John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[389] views on the questions of that period. Dana had taken it over quite recently, and while pledging himself to maintain its independence in politics, it was necessary in increasing its circulation to retain as far as practicable its old readers among the mechanics and shopkeepers of the city, who were mostly Democrats. While he was from the start just and sympathetic towards the South, he warned the Southerners to give no credence to the thought of revolution in the North, and to dismiss the idea that the Northerners were “a race of fanatics, Jacobins, agrarians, mercenaries, and cowards.” He pointed out that the war had to a certain extent exorcised this fantasy, but expressed the prophetic fear that the exorcism would not be complete nor the delusion wholly disappear till a new generation should arise “who know not John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis.” Meanwhile the ignorant and credulous should understand that whatever shall happen in regard to the impeachment of the President, no party or creed in the North “has the remotest idea of resorting to a revolution even on the reduced scale of a riot,” in order to redress any real or imaginary grievances. He added:

... If there had ever been a latent purpose, in one mind in a million, to apply this remedy under any imaginable circumstances, the terrible failure of the Confederate experiment has plucked it up by the roots, and will prevent its germinating again for a century to come.

Andrew Johnson may be deposed and disfranchised, and Benjamin Franklin Wade installed in his place; but a people who have seen the life-blood of a quarter of a million of their sons flow out on the battle-field are not going into a frenzy because an accidental President is toppled out of his chair, according to the forms of law, by the men who placed him there, but whose confidence he has betrayed. And if Mr. Wade should, in co-operation with the Senate, remove every Federal office-holder, from his cabinet down to the tidewaiters,