It is true that the South had no immediate grievance. The only action of the North of which she had any sort of right to complain was the infringement of the spirit of the Constitutional compact by the Personal Liberty Laws. But these laws there was now a decided disposition to amend or repeal--a disposition strongly supported by the man whom the North had elected as President. It is also true, that this man would never have lent himself to any unfair depression of the Southern part of the Union. This last fact, however, the South may be pardoned for not knowing. Even those Northerners who had elected Lincoln knew little about him except that he was the Republican nominee and had been a "rail-splitter." In the South, so far as one can judge, all that was heard about him was that he was a "Black Abolitionist," which was false, and that in appearance he resembled a gorilla, which was, at least by comparison, true.
But, even if Lincoln's fairness of mind and his conciliatory disposition towards the South had been fully appreciated, it is not clear that the logic of the Secessionist case would have been greatly weakened. The essential point was that the North, by virtue of its numerical superiority, had elected a purely Northern candidate on a purely Northern programme. Though both candidate and programme were in fact moderate, there was no longer any security save the will of the North that such moderation would continue. If the conditions remained unaltered, there was nothing to prevent the North at a subsequent election from making Charles Sumner President with a programme conceived in the spirit of John Brown's raid. It must be admitted that the policy adopted by the dominant North after the Civil War might well appear to afford a measure of posthumous justification for these fears.
In the North at first all seemed panic and confusion of voices. To many--and among them were some of those who had been keenest in prosecuting the sectional quarrel of which Secession was the outcome--it appeared the wisest course to accept the situation and acquiesce in the peaceable withdrawal of the seceding States. This was the position adopted almost unanimously by the Abolitionists, and it must be owned that they at least were strictly consistent in taking it. "When I called the Union 'a League with Death and an Agreement with Hell,'" said Garrison, "I did not expect to see Death and Hell secede from the Union." Garrison's disciple, Wendell Phillips, pronounced 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."