the South was in earnest about was not slavery but State sovereignty; the discovery that the North was far from a unit upon nationalism.  To meet the one, to organize the other, was the double task precipitated by the fall of Sumter.  Not only as a line of attack, but also as a means of defense, Lincoln had to raise to its highest power the argument for the sovereign reality of the national government.  The effort to do this formed the silent inner experience behind the surging external events in the stormy months between April and July.  It was governed by a firmness not paralleled in his outward course.  As always, Lincoln the thinker asked no advice.  It was Lincoln the administrator, painfully learning a new trade, who was timid, wavering, pliable in council.  Behind the apprentice in statecraft, the lonely thinker stood apart, inflexible as ever, impervious to fear.  The thinking which he formulated in the late spring and early summer of 1861 obeyed his invariable law of mental gradualness.  It arose out of the deep places of his own past.  He built up his new conclusion by drawing together conclusions he had long held, by charging them with his later experience, by giving to them a new turn, a new significance.

Lincoln’s was one of those natures in which ideas have to become latent before they can be precipitated by outward circumstance into definite form.  Always with him the idea that was to become powerful at a crisis was one that he had long held in solution, that had permeated him without his formulating it, that had entwined itself with his heartstrings; never was it merely a conscious act of the logical faculty.  His characteristics as a lawyer—­preoccupation with basal ideas, with ethical significance, with those emotions which form the ultimates of life—­these always determined his thought.  His idea of nationalism was a typical case.  He had always believed in the reality of the national government as a sovereign fact.  But he had thought little about it; rather he had taken it for granted.  It was so close to his desire that he could not without an effort acknowledge the sincerity of disbelief in it.  That was why he was so slow in forming a true comprehension of the real force opposing him.  Disunion had appeared to him a mere device of party strategy.  That it was grounded upon a genuine, a passionate conception of government, one irreconcilable with his own, struck him, when at last he grasped it, as a deep offense.  The literary statesman sprang again to life.  He threw all the strength of his mind, the peculiar strength that had made him president, into a statement of the case for nationalism.