th who voted for Bell and
Everett demanded peace at any price. An orator in New York at a great
mass meeting dared to say:

"If a revolution of force is to begin it shall be inaugurated at home!
It will be just as brutal to send men to butcher our brothers of the
South as it will be to massacre them in the Northern States."

The business interests of the Northern cities were bitterly and
unanimously arrayed against any attempt to use force against the South.
The city of New York was thoroughly imbued with Secession sentiment, and
its Mayor, through Daniel E. Sickles, one of the members of Congress,
demanded the establishment of a free and independent Municipal State on
the island of Manhattan.

Seward had just written to Charles F. Adams, our minister to England:

"Only an imperial and despotic government could subjugate thoroughly
disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This Federal
Republican country of ours is, of all forms of Government, the very one
which is the most unfitted for such a labor."

This letter could only mean one of two things, either that the first
member of the Cabinet was a Secessionist and meant to allow the South to
go unmolested, or he planned to change our form of Government by a _coup
d'etat_ in the crisis and assume the Dictatorship. In either event his
attitude boded ill for the new President and his future.

Wendell Phillips, the eloquent friend of Senator Winter, declared in
Boston in a public address:

"Here are a series of states who think their peculiar institutions
require that they should have a separate government. They have the right
to decide that question without appealing to you or me. Standing with
the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? Abraham
Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. There is no longer a
Union. You can not go through Massachusetts and recruit men to bombard
Charleston or New Orleans. Nothing but madness can provoke a war with
the Gulf States."

The last member of his distracted, divided, passion-ridden Cabinet had
gone at the close of its first eventful sitting. The dark figure of the
President stood beside the window looking over the mirror-like surface
of the Potomac to the hills of Virginia.

The shadow of a great sorrow shrouded his face and form. The shoulders
drooped. But the light in the depths of his sombre eyes was growing
steadily in intensity.

Old Edward, the veteran hallman, appeared at the