the war could no longer be fought “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water. … This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.” The demand by border-state slaveowners “that the government shall not strike its open enemies, lest they be struck by accident” had become “the paralysis—the dead palsy—of the government in this whole struggle.”26
