All government implies a principle of authority, and requires the occasional sacrifice of the individual's pleasure. The national bond has one strand in mutual good-will, but another strand is personal sacrifice, and another is stern command. The Union required some sacrifices, not only of material price,--as when a man pays just taxes, or acquiesces in a fiscal system which he considers unjust,--but sacrifices sometimes even of moral sentiment. Lincoln, explaining his position in 1855 to his old friend Speed, of Kentucky, repelled the suggestion that he had no personal interest in slavery. He says that whenever he crosses the border he sees manacled slaves or some similar sight which is a torment to him. "You ought to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union."
That acquiescence,--a costly sacrifice to the higher good; and the typical attitude of the Republicans and the moderate anti-slavery men,--seemed to Garrison and Phillips and their school a sinful compliance with evil. The extreme Abolitionists, as much as the extremists of the South, were opposed to the Union. They had no comprehension of the interests and principles involved in the preservation of the national life. One of the pleasant traits told of Garrison's private life is this: He was fond of music, especially religious music, but had little cultivation in that direction; and he would sit at the piano and pick out the air of the good old hymn-tunes with one hand, not knowing how to play the bass which makes a harmony. That was typical of his mental attitude,--he knew and loved the melody of freedom, but the harmony blended of freedom and national unity he did not comprehend.
The Southern disunionists finally carried their section, but the Abolition disunionists never made the slightest approach to converting the North. It was not merely that many at the North were indifferent to slavery, while to the whole community its interest was remote compared to what it was to the South. There was another reason for the failure of the Northern disunionists. Among the class to whom the appeal for freedom came closest home, the idealists, the men of moral conviction and enthusiasm, were many to whose ideality and enthusiasm American unity also spoke with powerful voice. Patriotism was more to them than a material interest, more than an enlarged and glowing sentiment of neighborhood and kinship,--it was devotion to moral interests of which the national organism was the symbol and the agent. They saw, as Webster saw, that "America is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in future and by fate, with these great interests,"--of free representative government, entire religious liberty, improved systems of national intercourse, the spirit of free inquiry, and the general diffusion of knowledge. They looked still higher than this,--they saw that America rightly tended toward universal personal liberty, and full opportunity and encouragement to man as man, of whatever race or class. That was what America stood for to those moral enthusiasts whose sanity matched their ardor. They saw that this ideal was still in the future, and that progress might be slow and difficult, but they were pledged in their souls to pursue it. And, with that purpose at heart, they were ready to maintain the national unity at whatever cost.