"[117] At the end of another month the
"Tribune's" famous editor was still in the same frame of mind, declaring
himself "averse to the employment of military force to fasten one
section of our confederacy to the other," and saying that, "if eight
States, having five millions of people, choose to separate from us, they
cannot be permanently withheld from so doing by federal cannon." On
December 17 he even said that the South had as good a right to secede
from the Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain, and
that he "would not stand up for coercion, for subjugation," because he
did not "think it would be just." On February 23, 1861, he said that if
the Cotton States, or the Gulf States, "choose to form an independent
nation, they have a clear moral right to do so," and if the "great body
of the Southern people" become alienated from the Union and wish to
"escape from it, we will do our best to forward their views." A volume
could be filled with the like writing of his prolific pen at this time,
and every sentence of such purport was the casting of a new stone to
create an almost impassable obstruction in the path along which the new
President must soon endeavor to move. Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany
"Evening Journal," and the confidential adviser of Seward, wrote in
favor of concessions; he declared that "a victorious party can afford to
be tolerant;" and he advocated a convention to revise the Constitution,
on the ground that, "after more than seventy years of wear and tear, of
collision and abrasion, it should be no cause of wonder that the
machinery of government is found weakened, or out of repair, or even
defective.
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