Coercion or Conciliation?
New York Herald, December
24, 1860
The republican journals of the North are daily becoming
more and more bitter in the tone of their belligerent manifesto[e]s, and in
their vituperative advocacy of the extremest measures, to reduce the slave
States to submission to the doctrines laid down in the Chicago platform. Appeal
to the inexorable logic of grooved cannon, Sharpe’s rifles and the bayonet
takes the place of reflection and argument now, just as rant, abuse, calumny
and diatribe did that of truth and facts while they were arousing their readers
to that pitch of anti-slavery excitement which has produced the present crisis.
They demand that Mr. Lincoln shall inaugurate his administration with blockades,
bombardments and invasion, as flippantly and impudently as though the welfare
of the country could be promoted by conformity to such diabolical fancies.
They decree that the South shall be “put down,” as glibly as if
fifteen States were a vagrant to be arrested by the first policeman. With
quasi-authoritative language, they pretend to foreshadow the policy of the
incoming administration, as substituting the blood red flag of civil war for
the stars and stripes which float over the Capitol, and confidently predict
that the “irrepressible conflict” will be carried out with a ruthless
barbarity which John Brown himself would have hesitated to sanction.
The transparent motive of so much furious clamor on the part of the republican
press is to drive Mr. Buchanan into initiating aggressive measures against
South Carolina, and any other States that may secede, in order that he and
his government may hereafter be chargeable with a responsibility which they
are afraid Mr. Lincoln may have sense enough to shrink from incurring. One
day the President is called an “idiot;” another we are assured
that he is “insane,” and, again, that he is a “traitor,”
“sold out to the South,” because he will neither send more troops
to Fort Moultrie nor encircle Charleston harbor with a naval cordon of steamships
and revenue cutters. The choicest billings-gate is resorted to, with most
refreshing disregard of truth, knowledge and propriety, in denouncing his
repugnance to bloodshed and endeavoring to hound him on to acts of violence.
It would harmonize with abolitionist plans to the letter were Mr. Buchanan
to suffer himself to be moved or intimidated by such scurrilous boistering.
Were he to yield one jot to the suggestions of his adversaries, they would
be the first to turn upon him the full vials of popular indignation, and to
represent the calamities which would thenceforth befal the country as an unwelcome
legacy bequeathed by him to a successor, willing but unable to evade or avert
them.
The forbearance which marks the course of the administration
in the peculiar and trying emergency to which abolitionist fanaticism has
reduced it is eminently wise and prudent. Its pacific attitude has involved
the sacrifice of no principle, and its patriotism has been equally displayed
in what it has done and in what it has left undone. It has refused to recognise
the right of a State to secede, though it has not denied its revolutionary
power to do so. While maintaining, what is undeniable, that no power to coerce
a State is delegated by the constitution to either the President or to Congress,
it has as strenuously asserted that individual delinquents may, if expedient,
be reached and punished by the strong arm of the central government, through
its federal courts. The attempt to coerce a State by military force would,
as declared by Mr. Madison, be an act of war—a virtual recognition of
its separate independence, and tantamount to a dissolution of the Union. Such
an act of folly will never be committed by Mr. Buchanan. The States belong
together. Their reserved rights, individual constitutions, and different social
institutions, are, each and all, a part of a common bond, sheltered by the
constitution, entitled, in their divergencies, to mutual respect and protection,
and he will not complete the work of destruction which fanaticism and sectionalism
have begun. With the treason of individuals, if it should ever come to any
overt act, he might be strictly entitled, perhaps, to pursue a more rigorous
method; but even then it will be his duty to consider the circumstances of
the case, and to weigh, in the merciful side of the scale, the injuries and
provocations which have wrought up the Southern masses into their present
state of frenzy. Goaded to insanity by the persevering aggressions of over
a quarter of a century, which have culminated in the election of a chief magistrate
of the confederation upon the avowed hostile, sectional principle of an “irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces, through which the United States
must become entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free labor nation,”
the insane effervescences of feeling which are beheld in the slave States
should be regarded with paternal and affectionate concern, and not with the
stern and severe front of inexorable justice. The skill of the physician and
the kindness of the nurse are the appliances through which the South must
be redeemed from its present extravagances. The administration is acting faithfully
to its duty, faithfully to the law, in accordance with the soundest principles
of policy and the wishes of the vast majority of conservative minds in the
country, in holding in abhorrence the harsh and outrageous recommendations
of the organs of republican opinion in the North.
Ten weeks will bring us to the time when Mr. Buchanan will
resign his incumbency of the Presidential chair to his successor. In the meanwhile,
all that can be accomplished by peaceful, persuasive and constitutional means
will be done to rescue the country from impending evil, and pilot the ship
of State from the midst of the breakers that surround it. After that period
the responsibility of the future will pass into the hands of Mr. Lincoln.
It is to be hoped that he, too, will comprehend the signification of the portentous
events which are hurrying the nation with headlong speed towards a precipice,
and employ the influence which timely concession may have in staying the progress
of destruction. We have frequently had occasion to show of late that the position
he occupies is more enviably free from ties and embarrassments than that of
any President who has ever preceded him. The sentiment of threefourths of
the people is conservative, and but a small minority at the North are in favor
of those violent measures for checking excitement and disorder at the South
which most of the republican organs demand. It will be a day of sorrow and
misery for America if he should be guided by the counsels of these latter.
Civil war, marshalled by fire, famine and slaughter, will thereafter take
possession of the land; property will lose its value; commerce and trade be
cut off, and agriculture abandoned; “the rye fields and wheat fields
of Massachusetts and New York,” and “the cotton and rice fields
of South Carolina, and the sugar plantations of Louisiana,” will be
trampled under foot by armed men, and the fixture of the Union, which we have
been accustomed to contemplate so proudly, be dimmed by a terrible vista of
anarchy and blood. We cannot believe that Mr. Lincoln will be willing to inaugurate
a period of disaster before which the imagination quails in dismay. The policy
which true wisdom would point out to him is unmistakeably [sic] clear. He
has but to plant himself upon the rock which afforded a sure and safe foothold
for his illustrious predecessors of the early days of the republic; to soar
above party weaknesses, and emulate the greatness of statesmen like Washington,
Jefferson and Madison, in times of difficulty for the republic; with a firm
hand to guide the country back to its pristine condition, recommending for
both South and North such amendments to the constitution as shall define and
maintain forever hereafter the rights of each; to repudiate every tendency
opposed to conciliation, forbearance and the largest amount of toleration
of their respective social institutions by different sections of the country;
and he will carve out for himself a name which shall stand among the highest
in the history of great and patriotic benefactors of the human race.
