But while he was making these terrible admissions of his own duty, what was Buchanan doing? Instead of holding up the hands of the nation's representatives in South Carolina, he was weakening them. Instead of strengthening the Federal garrison in Charleston harbor, he permitted it to dwindle until it was powerless to take a single step. Not one act, indeed, did he perform, but contented himself with calling on Congress for legislation to meet the emergency. And out of Congress, of course, he could get nothing, for the Southern representatives would vote for no such legislation, and the Republican members were bent upon waiting until Lincoln, who had been elected president, came in in March, and the northern Democrats were paralyzed with pusillanimity. So South Carolina went on proving to the other slave States that it could "go it alone." One after another these other States seceded from the Union. Northern arsenals were stripped of arms. Southern officers went out of the army one by one, and made ready to organize the army of the new Confederacy which was forming under the president's nose. It was a time for the strong arm, and for quick, decisive, Jacksonian, and not at all squeamish, action. But no such action was taken. The golden moment was lost, and when, three months afterward, Lincoln came in at last, war, with all its horrors, was upon the country. If the young rebellion had been truly nipped in the bud, as it might have been, by a rigid enforcement, in November and December, 1860, of Federal judicial processes in South Carolina; if the laws of the United States had been enforced in that State at the point of the bayonet, if need be; if a Federal functionary, sustained by an ample force of United States troops, had torn South Carolina's ordinance of secession into shreds on the steps of the capitol at Columbia, with no tender regard for South Carolina's interpretation of the Constitution, is it likely that South Carolina's sister States would have been so prompt at seceding? Very likely it might not have been necessary to do any of these things. If Buchanan had merely stood up and said, as Jackson did in 1833, "I shall enforce the laws of the United States in spite of any and all resistance that may be made," there might well have been no more of secession in 1860 or 1861 than there had been of real nullification in 1833. And if this step had been taken, and there had been no war, what then? What about slavery? it may be asked. Is it conceivable that northern sentiment would have permitted chattel slavery to continue? Was not war inevitable on that main question alone? Let us see. The sentiment for absolute and sudden emancipation was the product of the war. Lincoln was not an Abolitionist. The Republican party was not Abolitionist.