February 13, 1861; The New York Herald
That the Northern States at the present moment are on the eve of a calamitous commercial crisis, which threatens to plunge us into disorder, and perhaps ruin, no one with any foresight can fail to see. Apart from the evils resulting from the political difficulties now shaking the country from its centre to its borders, which have already culminated in the dismemberment of the Union, and a radical change in the positions of the North and the South, we are threatened here at the North with a terrible financial and social convulsion, completely breaking up all our commercial interests, destroying our profitable inter-trade with the Southern States, and the consequent interruption of the manufacturing industry of this section of the country, with all the trials and distresses which such a state of things is certain to entail upon us.
In a few weeks from now the new President will take possession of the purse and the sword at Washington; and we have no intimation from him with regard to his future policy, excepting it be in the dimly shadowed idea of a National Convention, which, at best, will take years to settle the question at issue, and will leave us nothing in the future. It seems to be his intention to take hold of the rump of Congress and the rump of the republic which is left to govern, and convert them into a military despotism; to make war upon the seceding Southern States with the naval and military arm at the disposal of the new administration: in other words, to inaugurate a sanguinary and unnatural civil war, on the mistaken idea that the Southern people are rebels and traitors. They are no more rebels and traitors than were the patriots of the thirteen colonies, who were dissatisfied with the British government because they believed that its laws infringed upon their personal rights and privileges, and they determined to form a government for themselves. If the Southern States believe that their rights and privileges have been invaded by the government of the united confederacy, and that there is no longer safety for them within its limits, the right of revolution remains to them just as much as it was vested in the thirteen British colonies in the middle of the last century. The seceding States have so decided, and have availed themselves of that right. They have formed a government of their own, adopted a constitution, and elected a President and Vice President. They will open negotiations with foreign Powers, and they will soon have an army of a hundred thousand men to maintain the integrity of their new government. And in this juncture what is it that is proposed to do? To make war upon them–a war of subjugation and conquest? Such are the unmistakeable indications. All our military leaders breathe nothing but war, and our civil and political leaders seem to have taken this infection: even the heads of departments in the quiescent and nerveless administration of Mr. Buchanan have no milder terms to use than ‘Shoot them down on the spot–shoot them down on the spot!’ To carry on such a war it will require loans upon loans, and if capitalists can be found to lend money for such a purpose the national debt may be swelled to a hundred millions in a few months.
Meantime, the commercial convulsion ripens apace; trade is stagnating; mercantile firms are suspending; the operative masses are approaching a starvation point; commerce between the North and South is at an end. In this terrible emergency what do we require to stave off the impending financial disaster and ultimate ruin of all our commercial interests? It is not coercion; it is not subjugation or conquest; it is not the violent of the laws’ of a confederacy already broken up. No; there is but one mode of averting the most destructive commercial revulsion that ever befell the country, and that is to recognise promptly the new Southern confederacy, to re-establish commercial relations between the North and South, and so reconstruct the government that the original condition of things in regard to interchange of commerce may be restored. If we do not do this, France and England will step in and open negotiations with the government of the Southern United States upon terms so favorable to all the contracting parties that the South will soon find itself in a position to be independent of us altogether, and we may see its profitable trade diverted into a foreign channel. Something should be done to prevent such a result as this before it is too late, and we see no better method than by recognizing the existence of an independent sovereignty in the Southern confederacy.
That such a necessity should have arisen is greatly to be deplored. That eight years of unexampled prosperity as a united nation should leave no better fruits than separation and sectional hostility is pitiable; but in these results we see only the consequence of a thirty years’ attempt to enforce the Puritan dogma that Southern slavery is sum of all iniquity.