The business interests of the Northern cities were bitterly and unanimously arrayed against any attempt to use force against the South. The city of New York was thoroughly imbued with Secession sentiment, and its Mayor, through Daniel E. Sickles, one of the members of Congress, demanded the establishment of a free and independent Municipal State on the island of Manhattan. Seward had just written to Charles F. Adams, our minister to England: "Only an imperial and despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This Federal Republican country of ours is, of all forms of Government, the very one which is the most unfitted for such a labor." This letter could only mean one of two things, either that the first member of the Cabinet was a Secessionist and meant to allow the South to go unmolested, or he planned to change our form of Government by a _coup d'etat_ in the crisis and assume the Dictatorship. In either event his attitude boded ill for the new President and his future. Wendell Phillips, the eloquent friend of Senator Winter, declared in Boston in a public address: "Here are a series of states who think their peculiar institutions require that they should have a separate government. They have the right to decide that question without appealing to you or me. Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. There is no longer a Union. You can not go through Massachusetts and recruit men to bombard Charleston or New Orleans. Nothing but madness can provoke a war with the Gulf States." The last member of his distracted, divided, passion-ridden Cabinet had gone at the close of its first eventful sitting. The dark figure of the President stood beside the window looking over the mirror-like surface of the Potomac to the hills of Virginia. The shadow of a great sorrow shrouded his face and form. The shoulders drooped. But the light in the depths of his sombre eyes was growing steadily in intensity. Old Edward, the veteran hallman, appeared at the door with his endless effort to wash his hands without water. "A young gentleman wishes to see you, sir, a reporter I think--Mr. Ned Vaughan, of the _Daily Republican_." Without lifting his eyes from the Virginia hills, the quiet voice said: "Let him in." In vain the wily diplomat of the press sought to obtain a declaration of policy on the question of the relief of Fort Sumter. In his easy, friendly way the President made him welcome, but only smiled and slowly shook his head in answer to each pointed question, or laughed aloud at the skillful traps he was invited to enter.