This Federal
Republican country of ours is, of all forms of Government, the very one
which is the most unfitted for such a labor."
This letter could only mean one of two things, either that the first
member of the Cabinet was a Secessionist and meant to allow the South to
go unmolested, or he planned to change our form of Government by a _coup
d'etat_ in the crisis and assume the Dictatorship. In either event his
attitude boded ill for the new President and his future.
Wendell Phillips, the eloquent friend of Senator Winter, declared in
Boston in a public address:
"Here are a series of states who think their peculiar institutions
require that they should have a separate government. They have the 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. You can not go through Massachusetts and recruit men to bombard
Charleston or New Orleans. Nothing but madness can provoke a war with
the Gulf States."
The last member of his distracted, divided, passion-ridden Cabinet had
gone at the close of its first eventful sitting. The dark figure of the
President stood beside the window looking over the mirror-like surface
of the Potomac to the hills of Virginia.
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