been, and I had fallen, it would have been the best thing that could have happened for the cause; but nothing will happen to me or to my house. I have not lived in this city for thirteen years for nothing. The friendly crowd responded with cheers and cries of "That's so," and separated, and so the incident came to an end.

Abraham Lincoln's speech in Cooper Union, February 27, 1860, won for him the nomination to the presidency by the Republican party. His speech became the platform of the party. In its principles and in its spirit it represented what Mr. Beecher had for ten years urged his fellow citizens to incorporate in a national resolve and embody in national action. It therefore made Abraham Lincoln Mr. Beecher's candidate for the presidency. In the triumph of the Republican party upon this platform, and with this man as its leader, the epoch of anti-slavery agitation came to an end; the epoch of civil war began. For from the day when the election of Abraham Lincoln was announced, the issue before the people of the North regarding slavery was changed. It was no longer, Would they consent to the extension of slavery? That question was answered. It was, Would they respond to Abraham Lincoln's appeal: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it"?

CHAPTER IX

THE CIVIL WAR

MR. LINCOLN was elected in November, 1860; his inauguration did not take place until March 4, 1861; this quasi interregnum of four months between the election and the inauguration of the President of the United States cost the nation unnumbered thousands of dollars and unnumbered thousands of lives. That the Civil War could have been absolutely prevented is not probable; that its duration would have been greatly lessened if Mr. Lincoln had taken the reins of government within four weeks after his election cannot be doubted, for during the four months of interregnum the nation was without a leader. Mr. Lincoln could not lead because he was not President; Mr. Buchanan could not lead because he had not capacity. The nation was confronting a great crisis, and Mr. Buchanan was not the man for a crisis. A skillful diplomat, a shrewd politician, skillful in the evasion of difficult questions, but without a statesman's ability to understand or a brave man's courage to meet them, incapable of comprehending a great situation or grasping a great principle, Mr. Buchanan was exactly not the man for the place.

There were in the country two conceptions of

the nature of the federal government. The United States of America is confessedly a union of sovereign states. Ought it to be regarded as a partnership from which any partner may withdraw at will, or a marriage which once consummated is indissoluble? The South held the first view, the North the second. The sovereignty resides in the people. Was the supreme expression of this sovereignty in the State or in the Nation? in an issue between the two which was the final arbiter? The South answered, The State; the North answered, The Nation. Either view was self-consistent; for either view rational argument was possible. Mr. Buchanan, versed in the art of compromising by the simple method of conceding something in every controversy to each disputant, attempted to solve this controversy by such a compromise. He said in effect to the North: "You are right—this is a nation; the union of the states is a marriage; no state has a right to secede." He said in effect to the South: "You are right-the sovereignty of the state is supreme; the sovereignty of the federal government is subordinate, and although no state has a right to secede, the federal government has no right to coerce it into submission if it does secede." Such a compromise, pronounced by the chief executive of the federal government, was entirely satisfactory to the secessionists; they did not in the least care what theory Mr. Buchanan held respecting the right of a state to secede, so long as he refused to use or allow to be used the

forces of the federal government in preventing secession. Under his administration seven states were permitted to hold conventions and proclaim their withdrawal from the Union; the Secretary of War was allowed to retain his post and use his power to equip the seceding states for the impending conflict; the United States brigadier-general commanding the Department of Texas was allowed to turn over his entire army, with all the posts and fortifications, arms, munitions of war, horses and equipments, to the Confederate authorities. Before Mr. Lincoln's inauguration, and under Mr. Buchanan's administration, the Confederate States had taken possession of every fort, arsenal, dockyard, mint, custom-house, and court-house in their territory except three- Fort Sumter, Fort Pickens, and Key West. This was not accomplished without strong opposition in the South. In South Carolina, when the minister first dropped from the service the prayer for the President of the United States, James L. Pettigrew, the foremost lawyer of the state, rose in his pew, and slowly and with distinct voice repeated, " Most humbly and heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to uphold and bless Thy servant the President of these United States;" then, placing his prayer-book in the rack, withdrew, with his wife, from the church, which he never reëntered. In Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens, easily the foremost statesman in the South, argued earnestly against secession; pointed out the fact that the Republican President faced a

Democratic majority, both in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, could carry no legislation, could appoint no officer, could not even form a cabinet hostile to the interests of the country, as the Democratic majority interpreted those interests. It may fairly be doubted whether the ordinance of secession would have commanded a popular vote in any state in the South except South Carolina if the vote could have been preceded by a full and free discussion, if it could have been unattended with threatening or violence, and if the Unionists could have had the moral support of the federal administration.

But it must be said, in apology for Mr. Buchanan, if not in defense of him, that if public sentiment was divided in the South, it was also divided in the North. The radical abolitionists were opposed to coercion and welcomed secession. They had themselves been secessionists from the first. Not a few of those who voted for Mr. Lincoln, when they found themselves confronting the peril of war, would have been almost ready to cancel their vote, and were quite ready to draw back from the principles to which he was committed and from which he never swerved. The commercial disasters which war would involve appalled some, the terrible tragedy of war appalled others, and an honest conviction of the impracticability of coercion convinced still others. Three days after the election theNew York Tribune," the most influential journal of the Republican party, in a leading ar