In like manner, with hand of steel within a velvet glove, Mr. Lincoln prevented the secession of Kentucky and Missouri. It was done with less violence, but it was done, and these rich and powerful States saved to the Union.
The swift and bloodless conquest of Maryland inspired the North with the most grotesque conception of the war and its outcome.
The British and French Governments had immediately recognized the Confederate States as belligerents under the terms of international law and closed their ports to the armed vessels of both contestants. Mr. Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, hastened to assure the nations of Europe that a dissolution of the Union was an absurd impossibility. It had never entered the mind of any candid statesman in America and should be dismissed at once by statesmen in Europe. And yet at this time eleven Southern States, stretching from the James to the Rio Grande, with a population of eight millions, had by solemn act of their Legislatures withdrawn from the Union and their armies were camping within a few miles of the City of Washington.
In all the North not a single statesman or a single newspaper appeared to have any conception of the serious task before them. The fusillades of rant, passion and bombast which filled the air would have been comic but for the grim tragedy which was stalking in their wake.
The "Rebellion" was ridiculed and sneered at in terms that taxed the genius of the writers for words of contempt.
The New York Tribune, the greatest and most powerful organ of public opinion in the North, a paper which had boldly from the first proclaimed the right of the South to peaceable secession, was now swept away with the popular fury.
Its editor gravely declared:
"The Southern rebellion is nothing more or less than the natural recourse of all mean-spirited and defeated tyrannies to rule or ruin, making of course a wide distinction between the will and the power, for the hanging of traitors is soon to begin before a month is over. The Nations of Europe may rest assured that Jeff Davis and Co. will be swinging from the battlements at Washington, at least by the fourth of July. We spit upon a later and longer deferred justice."
The New York Times gave its opinion with equal clearness: