people in their relations with us, these gusts end in a calm; and this
calm is due to the common-sense of the race. It revealed itself in the
treaty at the close of our Revolution, and it has been the ultimate
controlling factor in English dealings with us ever since. And now I
reach the last of my large historic matters, the Civil War, and our war
with Spain.


Chapter XII: On the Ragged Edge


On November 6, 1860, Lincoln, nominee of the Republican party, which was
opposed to the extension of slavery, was elected President of the United
States. Forty-one days later, the legislature of South Carolina,
determined to perpetuate slavery, met at Columbia, but, on account of a
local epidemic, moved to Charleston. There, about noon, December 20th, it
unanimously declared "that the Union now subsisting between South
Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of
America, is hereby dissolved." Soon other slave states followed this
lead, and among them all, during those final months of Buchanan's
presidency, preparedness went on, unchecked by the half-feeble,
half-treacherous Federal Government. Lincoln, in his inaugural address,
March 4, 1861, declared that he had no purpose, directly or indirectly,
to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it
existed. To the seceded slave states he said: "In your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not mine, is the momentous issue of
civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict
without being yourselves the aggressors. You can have no oath registered
in heaven to destroy the Government; while I shall have the most solemn
one to preserve, protect and defend it." This changed nothing in the