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 roll off a log. A few days after
the election, Greeley had rolled off his log. He was wallowing in panic.
He began to scream editorially. The Southern extremists were terribly
in earnest; if they wanted to go, go they would, and go they should. But
foolish Northerners would be sure to talk war and the retaining of the
South in the Union by force: it must not be; what was the Union compared
with bloodshed? There must be no war--no war. Such was Greeley's
terrified--appeal to the North. A few weeks after the election he
printed his famous editorial denouncing the idea of a Union pinned
together by bayonets. He followed up with another startling concession