John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[52] factional prejudice, and irritated with the imaginary wrongs of the South. Upon this element, rebel intrigue and conspiracy were working with telling effect; and instead of declaring and practising frank and direct adherence to the Government, the union members were fulminating baseless complaints, demanding impossible guarantees, and pleading indulgent excuses for the course of South Carolina and the Cotton Republics. And this condition of misdirected and unstable loyalty was also wide-spread among the leaders and people of the Border States of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

How to deal with such a morbid and disturbed public sentiment-how to treat this unnatural, contradictory, and halfhearted allegiance, was a problem of direct bearing on the Sumter question. Mr. Seward, optimist by nature, believed and argued that the revolution throughout the South had spent its force and was on the wane; and that the evacuation of Sumter, and the manifestation of kindness and confidence to the Rebel and Border States, would undermine the conspiracy, strengthen the union sentiment and union majorities, and restore allegiance and healthy political action without resort to civil war.

Mr. Lincoln shared Seward's pacific inclinations, but not his optimism. He deferred his decision; gathered information from Anderson, from Charleston, from Richmond, waited in anxious suspense for news from Pickens. No substantial encouragement, however, reached him from any quarter. Anderson had no faith in a relief expedition. All union sentiment had disappeared from South Carolina. The Virginia Convention was evidently playing fast and loose with treason; and finally, General Scott was so far wrought upon by the insane cry for concession to gratify the morbid patriotism which yet found expression in the South, that he advised