No quality could have endeared him more certainly to Lincoln than the very one which the bigots misunderstood.  From his earliest youth Lincoln had been governed by this same quality.  With his non-censorious mind, which accepted so much of life as he found it, which was forever stripping principles of their accretions, what could be more inevitable than his warming to the one great man at Washington who like him held that such a point of view was the only rational one.  Seward’s ironic peacefulness in the midst of the storm gained in luster because all about him raged a tempest of ferocity, mitigated, at least so far as the distracted President could see, only by self-interest or pacifism.

As Lincoln came into office, he could see and hear many signs of a rising fierceness of sectional hatred.  His secretary records with disgust a proposal to conquer the Gulf States, expel their white population, and reduce the region to a gigantic state preserve, where negroes should grow cotton under national supervision.(1) “We of the North,” said Senator Baker of Oregon, “are a majority of the Union, and we will govern our Union in our own way."(2) At the other extreme was the hysterical pacifism of the Abolitionists.  Part of Lincoln’s abiding quarrel with the Abolitionists was their lack of national feeling.  Their peculiar form of introspection had injected into politics the idea of personal sin.  Their personal responsibility for slavery—­they being part of a country that tolerated it—­was their basal inspiration.  Consequently, the most distinctive Abolitionists welcomed this opportunity to cast off their responsibility.  If war had been proposed as a crusade to abolish slavery, their attitude might have been different But in March, 1860, no one but the few ultra-extremists, whom scarcely anybody heeded, dreamed of such a war.  A war to restore the Union was the only sort that was considered seriously.  Such a war, the Abolitionists bitterly condemned.  They seized upon pacifism as their defense.  Said Whittier of the Seceding States: 

     They break the links of Union:  shall we light
     The fires of hell to weld anew the chain,
     On that red anvil where each blow is pain?

The fury and the fear offended Lincoln in equal measure.  After long years opposing the political temper of the extremists, he was not the man now to change front.  To one who believed himself marked out for a tragic end, the cowardice at the heart of the pacifism of his time was revolting.  It was fortunate for his own peace of mind that he could here count on the Secretary of State.  No argument based on fear of pain would meet in Seward with anything but derision.  “They tell us,” he had once said, and the words expressed his constant attitude, “that we are to encounter opposition.  Why, bless my soul, did anybody ever expect to reach a fortune, or fame, or happiness on earth or a crown in heaven, without encountering resistance and opposition?  What are we made men for but to encounter and overcome opposition arrayed against us in the line of our duty?"(3)