l, while
keeping at the same time his pledge to "execute the laws," was Lincoln's
principal problem in the first days of his Presidency.

His policy turned mainly on two principles. First, the South must see
that the administration of the laws was really impartial, and that the
President executed them because he had taken an oath to do so; not
because the North wanted to trample on the South. This consideration
explains the extreme rigour with which he enforced the Fugitive Slave
Law. Here was a law involving a Constitutional obligation, which he,
with his known views on Slavery, could not possibly like executing,
which the North certainly did not want him to execute, which he could be
executing only from a sense of obligation under the Constitution. Such
an example would make it easier for moderate Southern opinion to accept
the application of a similar strictness to the seceding States.

The second principle was the strict confinement of his intervention
within the limits presented by his Inaugural. This was calculated to
bear a double effect. On the one hand, it avoided an immediate practical
challenge to the doctrine of State Sovereignty, strongly held by many in
the Middle States who were nevertheless opposed to Secession. On the
other, it tended, if prolonged, to render the Southern assumption of the
_role_ of "a people risen against tyrants" a trifle ridiculous. A
freeman defying the edicts of the oppressor is a dignified spectacle:
not so that of a man desperately anxious to defy edicts which the
oppressor obstinately refuses to issue. It was possible for Lincoln to
put the rebels in this position because under the American Constitution
nine-tenths of the laws which practically affected the citizen were
State and not Federal laws. When people began to talk of protesting
against tyranny by refusing to allow the tyrant to deliver their mails
to them, it was obvious how near the comic the sublime defiance of the
Confederates was treading. There were men in the South who fully
realized the disconcerting effect of the President's moderation. "Unless
you baptize the Confederacy in blood," said a leading Secessionist of
Alabama to Jefferson Davis, "Alabama will be back in the Union within a
month."

Unfortunately Lincoln's attitude of masterly inactivity could not be
kept up for so long, for a problem, bequeathed him by his predecessor,
pressed upon him, demanding action, just where action might, as he well
knew, me