Meanwhile, while the Northerners talked
chiefly of yielding, the hot and florid rhetoric of the Southern
orators, often laden with contemptuous insult, smote with disturbing
menace upon the ears even of the most courageous Unionists. It was said
at the South and feared at the North that secession had a "Spartan band
in every Northern State," and that blood would flow in Northern cities
at least as soon and as freely as on the Southern plantations, if
forcible coercion should be attempted. Was it possible to be sure that
this was all rodomontade? To many good citizens there seemed some reason
to think that the best hope for avoiding the fulfillment at the North of
these sanguinary threats might lie in the probability that the
anti-slavery agitators would not stand up to encounter a genuinely
mortal peril.
When the Star of the West retired, a little ignominiously, from her task
of reinforcing Fort Sumter, Senator Wigfall jeered insolently. "Your
flag has been insulted," he said; "redress it if you dare! You have
submitted to it for two months, and you will submit forever.... We have
dissolved the Union; mend it if you can; cement it with blood; try the
experiment!" Mr. Chestnut of South Carolina wished to "unfurl the
Palmetto flag, fling it to the breeze ... and ring the clarion notes of
defiance in the ears of an insolent foe." Such bombastic but confident
language, of which a great quantity was uttered in this winter of
1860-61, may exasperate or intimidate according to the present temper of
the opponent whose ear it assaults; for a while the North was more in
condition to be awestruck than to be angered.
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