No possible plea for President Buchanan can make him rank among those who have held high office with any credit at all, but he must at once be acquitted of any intentional treachery to the Union.  It is agreed that he was a truthful and sincere man, and there is something pleasant in the simple avowal he made to a Southern negotiator who was pressing him for some instant concession, that he always said his prayers before deciding any important matter of State.  His previous dealings with Kansas would suggest to us robust unscrupulousness, but it seems that he had quite given his judgment over into the keeping of a little group of Southern Senators.  Now that he was deprived of this help, he had only enough will left to be obstinate against other advice.  It is suggested that he had now but one motive, the desire that the struggle should break out in his successor’s time rather than his own.  Even this is perhaps to judge Buchanan’s notorious and calamitous laches unfairly.  Any action that he took must to a certain extent have been provocative, and he knew it, and he may have clung to the hope that by sheer inaction he would give time for some possible forces of reason and conciliation to work.  If so, he was wrong, but similar and about as foolish hopes paralysed Lincoln’s Cabinet (and to a less but still very dangerous degree Lincoln himself) when they took up the problem which Buchanan’s neglect had made more urgent.  Buchanan had in this instance the advantage of far better advice, but this silly old man must not be gibbeted and Lincoln left free from criticism for his part in the same transaction.  Both Presidents hesitated where to us who look back the case seems clear.  The circumstances had altered in some respects when Lincoln came in, but it is only upon a somewhat broad survey of the governing tendencies of Lincoln’s administration and of its mighty result in the mass that we discover what really distinguishes his slowness of action in such cases as this from the hesitation of a man like Buchanan.  Buchanan waited in the hope of avoiding action, Lincoln with the firm intention to see his path in the fullest light he could get.

From an early date in November, 1860, every effort was made, by men too numerous to mention, to devise if possible such a settlement of what were now called the grievances of the South as would prevent any other State from following the example of South Carolina.  Apart from the intangible difference presented by much disapprobation of slavery in the North and growing resentment in the South as this disapprobation grew louder, the solid ground of dispute concerned the position of slavery in the existing Territories and future acquisitions of the United States Government; the quarrel arose from the election of a President pledged to use whatever power he had, though indeed that might prove little, to prevent the further extension of slavery; and we may almost confine our attention to this point.  Other points came into discussion.