risis, possibly a civil war, when
Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips were conspicuously running away from
the consequences of their own teachings, and were loudly crying "Peace!
peace!" after they themselves had long been doing all in their power to
bring the North up to the fighting point? When these leaders faced to
the rear, it was hard to say who could be counted upon to fill the front
rank. In truth, it was a situation which might have discouraged a more
combative patriot than Buchanan. Meanwhile, while the Northerners talked
chiefly of yielding, the hot and florid rhetoric of the Southern
orators, often laden with contemptuous insult, smote with disturbing
menace upon the ears even of the most courageous Unionists. It was said
at the South and feared at the North that secession had a "Spartan band
in every Northern State," and that blood would flow in Northern cities
at least as soon and as freely as on the Southern plantations, if
forcible coercion should be attempted. Was it possible to be sure that
this was all rodomontade? To many good citizens there seemed some reason
to think that the best hope for avoiding the fulfillment at the North of
these sanguinary threats might lie in the probability that the
anti-slavery agitators would not stand up to encounter a genuinely
mortal peril.

When the Star of the West retired, a little ignominiously, from her task
of reinforcing Fort Sumter, Senator Wigfall jeered insolently. "Your
flag has been insulted," he said; "redress it if you dare! You have
submitted to it for two months, and you will submit forever.... We have
dissolved the Union; mend it if you can; cement it with blood; try the
experiment!" Mr. Chestnut of South Carolina wished to "unfurl the
Palmetto flag, fling it to the breeze ... and ring the clarion notes of
defiance in the ears of an insolent foe." Such bombastic but confident
language, of which a great quantity was uttered in this winter of
1860-61, may exasperate or intimidate according to the present temper of
the opponent whose ear it assaults; for a while the North was more in
condition to be awestruck than to be angered. Her spokesmen failed to
answer back, and left her to listen not without anxiety to fierce
predictions that Southern flags would soon be floating over the dome of
the Capitol and even over Faneuil Hall, if she should be so imprudent as
to test Southern valor and Southern resources.

Matters looked even worse for the Union cause i