Seward seemed remarkably detached from what Russell even in his short time in America had come to see as the true gravity of the crisis. The two federal forts on everyone’s mind, Pickens and Sumter, somehow had become flint points capable of igniting a civil war. Russell understood, however, that the true cause of the conflict, no matter how hard anyone tried to disguise it, was slavery. He called it a “curse” and likened it to a cancer whose inner damage was masked by the victim’s outward appearance of health. He marveled that the South seemed intent on staking its destiny on ground that the
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