ty and ability to add that this
confidence was warranted by the delusive indications of surface
politics. Highly patriotic in purpose and prudent in act, their leading
men in Congress had promptly opposed secession, had moved a Senate
Committee of Thirteen, and secured the appointment and the organization
of the House Committee of Thirty-three. Already some twenty-three
different propositions of adjustment had been submitted to this
committee, and under the circumstances it actually seemed as if only a
little patience and patriotic earnestness were needed to find a
compromise,--perhaps an amendment of the Constitution,--which the
feverish unrest and impatience of the nation would compel Congress to
enact or propose, and the different States and sections, willing or
unwilling, to accept arid ratify.

Superior political wisdom and more thorough information, as well as a
finer strategy, a quicker enthusiasm, and a more unremitting industry,
must be accorded to the conspirators who now labored night and day in
the interest of disunion. They discerned more clearly than their
opponents the demoralization of parties at the North, the latent
revolutionary discontent at the South, the influence of brilliant and
combined leadership, and the social, commercial, and political
conditions which might be brought into action. They recognized that
they were but a minority, a faction; but they also realized that as
such they had a substantial control of from six to eleven States
whenever they chose to make that control effective, and that, for
present uses at least, the President was, under their influence, but as
clay in the hands of the potter.

Better than the Republicans from the North, or even the conservatives
from the border States, they knew that in the Cotton States a
widespread change of popular sentiment was then being wrought and might
very soon be complete. Except upon the extreme alternative of disunion,
the people of the border States were eager to espouse their quarrel,
and join them in a contest for alleged political rights. Nearly half
the people of the North were ready to acknowledge the justness of their
complaints. The election of Lincoln was indeed a flimsy pretext for
separation, but it had the merit of universal publicity, and of
rankling irritation among the unthinking masses of the South.
Agriculture was depressed, commerce was in panic, manufacturing
populations were in want, the national treasury was empty,