John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[71] but there was no lack of cliques and coteries in the great cities of the North who secretly nursed plots and projects contingent on possible insurrectionary commotions and chances. One of the rebel commissioners to Washington, in the interim during which Justice Campbell relieved them of their labors of diplomatic intrigue, visited New York, where he was waited upon by the spokesman of one of these Northern cabals, who poured into the ears of his credulous listener the recital of a most marvellous scheme of local conspiracy. Two hundred of New York's best citizens, he said, were at that moment elaborating a plan to secede from both the Union and the State, seize the navy yard at Brooklyn, and the forts in the harbor, and declare New York a free city. The informant was perhaps an adventurer anxious to pocket a liberal subsidy; yet, as an echo of Mayor Wood's official proposition, the incident was not without its significance, and the eager commissioner repeated the tale by letter to Jefferson Davis, countersigned by his own personal faith that there was “something in it.”

Jefferson Davis was by far too shrewd a leader to look for a literal fulfilment of any of these extravagant predictions or projects; but they afforded him a substantial basis for the belief that this class of sentiment would at least oppose and thwart the new administration in any quick or extended measures to suppress the “confederate” revolt.

On the part of the North, also, there had been grave misapprehension of the actual state of Southern opinion. For ten years the Southern threats of disunion had been empty bluster. The half-disclosed conspiracy of 1856 did not seem to extend beyond a few notorious agitators. The more serious revolutionary signs of the last three months--the retirement of Southern members from Congress, the secession of States, the seizure of federal forts and the formation of