wise men ever fancied that a conflict
could be avoided; but, as usual, the strenuous hope became father to an
anxious belief. Abraham Lincoln, in the first year when he gave
indication of his political clear-sightedness, said truly that the
country could not continue half slave and half free. That truth involved
war. There was no other possible way to settle the question between the
two halves; talk of freeing the slaves by purchase, or by gradual
emancipation and colonization, was simple nonsense, the forlorn schemes
of men who would fain have escaped out of the track of inexorable
destiny. Yet the vast majority of the nation, appalled at the vision of
the great fact which lay right athwart their road, was obstinate in the
delusive expectation of flanking it, as though there were side paths
whereby mankind can circumvent fate and walk around that which _must
be_, just as if it were not. Thus it came to pass that when the South
seceded, as every intelligent man ought to have been perfectly sure
would be the case, a confusion fell for a time upon the North. In that
section of the country there was for a few months a spectacle which has
no parallel in history. There was paralysis, there was disintegration;
worse than either, there was an utter lack of straight sense and clear
thought. There were politicians, editors, writers, agitators, reformers
in multitudes whose reiteration of their moral convictions, whose
intense addresses and uncompromising articles, had for years been
bringing about precisely this event; yet when it came, it appeared that
no one of them had contemplated it with any realizing appreciation, no
one of them was ready for it, no one of them had any sensible, practical
course of action to recommend. There was no union among them, no
cohesion of opinion or of purpose, no agreement of forecast; each had
his own individual notion as to what could be done, what should be done,
what would be the train of events. Politically speaking, society was a
mere parcel of units, with topical proximity, but with no other element
of aggregation. The immensity of the crisis seemed to shake men's minds;
the enigma of duty involved such possibilities, in case of a wrong
solution, that the wisest leaders, becoming dazed and overawed, uttered
the grossest follies. Men who had been energetic and vigorous before,
when they were pursuing a purpose, who became so again afterward, when
the distinct issue had taken shape, now lost f