New York Herald, April 11, 1861

The feverish excitement of the last few days, will probably have given place, before the lapse of many hours, to that stunned sensation of horror, which follows every terrible, irreparable catastrophe. The die has, perhaps, ere this been cast, and the groans of the dying, the shrieks of the wounded, and the hideous spectacle of mangled limbs, have been invoked to mark the stage at which [the] “irrepressible conflict” has arrived, in its infernal downward progress. “Fire, rape and slaughter,” will be next summoned to the wake of the black flag that has been unfurled, and the suicidal programme laid down by the Sewards, Lincolns, Wades, Sumners, Kings, Phillipses, Fessendens, Greeleys, Garrisons, Blairs, and Chases, of the Massachusetts school of abolitionism, will be carried out, as far as it is in the power of the incendiarists [sic] at the head of the government to do so. Craftily and stealthily as the preparations for impending ruin have been made, it cannot be denied that republican and anti-slavery leaders have given warning of their intentions. Even Mr. Seward did not hesitate to issue the fiat, that “battle” should be the resort to which his party would at last appeal, and to declare that “every one who should resist, oppose, or stand in the way of” the fruition of abolition labors, during the last thirty years, should be swept away, “as moths disappear before the whirlwind.” Mr. Lincoln, a day or two before, had clearly intimated, at Indianapolis, his intention of “retaking Southern forts and properties, and of invading South Carolina.” Wendell Phillips, the orator, par excellence, of Northern sectionalism, one month ago proclaimed his rejoicing and triumph in the disasters that he foresaw were impending. He exclaimed, “I can imagine the scenes of blood. They are dreadful; but I do not shrink from the sentiment ‘that there are scenes of tremendous horror, which I could smile at by Mercy’s side.’ “ “Weigh out,” he continued, “the fifty thousand hearts that have beaten their last pulse, amid agonies of thought, and suffering fancy faints to think of, and the fifty thousand mothers, who, with sickening senses, watch for the footsteps that are not wont to tarry long in their coming—add all the misery of cities sacked and lands laid waste,”—and what then? They cannot “claim a tear,” when compared with the system of slavery! In order to extinguish slavery, the dragons[’] teeth of destruction have been carefully and deliberately sown, and they are beginning to bring forth their fatal crop of fruit.

Can anything be imagined more atrocious, more heartrending, than this steady roll onward of the flood, which has begun to devour before it every trace of our past prosperity as a nation? The stupendous treason, which has insidiously, slowly, but surely, worked itself into a dividing line between those who have cherished the institutions of the country, and the traitors, North and South, who have been resolved to destroy it, is at length consummated. Brothers are armed against brothers; fathers against sons; a United States fleet, with every implement of destruction, has been sent to carry death into the midst of communities bound to us by the most sacred ties, and the signal for massacre has, in all likelihood, already been given. To such a depth of degradation have bigotry, fanaticism, and ruthless intolerance, reduced a country which, a year ago was the wonder and admiration of the civilized world. A little while longer, and we may see armies springing up in Virginia, Maryland; the seat of government forcibly driven from Washington; hosts pouring into the slave States from the North and Northwest, under a dozen different leaders; hostile arrays of troops wending Northward from the Carolinas, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama; the border States swollen with the implements of wholesale slaughter; commerce, trade, manufactures and agriculture prostrated; no national capital, no treasury, no country; but everywhere, trained bands exhausting the resources of localities to elevate some petty leader to power, and cater to individual demagogueism [sic]! Officers high in rank, in both the Northern and Southern armies, have already paraded to the world their readiness to gain distinction in a war of sections, and it is probable that more than one among them is already calculating the chances of his own ascendency, in some future military despotism.

Nine out of ten of the people of the Northern and Central States repudiate the coercive policy which is hurrying the republic to destruction, and contemplate with terror and dismay the prospect before us. Oceans of blood and millions of treasure are about to be expended, in order to carry out, ostensibly, an impracticable theory, with no other conceivable end than to leave the country exhausted, impoverished and wretched. The ultima ratio which Mr. Lincoln and his advisers have appealed to, will result, before the lapse of many months, in the overthrow of the prosperity which it has required over three-quarters of a century of industry and energy to create, and in exhausting the means which it has cost so much toil and labor to accumulate. The last act of the tragedy will be, either that the North and South, after having drained the land of its resources, burdened it with an immense debt, and expended the lives of tens of thousands of useful citizens, will find themselves compelled to negotiate a peace from the very same basis that exists at present; or that some Western Napoleon will bind the disunited fragments of the confederacy together under one common yoke; or else that petty generals will extend through the United States the direful scenes that have been witnessed in Mexico for over twenty-five years, and that utter anarchy will be the consequence of the collision which the republican party has so suicidally provoked.

The prospect never was so dark, menacing and desolate as it is now. The developements of each day are looked forward to with anxiety and dread. The people shrink aghast from the appeal that has been made to artillery and the bayonet, and the only certainty in the minds of men, appears to be, that horrors of every description are about to overwhelm the land.