The triumph of the Republican party at the polls was the signal for the work of dissolution to begin. Webster's terrific vision of “a land rent with civil feuds” became reality in the short space of six weeks after Lincoln's election, by the secession of South Carolina from the Union. Quickly other Southern States followed, until a United States South was organized, the chief stone in the corner of the new political edifice being Negro slavery. It was not six weeks after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, when the roar of cannon in Charleston Harbor announced to the startled country that war between the States had begun. The first call of the new President for troops to put down the rebellion and to save the Union, and the patriotic uprising which it evoked made it plain that the struggle thus opened was to be nothing less than a death-grapple between the two sections.

Before the attack on Fort Sumter, Garrison was opposed to coercing the rebel States back into the Union. He admitted the Constitutional power of the National Government to employ force in maintaining the integrity of the Republic. “The Federal Government must not pretend to be in actual operation, embracing thirty-four States,” the editor of the Liberator commented, “and then allow the seceding States to trample upon its flag, steal its property, and defy its authority with impunity; for it would then be (as it is at this moment) a mockery and a laughingstock.