Friday, November 28, 2014

Charles Eliot Norton to Arthur H. Clough, May 27, 1861

Shady Hill, 27 May, 1861.

. . . My last letter to you was written a day or two before the fall of Fort Sumter. Since then I have wished over and over again that you were here, that you might have seen and taken part in the magnificent popular movement of these days.

As events have turned out nothing could have been more fortunate than the bombardment of the fort, and the lowering of the national flag before the force of a rebellious State. The guns of South Carolina battered down a great deal more than the walls of the fort, — party divisions and prejudices, personal interests, private or social differences, all fell before them. The whole Northern people was heartily united, and there was but one feeling and one will among them all. It was not that their passions were aroused, or that they were seized with the sudden contagion of a short-lived popular excitement, — but all their self-respect, their intelligent and conservative love of order, government, and law, all their instinctive love of liberty, and their sense of responsibility for the safety of the blessings of freedom and of popular government, were stirred to their very depth. The question at issue was put so plainly by the Charleston guns that no man in the Free States could hesitate as to the answer. . . .

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 234

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