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abjuring all manner of anti-Slavery sentiment and inculcation evermore, and becoming Slave States.
A few Southern fanatics, who deemed nothing needed but the reopening of the African Slave-Trade to render “the South” the mistress of the world, wished to be rid of all “ Yankee” association and contamination evermore; but the great mass, even in the Cotton States, regarded Secession but as a device for bringing the North to its knees, and binding it over to future docility to every exaction of the Slave Power.
Mr. Lincoln fondly regarded his Inaugural as a resistless proffering of the olive-branch to “the South” ; the conspirators everywhere interpreted it as a challenge to war.1 And when the former had taken the oath, solemnly administered to him by Chief Justice Taney, the two Presidents wended their way back, duly escorted, to the White House, at whose door Mr. Buchanan bade Mr. Lincoln a cordial good-by, retiring to the residence of his friend and beneficiary, Robert Ould, whom he had made U. S. District Attorney, and who, though from Maryland, soon after fled to Richmond, and entered at once the military service of the Confederacy.
1 It were idle to quote the Disunion press, even of the yet unseceded States, to prove this; since their strictures may well be imagined. The following, from professedly loyal journals, are worth recording:
The Inaugural, as a whole, breathes the spirit of mischief. It has only a conditional conservatism — that is, the lack of ability or some inexpediency to do what it would. It assumes despotic authority, and intimates the design to exercise that authority to any extent of war and bloodshed, qualified only by the withholding of the requisite means to the end by the American people. The argumentation of the address is puerile. Indeed, it has no quality entitled to the dignity of an argument. It is a shaky specimen of special pleading, by way of justifying the unrighteous character and deeds of the fanaticism which, lifted into power, may be guilty, as it is capable, of any atrocities. There is no Union spirit in the address, it is sectional and mischievous, and studiously withholds any sign of recognition of that equality of the States upon which the Union can alone be maintained. If it means what it says, it is the knell and requiem of the Union, and the death of hope. --Baltimore Sun. Mr. Lincoln stands to-day where he stood on the 6th of November last, on the Chicago Platform. He has not receded a single hair's breadth. He has appointed a Cabinet in which there is no slaveholder — a thing that has never before happened since the formation of the Government; and in which there are but two nominally Southern men, and both bitter Black Republicans of the radical dye. Let the Border States ignominiously submit to the Abolition rule of this Lincoln Administration, if they like; but don't let the miserable submidssionists pretend to be deceived. Make any base or cowardly excuse but this. --Philadelphia Pennsylvanian.
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