plain
as a turnpike road;" it was, to execute the public laws.

His duty was simple; his understanding of it was unclouded by doubt or
sophistry; his resolution to do it was firm; but whether his hands would
be strengthened sufficiently to enable him to do it was a question of
grave anxiety. The president of a republic can do everything if the
people are at his back, and almost nothing if the people are not at his
back. Where, then, were now the people of the United States? In seven
States they were openly and unitedly against him; in at least seven more
they were under a very strong temptation to range themselves against him
in case of a conflict; and as for the Republican States of the North, on
that fourth day of March, 1861, no man could say to what point they
would sustain the administration. There had as yet come slight
indications of any change in the conceding, compromising temper of that
section. Greeley and Seward and Wendell Phillips, representative men,
were little better than Secessionists. The statement sounds ridiculous,
yet the proof against each comes from his own mouth. The "Tribune" had
retracted none of those disunion sentiments, of which examples have been
given. Even so late as April 10, 1861, Mr. Seward wrote officially to
Mr. C.F. Adams, minister to England: "Only an imperial and despotic
government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary
members of the state. This federal, republican country of ours is, of
all forms of government, the very one which is the most unfitted for
such a labor." He had been and still was favoring delay and
conciliation, in the visionary hope that the seceders would follow the
scriptural precedent of the prodigal son. On April 9 the rumor of a
fight at Sumter being spread abroad, Mr. Phillips said:[132] "Here are a
series of States, girding the Gulf, who think that their peculiar
institutions require that they should have a separate government. They
have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or me....
Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the
right?... Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter....
There is no longer a Union.... Mr. Jefferson Davis is angry, and Mr.
Abraham Lincoln is mad, and they agree to fight.... You cannot go
through Massachusetts and recruit men to bombard Charleston or New
Orleans.... We are in no condition to fight.... Nothing but madness can
provoke war with the Gul