This was the immensely significant fact of November, 1860.  It made a great impression on the whole country.  For the moment it made the fierce talk of the Southern extremists inconsequential.  Buoyant Northerners, such as Seward, felt that the crisis was over; that the South had voted for a reconciliation; that only tact was needed to make everybody happy.  When, a few weeks after the election, Seward said that all would be merry again inside of ninety days, his illusion had for its foundation the Southern rejection of the slave profiteers.

Unfortunately, Seward did not understand the precise significance of the thought of the moderate South.  He did not understand that while the South had voted to send Breckinridge and his sort about their business, it was still deeply alarmed, deeply fearful that after all it might at any minute be forced to call them back, to make common cause with them against what it regarded as an alien and destructive political power, the Republicans.  This was the Southern reservation, the unspoken condition of the vote which Seward—­and for that matter, Lincoln, also,—­failed to comprehend.  Because of these cross-purposes, because the Southern alarm was based on another thing than the standing or falling of slavery, the situation called for much more than tact, for profound psychological statesmanship.

And now emerges out of the complexities of the Southern situation a powerful personality whose ideas and point of view Lincoln did not understand.  Robert Barnwell Rhett had once been a man of might in politics.  Twice he had very nearly rent the Union asunder.  In 1844, again in 1851, he had come to the very edge of persuading South Carolina to secede.  In each case he sought to organize the general discontent of the South,—­its dread of a tariff, and of Northern domination.  After his second failure, his haughty nature took offense at fortune.  He resigned his seat in the Senate and withdrew to private life.  But he was too large and too bold a character to attain obscurity.  Nor would his restless genius permit him to rust in ease.  During the troubled ’fifties, he watched from a distance, but with ever increasing interest, that negative Southern force which he, in the midst of it, comprehended, while it drifted under the wing of the extremists.  As he did so, the old arguments, the old ambitions, the old hopes revived.  In 1851 his cry to the South was to assert itself as a Separate nation—­not for any one reason, but for many reasons—­and to lead its own life apart from the North.  It was an age of brilliant though ill-fated revolutionary movements in Europe.  Kossuth and the gallant Hungarian attempt at independence had captivated the American imagination.  Rhett dreamed of seeing the South do what Hungary had failed to do.  He thought of the problem as a medieval knight would have thought, in terms of individual prowess, with the modern factors, economics and all their sort, left on one side.  “Smaller nations (than South Carolina),” he said in 1851, “have striven for freedom against greater odds.”