healed until it had run its course. The doctrine of "the irrepressible
conflict" had been taught too long, and accepted too widely and
earnestly, to die out until it should culminate in secession and
disunion, and, if coercion were resorted to, then in civil war. I
believed from the first that it was the purpose of some of the apostles
of that doctrine to force a collision between the North and the South,
either to bring about a separation or to find a vain but bloody pretext
for abolishing slavery in the States. In any event, I knew, or thought I
knew, that the end was certain collision and death to the Union.

Believing thus, I have for years past denounced those who taught that
doctrine, with all the vehemence, the bitterness, if you choose--I
thought it a righteous, a patriotic bitterness--of an earnest and
impassioned nature. * * * But the people did not believe me, nor those
older and wiser and greater than I. They rejected the prophecy, and
stoned the prophets. The candidate of the Republican party was chosen
President. Secession began. Civil war was imminent. It was no petty
insurrection, no temporary combination to obstruct the execution of
the laws in certain States, but a revolution, systematic, deliberate,
determined, and with the consent of a majority of the people of each
State which seceded. Causeless it may have been, wicked it may have
been, but there it was--not to be railed at, still less to be laughed
at, but to be dealt with by statesmen as a fact. No display of vigor or
force alone, however sudden or great, could have arrested it even at the
outset. It was disunion at last. The wolf had come, but civil war had
not yet followed. In my deliberate and solemn judgment there was but
one wise and masterly mode of dealing with it. Non-coercion would avert
civil war, and compromise crush out both abolitionism and secession. The
parent and the child would thus both perish. But a resort to force would
at once precipitate war, hasten secession, extend disunion, and while it