Ideas of

state allegiance in the

South

State lines

obliterated in

the North

mind and heart they would as soon have thought of suicide as of abandoning their state. This brings out clearly how Southerners thought in terms of states-a feeling very much less marked in the North. A great industrial revolution had swept over the North and had wiped out, in a commercial sense, state lines. It was "better business" to think in terms of union than in terms of states-more business, safer business. Again, in the case of a majority of the twenty-three "northern" states the state lines were quite artificially made. People do not have the same sense of affection for a state if they have to wait for a surveyor's squad to come and tell them what to love and what not to, as they do for a state that has certain natural boundaries which have long marked off, distinctly, a section which their grandfathers and great-grandfathers revered and honored for definite principles which local tradition had made glorious. The South had not been shocked into a revolution of business; with few changes it was going on the even tenor of a way long ago established. This peculiar fealty of state had been cemented by eighty years of fighting for States' Rights; it explains why, now, half of the officers of the United States army as it then existed quietly packed their kits and left for the South saying, often in sadness, "My state-right or wrong."

perilous

When Abraham Lincoln assumed control in Washington and could look about (over the host of office-seekers which nearly swamped him), his eyes, therefore, gazed upon the very "sad and heart-rending spectacle" Lincoln's which Henry Clay prayed he might never live to situation see, and peered curiously into that very "abyss, over the edge of which Webster boasted he had never allowed himself to hang. Men wondered how he would treat the national situation in his inaugural address. Would

His first

it ignore the issue? Would it advise submission inaugural to the "inevitable"? Would it be a battle-cry

or a "swan song" to the "once glorious Union"? Its actual words were a surprise to almost everyone for it amounted

simply to a very tender appeal; as a mother might sing over quarrelsome children, so Lincoln, in words half-meaningless to the North and smacking of weakness to the South, spoke tenderly in hope of peace. It was a sign of weakness-if love were not the greatest thing, the strongest thing, in all the world!

The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave [ran those stately lines] to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

For all that this noble state paper spoke so feelingly, not a single reader of it could miss the fact that Lincoln laid down very plainly in it his purpose to preserve the Union and to use, to that end, every power of the government at his command. William H. Seward, whom Lincoln now made Secretary of

Seward's prescription for the national disease

State, looked upon himself as the mainstay of the new administration. He proposed that Lincoln should bring on a foreign war with Great Britain, France, and Spain, in order to distract the nation's attention from its troubles. Lincoln listened. Others brought him other advice, some of it good, some of it as absurd as Seward's. Patiently he listened to all. His poise in the midst of the rabble was like nothing so much as that of one of his pioneer ancestor's in the Allegheny or Kentucky forests-a man surrounded by harsh Nature and dependent upon his wits to keep soul and body together. He kept his ears open to the politicians but his heart was beating deep down among the hearts of the common people. Will-o'-the-wisps, in the form of rash steps, were held to his eyes by "ardent" patriots; jack-o'-lanterns, in the shape of idle compromises,1 were flashed before his face.

Lincoln's poise

1One of these compromises suggested that the Constitution should be amended so that our nation should be definitely divided into slaveholding and non-slaveholding sections by the Missouri Compromise line. Another proposed that the Northern States repeal all “personal liberty" laws. Another, that slave owners be financially reimbursed for the loss of every runaway slave. Lincoln favored none of these, being conscious that they did not strike at the root of the trouble.

To all suggestions he gave some attention; his inactivity angered many friends, gave false hopes to the designers of eccentric schemes, and made the South still more confident that the North "would not fight." If it was lethargy—it was not the lethargy of cowardice. One light he never lost sight of and never ceased to steer for the preservation of the Union; the one policy he never once thought of abandoning was the battle-cry of his party, "No extension of slavery." Extremists assailed him from every side, but, in Professor West's splendid words, "the silent masses responded to his sympathy and answered his appeal with love and perfect trust, and enabled him to carry through successfully the greatest task so far set for any American statesman."

Moral uprightness and party promises

Lincoln's
sympathy
for the South

Lincoln never blamed the South; he saw how very deep the roots of the trouble had been driven, how naturally they had grown; and with sincere sorrow he saw the South throw itself into a one-sided conflict with a bravery and a determination never equalled since swords and shields had been fashioned by mankind. These were not, as Webster used the words, "dishonored fragments" of a once glorious Union. You cannot question the "honor" of a million and a half heroic American soldiers; you cannot gainsay Jefferson Davis on his knees all night in prayer after a last appeal to the United States Senate; nor can you impugn the motive of a "Stonewall" Jackson asking God's favor on his sleeping ranks of gray.

Amid all the confusion which followed the secession of the seven states (joined, six weeks later, by four more, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee) the world seemed to wait for the "overt act" which should change guesses into certain knowledge and draw clear lines between "friend" and "foe." The South, believing that the North would not fight, was confident that it could make better terms out of the Union than in it; doubtless this argument was supreme in influencing moderate men to favor nominal secession. Between the rabidly partizan North and South lay the "Border States," Maryland,

Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia (1863), and Missouri. These states had known only the milder domestic type of slavery but in large part, they were doomed to be steadily over-run with armies for years.

The regrettable overt act came when Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, April 12, 1861, on the ground that Lincoln's resolute attempt to relieve its garrison was 'an act of war."

It is sometimes a relief "to know the worst." The

Fort Sumter bombarded

opening of hostilities hushed the jargon of debate and warned

THE BOMBARDMENT OF FORT SUMTER. (An illustration from a contemporary magazine.)

The sections compared

every man to find his place in a uniform or in work. The South contained but about five and a half millions of whites to face nineteen millions at the North. But it was, plainly, a defensive war she was to fight, and she had nearly four million blacks to rely upon as laborers, who-be it forever remembered to their honor