South had no immediate grievance. The only action of
the North of which she had any sort of right to complain was the
infringement of the spirit of the Constitutional compact by the Personal
Liberty Laws. But these laws there was now a decided disposition to
amend or repeal--a disposition strongly supported by the man whom the
North had elected as President. It is also true, that this man would
never have lent himself to any unfair depression of the Southern part of
the Union. This last fact, however, the South may be pardoned for not
knowing. Even those Northerners who had elected Lincoln knew little
about him except that he was the Republican nominee and had been a
"rail-splitter." In the South, so far as one can judge, all that was
heard about him was that he was a "Black Abolitionist," which was
false, and that in appearance he resembled a gorilla, which was, at
least by comparison, true.

But, even if Lincoln's fairness of mind and his conciliatory disposition
towards the South had been fully appreciated, it is not clear that the
logic of the Secessionist case would have been greatly weakened. The
essential point was that the North, by virtue of its numerical
superiority, had elected a purely Northern candidate on a purely
Northern programme. Though both candidate and programme were in fact
moderate, there was no longer any security save the will of the North
that such moderation would continue. If the conditions remained
unaltered, there was nothing to prevent the North at a subsequent
election from making Charles Sumner President with a programme conceived
in the spirit of John Brown's raid. It must be admitted that the policy
adopted by the dominant North after the Civil War might well appear to
afford a measure of posthumous justification for these fears.

In the North at first all seemed panic and confusion of voices. To
many--and among them were some of those who had been keenest in
prosecuting the sectional quarrel of which Secession was the outcome--it
appeared the wisest course to accept the situation and acquiesce in the
peaceable withdrawal of the seceding States. This was the position
adopted almost unanimously by the Abolitionists, and it must be owned
that they at least were strictly consistent in taking it. "When I called
the Union 'a League with Death and an Agreement with Hell,'" said
Garrison, "I did not expect to see Death and Hell secede from the
Union." Garrison's disciple, Wendell Phillips, p