"ready to fling to the breeze of treason which it and the mayor hoped to raise in this city."
The firing on Fort Sumter brought a much-needed realization of the seriousness of the situation, and put an end to the sympathy for the Southern cause. The Southern papers viewed with bitter anger and disgust this boldness of front on the part of journals and politicians formerly considered neutral, if not friendly. The Charleston Mercury called the roll of the statesmen whom the South had counted friends. "Where," it asked, "are Fillmore, Van Buren, Cochrane, McKeon, Weed, Dix, Dickinson and Barnard, of New York, in the bloody crusade proposed by President Lincoln against the South? Unheard of in their dignified retirement, or hounding on the fanatic warfare, or themselves joining 'the noble army of martyrs for liberty' marching on the South."
"The proposition to subjugate," said the Richmond Examiner, "comes from the metropolis of the North's boasted conservatism, even from the largest beneficiary of Southern wealth—New York City."
Meanwhile Lincoln had taken Seward into his Cabinet, and James Watson Webb, another bitter enemy of Greeley, had been offered the post of Minister to Constantinople. Rejecting that, he had been made Ambassador to Brazil. Greeley was left without political recognition, and his temper was such that he could not but be unhappy, especially considering that, only a few months before, he had been proclaimed as the man who had brought about Lincoln's nomination.
He was indeed "a power without the government," left to fight the struggle in his own way. While his editorials in November and December, 1860, doubtless had much to do with alienating Lincoln from him, the fact that his bitterest enemy stood between him and the Presi
