he great numbers--of whom some would have re-made the
Constitution, others would have agreed to peaceable separation, and
still others would have made any concession to retain the integrity of
the Union--now saw that these were indeed, as Jefferson Davis had said,
"quack nostrums," and that the choice lay between permitting a secession
accompanied with insulting menaces and some degree of actual violence,
and maintaining the Union by coercion. In this dilemma great multitudes
of Northern Democrats, whose consciences had never been in the least
disturbed by the existence of slavery in the country or even by efforts
to extend it, became "Union men" in the Northern sense of the word,
which made it about equivalent to coercionists. Their simple creed was
the integrity and perpetuity of the nation.

Mr. Lincoln showed in his inaugural his accurate appreciation of the new
situation. Owing all that he had become in the world to a few
anti-slavery speeches, elevated to the presidency by votes which really
meant little else than hostility to slavery, what was more natural than
that he should at this moment revert to this great topic and make the
old dispute the main part and real substance of his address? But this
fatal error he avoided. With unerring judgment he dwelt little on that
momentous issue which had only just been displaced, and took his stand
fairly upon that still more momentous one which had so newly come up. He
spoke for the Union; upon that basis a united North _ought_ to support
him; upon that basis the more northern of the slave States might remain
loyal. As matter of fact, Union had suddenly become the real issue, but
it needed at the hands of the President to be publicly and explicitly
announced as such; this recognition was essential; he gave it on this
earliest opportunity, and the announcement was the first great service
of the new Republican ruler. It seems now as though he could hardly have
done otherwise, or have fallen into the error of allying himself with
bygone or false issues. It may be admitted that he could not have passed
this new one by; but the important matter was that of proportion and
relation, and in this it was easy to blunder. In truth it was a crisis
when blundering was so easy that nearly all the really able men of the
North had been doing it badly for three or four months past, and not a
few of them were going to continue it for two or three months to come.
Therefore the sound conceptio