In 1860 he had concluded that his third chance had come.  He would try once more to bring about secession.  To split the Union, he would play into the hands of the slave-barons.  He would aim to combine with their movement the negative Southern movement and use the resulting coalition to crown with success his third attempt.  Issuing from his seclusion, he became at once the overshadowing figure in South Carolina.  Around him all the elements of revolution crystallized.  He was sixty years old; seasoned and uncompromising in the pursuit of his one ideal, the independence of the South.  His arguments were the same which he had used in 1844, in 1851:  the North would impoverish the South; it threatens to impose a crushing tribute in the shape of protection; it seeks to destroy slavery; it aims to bring about economic collapse; in the wreck thus produced, everything that is beautiful, charming, distinctive in Southern life will be lost; let us fight!  With such a leader, the forces of discontent were quickly, effectively, organized.  Even before the election of Lincoln, the revolutionary leaders in South Carolina were corresponding with men of like mind in other Southern States, especially Alabama, where was another leader, Yancey, only second in intensity to Rhett.

The word from these Alabama revolutionists to South Carolina was to dare all, to risk seceding alone, confident that the other States of the South would follow.  Rhett and his new associates took this perilous advice.  The election was followed by the call of a convention of delegates of the people of South Carolina.  This convention, on the twentieth of December, 1860, repealed the laws which united South Carolina with the other States and proclaimed their own independent.

XII.  THE CRISIS

Though Seward and other buoyant natures felt that the crisis had passed with the election, less volatile people held the opposite view.  Men who had never before taken seriously the Southern threats of disunion had waked suddenly to a terrified consciousness that they were in for it.  In their blindness to realities earlier in the year, they were like that brilliant host of camp followers which, as Thackeray puts it, led the army of Wellington dancing and feasting to the very brink of Waterloo.  And now the day of reckoning had come.  An emotional reaction carried them from one extreme to the other; from self-sufficient disregard of their adversaries to an almost self-abasing regard.

The very type of these people and of their reaction was Horace Greeley.  He was destined many times to make plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow.  To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—­in the vulgar but pointed American phrase—­to