Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/254

 reality. A chill swept over the North. The anti-slavery enthusiasm of the campaign was suddenly hushed. The question which but yesterday had agitated men's minds and fired men's hearts, whether it was not right and just and good policy to exclude slavery from the Territories and to put that remnant of barbarism upon the course of ultimate extinction, was suddenly crowded into the background by the apparently much more pressing question: what might be done to avert the awful calamity of a great civil conflict that seemed to hang over the country like a gloomy storm-cloud. People wore very sober faces, and inquired each other's opinions with a tremor of anxiety in their voices.

The defeated Democrats, who all the while had predicted dire mischief in case of a Republican victory, were, of course, not slow to take advantage of the disturbed state of the popular mind. Some of them openly justified the secession movement under existing circumstances; others loudly demanded that the victorious party should abandon the anti-slavery principles and policy it had been contending for, and thus induce the Southern leaders to let their States stay in the Union. The supporters of Bell and Everett in the late campaign, the “Constitutional Union party,” which had not carried a single State in the presidential election, but enjoyed in the country that consideration to which the high individual respectability of its leaders and many of its members entitled it, were no less zealous in the advocacy of some compromise by which the South might be “pacified.”  So-called “Union-meetings” were held all over the North to urge such a policy, and clamorous appeals were made to the lovers of peace as well as to those whose motives were more selfish. Southern trade came to a complete stand-still, and Northern merchants and manufacturers stood terrified at the prospect of their Southern customers refusing to