therefore waited until the enemies of the Union struck the first blow.
As soon as, on the 12th of April, 1861, the first gun was fired in
Charleston harbor on the Union flag upon Fort Sumter, the call was
sounded, and the Northern people rushed to arms.

Lincoln knew that the plain people were now indeed ready to fight in
defence of the Union, but not yet ready to fight for the destruction of
slavery. He declared openly that he had a right to summon the people to
fight for the Union, but not to summon them to fight for the abolition of
slavery as a primary object; and this declaration gave him numberless
soldiers for the Union who at that period would have hesitated to do
battle against the institution of slavery. For a time he succeeded in
rendering harmless the cry of the partisan opposition that the Republican
administration were perverting the war for the Union into an "abolition
war." But when he went so far as to countermand the acts of some
generals in the field, looking to the emancipation of the slaves in the
districts covered by their commands, loud complaints arose from earnest
antislavery men, who accused the President of turning his back upon the
antislavery cause. Many of these antislavery men will now, after a calm
retrospect, be willing to admit that it would have been a hazardous
policy to endanger, by precipitating a demonstrative fight against
slavery, the success of the struggle for the Union.

Lincoln's views and feelings concerning slavery had not changed. Those
who conversed with him intimately upon the subject at that period know
that he did not expect slavery long to survive the triumph of the Union,
even if it were not immediately destroyed by the war. In this he was
right. Had the Union armies achieved a decisive victory in an early
period of the conflict, and had the seceded States been received back
with slavery, the "slave power" would then have been a defeated power,