Boston Daily Post, February 16, 1861

The talented Senator Green, of Missouri, has just made the remark in the Senate, that there must be a reaction in the public mind of the North, or else the Crittenden amendments, would be good for nothing. Certainly, the remark is a sound one. Law, to be efficient, must be based on public opinion. Now, the most favorable sign of a re-construction of the old Union, or to speak more precisely, of a return to the normal form of our national life, one Congress, is the substantial reaction that is going on in the North. All that is now asked is for the time that is necessary in order to clothe this reaction in the shape of authentic evidence.

Our Federal Government is emphatically the offspring of public opinion, and is the first instance of such in the modern civilized world. It may be accurately said that American nationality never appeared as a great central power conferring local rights, but as a popular sentiment dictating successive forms of law devised to protect the rights of the primordial elements of the nation, the States, and defending the common flag. This feeling always regarded the people of the several States, so far as the sentiment of nationality is concerned—as one people, with common rights, common interests, and a common destiny—as brethren of one family. Such unity as this made our country.

Nothing during the past ninety days has been more depressing to discriminating observers here at the North, to all indeed who see and deplore the mischief of abolitionism, than the extent to which the existence of this old feeling of fraternity has been kept out of sight at the South. Especially in the secession States, the great fact has been mostly ignored, that there is a majority of the people of the thirty-four States of more than a million by the November vote, and which has been vastly increased since, holding precisely to the vital unity of the Fathers; the same unity that joined together the patriots of the South and of the North in the revolution; the same unity that gave birth to the early Congress, and that culminated in that matchless result—the Federal Constitution.

Those who make this feeling the paramount rule of their political action cannot but shrink back with horror at the bare idea of shedding the blood of brethren in a civil war. This is the sentiment that is astir now; it is making itself felt North and South with effect, and will march on as certainly as the sun shines, with a conqueror's mighty strength. It is not for civil war, but for the Union of the Fathers. At present Tennessee, as though the spirit of the Hermitage felt itself insulted, bears the palm at the South; Rhode Island and New Jersey at the North. It is assuredly here in Massachusetts. The evidences of it are as many as circumstances have permitted to be exhibited, and all that a patriot could wish. Go among the people, in the mechanics' shops, and the merchants' stores, and in the village centres, and see how patriots of all parties, Lincoln men as well as others, are rasping down the whole brood of Abolition, civil war men. This feeling is finding vent in petitions for conciliation. It is seen in the fourteen thousand petition[s] from Boston alone; it is seen more precisely in the petitioning for the Crittenden pacification. Charles Sumner feels this. To be sure, he has a short, crisp, fanatic sort of a mode of explaining this away, namely, by telling the people they do not know what they are about, as though reading hadn't been taught in the common schools for a whole generation! This won't do. The people know what they are about, and see with indignation what he is about. They know that such Abolitionism as he has flooded the Senate with, has well nigh destroyed the fairest nation which the sun shines upon. As soon as the people can get at him they will tumble him from the seat of power which he has abused, and fill his place with a man with heart and mind enough for the whole Union.

We repeat: there is nothing more certain than the fact of reaction here. It is seen in the last municipal elections in nearly all the large cities, where the Republicans of the Andrew and Phillips stripe were beaten horse and foot. Sumner would explain this by saying the people didn't know what they were about! Then, too, there is the tremendous feeling not only here in Massachusetts, but all through the North, against those pests, Abolition demagogues, which will not respect the sex. Even Susan Anthony can't get a hall to speak in, far or near; or if this noted Abolitionist does get one, to the regret of all friends of free speech, people won[']t listen to her. All this cannot be justified, but such is the fact; and it seems at least to show the drifting of the current.

In truth, the Union of the fathers is not dissolved. Between the men who have just voted for the Union in Tennessee and the like men all through the South—the six Cotton States not excepted—and the conservatism of the North, as represented among Republicans, in the West by Kellogg and Douglas, in the East by Adams, and in the Middle States by Cameron, there is the old Union feeling, the vital spark of a true National Unity. It is to such hands that the country looks to see the dark curtain of the present lifted. Then will appear the blue sky of peace and future glory for our country.