“This prick in the great Northern balloon will let out a quantity of poisonous gas, and rouse the people to a sense of the nature of the conflict on which they have entered.” In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—“adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed”—one of the North’s leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution. It was echoed by a soldier in the ranks: “I shall see the thing played out, or die in the attempt.” Even as Greeley was writing despairingly to Lincoln, an editorial in the Tribune by another hand maintained that “it is not characteristic of
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