious Seward, whose manifesto, like the proffers of Louis XI in his imprisonment, ends with a gigantic, indispensable .’ He says that we are the midst of alarms, and somewhat exposed to accidents, unavoidable in seasons of tempestuous passions,’, therefore, although he would prefer above all things such procrastination as may yet insure that cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana shall ultimately be tilled with free labor,’’– and this is his most significant utterance, as the mouthpiece of Mr. Lincoln – sacrifices, private or public, shall be needful for the Union, they will be made. And with a foresight as to what those sacrifices, instigated by himself as Premier of the incoming administration may be, he adds: ‘The Union shall continue and endure; and men in after times shall declare that this generation, which saved the Union from such sudden and unlooked for dangers, surpassed in magnanimity even that one which laid its foundations in the eternal principles of liberty, justice and humanity.’
Mr. Seward’s programme for the future is, nevertheless, unbloody and compromising enough to be infinitely displeasing to the Wades, Sumners, Giddingses, Washburnes, Lovejoys, Hales and Garrisons of the republican party. They have adopted the motto that victors must dictate to the vanquished,’ unwilling to comprehend that, although they have elected a President on an abolition platform. he is far yet from having been inaugurated, and that his chances are small of ever becoming chief magistrate of the whole thirty-three States – united. They are unprepared to abandon so soon the chance of the fulfilment of Mr. Greeley’s aspiration: ‘Let the epitaphs of John Brown and his compatriots remain unwritten until the not distant day when no slave shall clank his chains in the shades of Monticello, or by the grave of Mount Vernon.
Such a letting down from his old positions was the speech of Mr. Seward held to be, that Senator Wade exclaimed: ‘Great was the fall thereof.’ Of course the radical Southern party are equally dissatisfied. They ridicule the awkward absurdity that the disease of today can be cured years hence; that acknowledgment of the need of immediate change should be simultaneous with the declaration that change must be postponed; that avowal of the imminence of the emergency is accompanied by a demand that it shall not be met until it is too late; that the country should be called upon to sleep quietly on the edge of the crater, while the volcano is rumbling with the elements of inevitable explosion.
Meanwhile the huge, hideous, jagged mass of revolution tumbles downward, in its irregular, unexplored track, with constantly accelerating rapidity. ‘Irrepressible conflict’ has developed itself into such outlines of civil war that sober minded, patriotic citizens tremble from day to day lest the next news should be the calamity of bloodshed somewhere, and the beginning of internecine strife which may spread like a pall over the prosperity of the Union. The populations of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, Maryland, Florid and Georgia have virtually broken the links already that bind them to the confederation. Tennessee has called for a State Convention in February for the purpose of seceding, and Kentucky cannot long remain in the background. The occupation of the arsenal at St. Louis by United States troops shows how strong the anti-Northern feeling is there. The excited sectional feeling which opened the mouths of the cannon of Fort Moultrie upon a steamer chartered by the United States government finds its re-echo and response from Cape Henlopen to the Rio Grande. The fortifications which have been seized upon by State authorities on the Atlantic seaboard and on the Gulf of Mexico render the approach to most of the Southern ports impossible. Fort Pulaski, in the hands of Georgia, is impregnable; the defenses of the Belize could not be retaken by the entire United States Navy; Pensacola, in the hands of Alabama, and forts Monroe and McHenry, occupied by Virginia and Maryland, defy attack. In face of such a critical state of things the time has passed to reason that the President or the government has the right to protect federal property. Even though it had not passed away beyond hope of recovery by force of arms, it would still be a duty to inquire whether there is no higher principle than that which is based upon mere abstract right.
The bitter end so long foreseen is at last approaching. The period has arrived for the country to pay for the treat of elevating anti-slavery republicanism to power in the country. The present prostration and confusion of all material interests; such a dislocation of administrative machinery as never has been known before; bitter, bloodthirsty hatred between ultraists of the South and the North; the probability that a quiet, continuous routine of government, after the 4th of March, will be impossible; the frightful possibility of an abyss of civil war, which may reduce us to a lower level than Mexico – all this is the consequence of that agitation of the slavery question, against the constitutional rights of the slave-holding states, which has been steadily persevered in for thirty years, and which has, within three months, reached the climax of evil. The catastrophe has not come upon us of a sudden, nor without premonitory signs visible to the most ordinary observation. Its latest colossal steps may have taken many by surprise; but historical experience shows that the passions and purposes of revolution, once unloosed, outstrip consummation the keenest imaginations of those even who have inspired them and given them birth. If, in the deplorable predicament into which the Union has been hurried by the blind heat of anti-slavery zealots, crazy, ambitious New England preachers and pseudo philanthropists – who could not or would not stop to calculate the cost – the counsels should be listed too of those who would at any hazard, attempt to coerce the Southern States, the mischief would become desperate and irremediable. The faint remnant of hope which still remains for the cause of national unity is to be found in the praiseworthy moderation with which Mr. Buchanan in the present crisis has adhered to a policy of the utmost forbearance in the midst of the difficulties by which he has been surrounded.
Fifteen States, before the 4th of March next, will probably have separated themselves from the Union. As the weeks have passed by since the opening of the present session of Congress, the eyes of the people have been turned first upon their national representatives, and then upon the incoming administration, to dispel the tempest that threatens to engulf us. The shiftless imbecility, incapacity, stupidity, ignorance, together with the gross venality and selfishness, of the Senate and House of Representatives, have literally filled the country with stupor and amazement. At a moment when the discretion, judgment, patriotism and prestige of statesmen, similar to those that surrounded Washington, Jefferson and Madison, were needed, there has been only seen a desolate blank in knowledge and sagacity at the source whence sound and healthy legislation should have proceeded. And while Congress has been burrowing in its molehill Mr. Lincoln has also refrained from saying a word which could allay fears of terrible impending disaster. Thus …we have drifted to a point where the question has ceased to be, “shall the Union be dissolved?” “Shall the South be permitted to go out peaceably, or must there be civil war?” has taken its place. Can anything be more horrible?
“A nation at the height of its prosperity surrounded by every external and rejoicing in every internal essential of happiness, suicidally plunging its future destiny, its wealth, fair fame and the hopes which humanity had founded upon it, into an abyss of utter ruin, desolation and misery, without the slightest hope, and scarce a possibility, of recovery.”
“Let there be peace. Below all the fires of discord that now burn, there stands out clear, unmistakeable, demonstrated, the inextinguishable love of country of five-sixths of the population of the United States. Neither abolition fanatics nor fire-eating mobocrats can quench it. Let it all be employed now in averting the miseries which factions, wrought up to frenzy by the exaggerations of sectional emotions, would bring upon us.