ronounced the matter one
for the Gulf States themselves to decide, and declared that you could
not raise troops in Boston to coerce South Carolina or Florida. The same
line was taken by men who carried greater weight than did the
Abolitionists. No writer had rendered more vigorous service to the
Republican cause in 1860 than Horace Greeley of the _New York Tribune_.
His pronouncement in that journal on the Southern secessions was
embodied in the phrase: "Let our erring sisters go."

But while some of the strongest opponents of the South and of Slavery
were disposed to accept the dismemberment of the Union almost
complacently, there were men of a very different type to whom it seemed
an outrage to be consummated only over their dead bodies. During the
wretched months of Buchanan's incurable hesitancy the name of Jackson
had been in every mouth. And at the mere sound of that name there was a
rally to the Union of all who had served under the old warrior in the
days when he had laid his hand of steel upon the Nullifiers. Some of
them, moved by that sound and by the memory of the dead, broke through
the political ties of a quarter of a century. Among those in whom that
memory overrode every other passion were Holt, a Southerner and of late
the close ally of Davis; Cass, whom Lowell had pilloried as the typical
weak-kneed Northerner who suffered himself to be made the lackey of the
South; and Taney, who had denied that, in the contemplation of the
American Constitution, the Negro was a man. It was Black, an old
Jacksonian, who in the moment of peril held the nerveless hands of the
President firm to the tiller. It was Dix, another such, who sent to New
Orleans the very Jacksonian order: "If any man attempts to haul down the
American flag, shoot him at sight."

War is always the result of a conflict of wills.

The conflict of wills which produced the American Civil War had nothing
directly to do with Slavery. It was the conflict between the will of
certain Southern States to secede rather than accept the position of a
permanent minority and the will expressed in Jackson's celebrated toast:
"Our Union, it must be preserved." It is the Unionist position which
clearly stands in need of special defence, since it proposed the
coercion of a recalcitrant population. Can such a defence be framed in
view of the acceptance by most of us of the general principle which has
of late been called "the self-determination of peoples"?

I th