only looking for a decent line of retreat; but that if the agitation should be actually continued, his confidence was unshaken in the great body of the Northern people that they would “in due time, and in the right manner, apply an appropriate and effectual corrective.”
In the South, too, he saw much “to encourage the friends of the Union.” But it was there, after all, that he discovered the real source of the danger threatening the Republic. The main part of his letter he devoted to an elaborate review and refutation of the arguments with which nullification and secession were sought to be justified, exposing the absurdity of the theory underlying them, and the criminality of any attempt to carry that theory into practice. If such an attempt were made, he insisted, then “the power, the authority, and the dignity of the government ought to be maintained, and resistance put down at every hazard.” He closed with a glowing eulogy on the glories and the benign effects of the Union.
The gentlemen from New York had probably desired a paper of a different character, for almost its whole argument was addressed, not to the North, but to the South. The discussion of the secession doctrines preached at the South occupied four fifths of its space. It was one more of his characteristic efforts to disarm the disunion tendency at the South, to that end opposing the anti-slavery tendency at the North not seldom at a sacrifice of his own feelings.
