Walworth said that it would be “as brutal to send men to butcher our own brothers of the Southern States as it would be to massacre them in the Northern States.”  When DeWitt Clinton’s son, George, spoke of secession as “rebellion,” the multitude hailed the word with cries of dissent.  Even at Faneuil Hall, in Boston, “a very large and respectable meeting” was emphatically in favor of compromise.  It was impossible to measure accurately the extent and force of all this demoralization; but the symptoms were that vast numbers were infected with such sentiments, and that they would have been worse than useless as backers of a vigorous policy on the part of the government.

With the North wavering and ready to retreat, and the South aggressive and confident, it was exacting to expect Mr. Buchanan to stand up for a fight.  Why should he, with his old-time Democratic principles, now by a firm, defiant attitude precipitate a crisis, possibly a civil war, when Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips were conspicuously running away from the consequences of their own teachings, and were loudly crying “Peace! peace!” after they themselves had long been doing all in their power to bring the North up to the fighting point?  When these leaders faced to the rear, it was hard to say who could be counted upon to fill the front rank.  In truth, it was a situation which might have discouraged a more combative patriot than Buchanan.  Meanwhile, while the Northerners talked chiefly of yielding, the hot and florid rhetoric of the Southern orators, often laden with contemptuous insult, smote with disturbing menace upon the ears even of the most courageous Unionists.  It was said at the South and feared at the North that secession had a “Spartan band in every Northern State,” and that blood would flow in Northern cities at least as soon and as freely as on the Southern plantations, if forcible coercion should be attempted.  Was it possible to be sure that this was all rodomontade?  To many good citizens there seemed some reason to think that the best hope for avoiding the fulfillment at the North of these sanguinary threats might lie in the probability that the anti-slavery agitators would not stand up to encounter a genuinely mortal peril.

When the Star of the West retired, a little ignominiously, from her task of reinforcing Fort Sumter, Senator Wigfall jeered insolently.  “Your flag has been insulted,” he said; “redress it if you dare!  You have submitted to it for two months, and you will submit forever....  We have dissolved the Union; mend it if you can; cement it with blood; try the experiment!” Mr. Chestnut of South Carolina wished to “unfurl the Palmetto flag, fling it to the breeze ... and ring the clarion notes of defiance in the ears of an insolent foe.”  Such bombastic but confident language, of which a great quantity was uttered in this winter of 1860-61, may exasperate or intimidate according to the present temper of the opponent whose ear it assaults; for a while the North was more in condition to be awestruck than to be angered.  Her spokesmen failed to answer back, and left her to listen not without anxiety to fierce predictions that Southern flags would soon be floating over the dome of the Capitol and even over Faneuil Hall, if she should be so imprudent as to test Southern valor and Southern resources.