country post-offices.

By this time, Lincoln had thrown off the overpowering gloom which
possessed him in the latter days at Springfield. It is possible he
had reacted to a mood in which there was something of levity. His
oscillation of mood from a gloom that nothing penetrated to a sort of
desperate mirth, has been noted by various observers. And in 1861 he
had not reached his final poise, that firm holding of the middle
way,---which afterward fused his moods and made of him, at least in
action, a sustained personality.

About the middle of the month he had a famous interview with Colonel W.
T. Sherman who had been President of the University of Louisiana and had
recently resigned. Senator John Sherman called at the White House with
regard to "some minor appointments in Ohio." The Colonel went with him.
When Colonel Sherman spoke of the seriousness of the Secession movement,
Lincoln replied, "Oh, we'll manage to keep house." The Colonel was so
offended by what seemed to him the flippancy of the President that he
abandoned his intention to resume the military life and withdrew from
Washington in disgust.(13)

Not yet had Lincoln attained a true appreciation of the real difficulty
before him. He had not got rid of the idea that a dispute over slavery
had widened accidentally into a needless sectional quarrel, and that as
soon as the South had time to think things over, it would see that it
did not really want the quarrel. He had a queer idea that meanwhile he
could hold a few points on the margin of the Seceded States, open custom
houses on ships at the mouths of harbors, but leave vacant all Federal
appointments within the Seceded States and ignore the absence of their
representatives from Washington.(14) This marginal policy did not seem
to him a policy of coercion; and though he was beginning to see that the
situation from the Southern point of view turned on the right of a State
to resist coercion, he was yet to learn that idealistic elements of
emotion and of political dogma were the larger part of his difficulty.

Meanwhile, the upper South had been proclaiming its idealism. Its
attitude was creating a problem for the lower South as well as for the
North. The pro-slavery leaders had been startled out of a dream. The
belief in a Southern economic solidarity so complete that the secession
of any one Slave State would compel the secession of all the others,
that belief had been proved fallacious. It had been made p