January 27, 1861, The New York Herald
The present generation have not experienced the horrors of war upon their own soil, or felt its intolerable burdens, and hence flippant journalists at the North and at the South, and demagogues who desire to fish in troubled waters, can with impunity urge the country to take a leap in the dark over the fearful precipice of civil war – the most horrible, cruel and exhausting of all wars.
Greely formerly belonged to the peace sect, and was as much opposed to fighting as a Quaker. He denounced all sorts of war, even foreign war, and within a few weeks he said it would be contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the doctrines of human liberty to prevent the peaceable secession of the Southern States. He is now infected with the republican mania for coercion and civil war. At the time of the Mexican war the Tribune denounced the invasion on the part of the United States as a national sin, and endorsed the patriotic wish of Tom Corwin that our army sent to Mexico might be with bloody hands sent to hospitable graves. But, accordingly to Greeley, now, an army sent from the North to butcher our own citizens at the south, because they are not willing tamely to submit to Northern aggression and injustice, would be doing God service; and if they perished they would be enrolled in heaven as noble army of martyrs, in company with John Brown.
If the instigators to war were only successful in their design, they would soon pay the penalty of their wickedness to an impoverished, ruined people awakened to a sense of their folly. The last war with England prostrated the country, exhausted its resources and left it bankrupt. Funds were raised only at heavy ruinous discounts and private individuals were applied to for help in the struggle. Between the disaffection of the New England States and the want of the sinews of war, it was unable to carry on the contest for twelve months longer, and hence the government after three years fighting, was compelled to make peace. If foreign war is so disastrous, what would be the result of a civil war, in which American citizens – those of fifteen sister States on one side, and those of eighteen on the other – divided only by a geographical line, should cut each other’s throats and carry devastation into each other’s territory?
There is only one way which this matter can be settled without a disruption of the Union, and that is by inserting declaratory amendments in the constitution explaining those provisions which have been violated or evaded by the anti-slavery revolutionists of the Northern States. This, and this alone, will remove the whole question from Congress, and restore to the country that tranquility for which the constitution and the perfect Union were established. But if this should not be agreed to in Congress, then let a peaceable separation of the States take place, and two great confederacies be formed for the subjugation of the whole continent at a future day. Coercion might not be successful, and in that case the Union would be gone irretrievably. But if it were successful, it would be worse than useless. It could not make the South loyal, and the whole character of our institutions would be changed, and a military despotism take the place of free government. If there must be invasion of the South, then we submit that the abolitionists undertake it themselves – that they all go – and that Phillips and Garrison, and Hale, and Wade, and Giddings and Greeley, and Webb and Raymond, and Cheever and Beecher, with three thousand clergymen of New England, march at their head to South Carolina and to the other seceding States, and that the fire eating secession leaders, who are in favor of per se meet the Praise-God-Barebones army, not with white men, but with battalions of well fed, sleek blacks, who are ready to die for their institution and their masters, and who would make short work with the fanatic invaders, who, like John Brown, dream that the moment they show themselves the negro population would appear in insurrection as their allies. They would only find out their mistake when too late to return, and thus we would get rid at once and forever of the disturbing element which has kept the country in hot water for so long, and has at last brought it to the verge of ruin; and the Union would be placed upon a basis on which it could not be shaken for all future time.