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."