In
their thoughts they anticipated a later statesman and realized
that they were confronted by a condition and not by a theory.
Secession was at last a reality. Which course should they take?
What strikes us most forcibly, as we look back upon that day, is
the widespread desire for peace. The abolitionists form a
conspicuous example. Their watchword was "Let the erring sisters
go in peace." Wendell Phillips, their most gifted orator, a
master of spoken style at once simple and melodious, declaimed
splendidly against war. Garrison, in "The Liberator", followed
his example. Whittier put the same feeling into his verse:
They break the links of Union; shall we light
The flames of hell to weld anew the chain
On that red anvil where each blow is pain?
Horace Greeley said in an editorial in the "New York Tribune":
"If the cotton states shall decide that they can do better out of
the Union than in it, we shall insist on letting them go in
peace. Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall
deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive
measures designed to keep them in. We hope never to live in a
republic where one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets."
The Democrats naturally clung to their traditions, and, even when
they went over, as Black and Stanton did, to the Anti-Southern
group, they still hoped that war would not be the result.
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