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+Title: Abraham Lincoln and the Union, A Chronicle of the Embattled North
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+Author: Nathaniel W. Stephenson
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+THIS BOOK, VOLUME 29 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, ALLEN
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+THIS BOOK, VOLUME 29 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, ALLEN
+JOHNSON, EDITOR,  WAS DONATED TO PROJECT GUTENBERG BY THE JAMES
+J. KELLY LIBRARY OF ST. GREGORY'S UNIVERSITY; THANKS TO ALEV AKMAN.
+
+Scanned by Dianne Bean.
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+
+
+Abraham Lincoln and the Union, A Chronicle of the Embattled North
+
+BY NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON
+
+
+
+
+NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO.
+LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
+OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+1918
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+In spite of a lapse of sixty years, the historian who attempts to
+portray the era of Lincoln is still faced with almost impossible
+demands and still confronted with arbitrary points of view.  It
+is out of the question, in a book so brief as this must
+necessarily be, to meet all these demands or to alter these
+points of view. Interests that are purely local, events that did
+not with certainty contribute to the final outcome, gossip, as
+well as the mere caprice of the scholar--these must obviously be
+set aside.
+
+The task imposed upon the volume resolves itself, at bottom, into
+just two questions: Why was there a war? Why was the Lincoln
+Government successful? With these two questions always in mind I
+have endeavored, on the one hand, to select and consolidate the
+pertinent facts; on the other, to make clear, even at the cost of
+explanatory comment, their relations in the historical sequence
+of cause and effect.  This purpose has particularly governed the
+use of biographical matter, in which the main illustration, of
+course, is the career of Lincoln.  Prominent as it is here made,
+the Lincoln matter all bears in the last analysis on one
+point--his control of his support.  On that the history of the
+North hinges.  The personal and private Lincoln it is impossible
+to present within these pages.  The public Lincoln, including the
+character of his mind, is here the essential matter.
+
+The bibliography at the close of the volume indicates the more
+important books which are at the reader's disposal and which it
+is unfortunate not to know.
+
+NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON. Charleston, S. C., March, 1918. 
+
+
+
+ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+I. THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC
+
+II. THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION
+
+III. THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY
+
+IV. THE CRISIS
+
+V. SECESSION
+
+VI. WAR
+
+VII. LINCOLN
+
+VIII. THE RULE OF LINCOLN
+
+IX. THE CRUCIAL MATTER
+
+X. THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY
+
+XI. NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR
+
+XII. THE MEXICAN EPISODE
+
+XIII. THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864
+
+XIV. LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC
+
+
+"There is really no Union now between the North and the South....
+No two nations upon earth entertain feelings of more bitter
+rancor toward each other than these two nations of the Republic."
+
+This remark, which is attributed to Senator Benjamin Wade of
+Ohio, provides the key to American politics in the decade
+following the Compromise of 1850.  To trace this division of the
+people to its ultimate source, one would have to go far back into
+colonial times. There was a process of natural selection at work,
+in the intellectual and economic conditions of the eighteenth
+century, which inevitably drew together certain types and
+generated certain forces.  This process manifested itself in one
+form in His Majesty's plantations of the North, and in another in
+those of the South.  As early as the opening of the nineteenth
+century, the social tendencies of the two regions were already so
+far alienated that they involved differences which would scarcely
+admit of reconciliation.  It is a truism to say that these
+differences gradually were concentrated around fundamentally
+different conceptions of labor--of slave labor in the South, of
+free labor in the North.
+
+Nothing, however, could be more fallacious than the notion that
+this growing antagonism was controlled by any deliberate purpose
+in either part of the country.  It was apparently necessary that
+this Republic in its evolution should proceed from confederation
+to nationality through an intermediate and apparently reactionary
+period of sectionalism.  In this stage of American history,
+slavery was without doubt one of the prime factors involved, but
+sectional consciousness, with all its emotional and psychological
+implications, was the fundamental impulse of the stern events
+which occurred between 1850 and 1865.
+
+By the middle of the nineteenth century the more influential
+Southerners had come generally to regard their section of the
+country as a distinct social unit.  The next step was inevitable.
+The South began to regard itself as a separate political unit. 
+It is the distinction of Calhoun that he showed himself toward
+the end sufficiently flexible to become the exponent of this new
+political impulse.  With all his earlier fire he encouraged the
+Southerners to withdraw from the so-called national parties, Whig
+and Democratic, to establish instead a single Southern party, and
+to formulate, by means of popular conventions, a single concerted
+policy for the entire South.
+
+At that time such a policy was still regarded, from the Southern
+point of view, as a radical idea.  In 1851, a battle was fought
+at the polls between the two Southern ideas--the old one which
+upheld separate state independence, and the new one which
+virtually acknowledged Southern nationality.  The issue at stake
+was the acceptance or the rejection of a compromise which could
+bring no permanent settlement of fundamental differences.
+
+Nowhere was the battle more interesting than in South Carolina,
+for it brought into clear light that powerful Southern leader who
+ten years later was to be the masterspirit of secession--Robert
+Barnwell Rhett.  In 1851 he fought hard to revive the older idea
+of state independence and to carry South Carolina as a separate
+state out of the Union.  Accordingly it is significant of the
+progress that the consolidation of the South had made at this
+date that on this issue Rhett encountered general opposition. 
+This difference of opinion as to policy was not inspired, as some
+historians have too hastily concluded, by national feeling.
+Scarcely any of the leaders of the opposition considered the
+Federal Government supreme over the State Government.  They
+opposed Rhett because they felt secession to be at that moment
+bad policy.  They saw that, if South Carolina went out of the
+Union in 1851, she would go alone and the solidarity of the South
+would be broken.  They were not lacking in sectional patriotism,
+but their conception of the best solution of the complex problem
+differed from that advocated by Rhett.  Their position was summed
+up by Langdon Cheves when he said, "To secede now is to secede
+from the South as well as from the Union."  On the basis of this
+belief they defeated Rhett and put off secession for ten years.
+
+There is no analogous single event in the history of the North,
+previous to the war, which reveals with similar clearness a
+sectional consciousness.  On the surface the life of the people
+seemed, indeed, to belie the existence of any such feeling.  The
+Northern capitalist class aimed steadily at being non-sectional,
+and it made free use of the word national.  We must not forget,
+however, that all sorts of people talked of national
+institutions, and that the term, until we look closely into the
+mind of, the person using it, signifies nothing.  Because the
+Northern capitalist repudiated the idea of sectionalism, it does
+not follow that he set up any other in its place.  Instead of
+accomplishing anything so positive, he remained for the most part
+a negative quantity.
+
+Living usually somewhere between Maine and Ohio, he made it his
+chief purpose to regulate the outflow of manufactures from that
+industrial region and the inflow of agricultural produce.  The
+movement of the latter eastward and northward, and the former
+westward and southward, represents roughly but graphically the
+movement of the business of that time.  The Easterner lived in
+fear of losing the money which was owed him in the South.  As the
+political and economic conditions of the day made unlikely any
+serious clash of interest between the East and the West, he had
+little solicitude about his accounts beyond the Alleghanies.  But
+a gradually developing hostility between North and South was
+accompanied by a parallel anxiety on the part of Northern capital
+for its Southern investments and debts.  When the war eventually
+became inevitable, $200,000,000 were owed by Southerners to
+Northerners.  For those days this was an indebtedness of no
+inconsiderable magnitude.  The Northern capitalists, preoccupied
+with their desire to secure this account, were naturally eager to
+repudiate sectionalism, and talked about national interests with
+a zeal that has sometimes been misinterpreted.  Throughout the
+entire period from 1850 to 1865, capital in American politics
+played for the most part a negative role, and not until after the
+war did it become independent of its Southern interests.
+
+For the real North of that day we must turn to those Northerners
+who felt sufficient unto themselves and whose political
+convictions were unbiased by personal interests which were
+involved in other parts of the country.  We must listen to the
+distinct voices that gave utterance to their views, and we must
+observe the definite schemes of their political leaders. 
+Directly we do this, the fact stares us in the face that the
+North had become a democracy.  The rich man no longer played the
+role of grandee, for by this time there had arisen those two
+groups which, between them, are the ruin of aristocracy--the
+class of prosperous laborers and the group of well-to-do
+intellectuals.  Of these, the latter gave utterance, first, to
+their faith in democracy, and then, with all the intensity of
+partisan zeal, to their sense of the North as the agent of
+democracy.  The prosperous laborers applauded this expression of
+anopinion in which they thoroughly believed and at the same time
+gave their willing support to a land policy that was typically
+Northern.
+
+American economic history in the middle third of the century is
+essentially the record of a struggle to gain possession of public
+land.  The opposing forces were the South, which strove to
+perpetuate by this means a social system that was fundamentally
+aristocratic, and the North, which sought by the same means to
+foster its ideal of democracy.  Though the South, with the aid of
+its economic vassal, the Northern capitalist class, was for some
+time able to check the land-hunger of the Northern democrats, it
+was never able entirely to secure the control which it desired,
+but was always faced with the steady and continued opposition of
+the real North.  On one occasion in Congress, the heart of the
+whole matter was clearly shown, for at the very moment when the
+Northerners of the democratic class were pressing one of their
+frequent schemes for free land, Southerners and their sympathetic
+Northern henchmen were furthering a scheme that aimed at the
+purchase of Cuba.  From the impatient sneer of a Southerner that
+the Northerners sought to give "land to the landless" and the
+retort that the Southerners seemed equally anxious to supply
+"niggers to the niggerless," it can be seen that American history
+is sometimes better summed up by angry politicians than by
+historians.
+
+We must be on our guard, however, against ascribing to either
+side too precise a consciousness of its own motives.  The old
+days when the American Civil War was conceived as a clear-cut
+issue are as a watch in the night that has passed, and we now
+realize that historical movements are almost without exception
+the resultants of many motives.  We have come to recognize that
+men have always misapprehended themselves, contradicted
+themselves, obeyed primal impulses, and then deluded themselves
+with sophistications upon the springs of action.  In a word,
+unaware of what they are doing, men allow their aesthetic and
+dramatic senses to shape their conceptions of their own lives.
+
+That "great impersonal artist," of whom Matthew Arnold has so
+much to say, is at work in us all, subtly making us into
+illusions, first to ourselves and later to the historian.  It is
+the business of history, as of analytic fiction, both to feel the
+power of these illusions and to work through them in imagination
+to the dim but potent motives on which they rest.  We are prone
+to forget that we act from subconscious quite as often as from
+conscious influences, from motives that arise out of the dim
+parts of our being, from the midst of shadows that psychology has
+only recently begun to lift, where senses subtler than the
+obvious make use of fear, intuition, prejudice, habit, and
+illusion, and too often play with us as the wind with blown
+leaves.
+
+True as this is of man individually, it is even more
+fundamentally true of man collectively, of parties, of peoples. 
+It is a strikingly accurate description of the relation of the
+two American nations that now found themselves opposed within the
+Republic.  Neither fully understood the other.  Each had a social
+ideal that was deeper laid than any theory of government or than
+any commercial or humanitarian interest.  Both knew vaguely but
+with sure instinct that their interests and ideals were
+irreconcilable.  Each felt in its heart the deadly passion of
+self-preservation.  It was because, in both North and South, men
+were subtly conscious that a whole social system was the issue at
+stake, and because on each side they believed in their own ideals
+with their whole souls, that, when the time came for their trial
+by fire, they went to their deaths singing.
+
+In the South there still obtained the ancient ideal of
+territorial aristocracy.  Those long traditions of the Western
+European peoples which had made of the great landholder a petty
+prince lay beneath the plantation life of the Southern States. 
+The feudal spirit, revived in a softer world and under brighter
+skies, gave to those who participated in it the same graces and
+somewhat the same capacities which it gave to the knightly class
+in the days of Roland--courage, frankness, generosity, ability in
+affairs, a sense of responsibility, the consciousness of caste. 
+The mode of life which the planters enjoyed and which the
+inferior whites regarded as a social paradise was a life of
+complete deliverance from toil, of disinterested participation in
+local government, of absolute personal freedom--a life in which
+the mechanical action of law was less important than the more
+human compulsion of social opinion, and in which private
+differences were settled under the code of honor.
+
+This Southern life was carried on in the most appropriate
+environment.  On a landed estate, often larger than many of
+Europe's baronies, stood the great house of the planter, usually
+a graceful example of colonial architecture, surrounded by
+stately gardens.  This mansion was the center of a boundless
+hospitality; guests were always coming and going; the hostess and
+her daughters were the very symbols of kindliness and ease.  To
+think of such houses was to think of innumerable joyous days; of
+gentlemen galloping across country after the hounds; of coaches
+lumbering along avenues of noble oaks, bringing handsome women to
+visit the mansion; of great feastings; of nights of music and
+dancing; above all, of the great festival of Christmas,
+celebrated much as had been the custom in "Merrie England"
+centuries before.
+
+Below the surface of this bright world lay the enslaved black
+race. In the minds of many Southerners--it was always a secret
+burden from which they saw no means of freeing themselves.  To
+emancipate the slaves, and thereby to create a population of free
+blacks, was generally considered, from the white point of view,
+an impossible solution of the problem.  The Southerners usually
+believed that the African could be tamed only in small groups and
+when constantly surrounded by white influence, as in the case of
+house servants.  Though a few great capitalists had taken up the
+idea that the deliberate exploitation of the blacks was the high
+prerogative of the whites, the general sentiment of the Southern
+people was more truly expressed by Toombs when he said: "The
+question is not whether we could be more prosperous and happy
+with these three and a half million slaves in Africa, and their
+places filled with an equal number of hardy, intelligent, and
+enterprising citizens of the superior race; but it is simply
+whether, while we have them among us, we would be most prosperous
+with them in freedom or in bondage."
+
+The Southern people, in the majority of instances, had no hatred
+of the blacks.  In the main they led their free, spirited, and
+gracious life, convinced that the maintenance of slavery was but
+making the best of circumstances which were beyond their control.
+It was these Southern people who were to hear from afar the
+horrible indictment of all their motives by the Abolitionists and
+who were to react in a growing bitterness and distrust toward
+everything Northern.
+
+But of these Southern people the average Northerner knew nothing.
+He knew the South only on its least attractive side of
+professional politics.  For there was a group of powerful
+magnates, rich planters or "slave barons," who easily made their
+way into Congress, and who played into the hands of the Northern
+capitalists, for a purpose similar to theirs.  It was these men
+who forced the issue upon slavery; they warned the common people
+of the North to mind their own business; and for doing so they
+were warmly applauded by the Northern capitalist class.  It was
+therefore in opposition to the whole American world of organized
+capital that the Northern masses demanded the use of "the
+Northern hammer"--as Sumner put it, in one of his most furious
+speeches--in their aim to destroy a section where, intuitively,
+they felt their democratic ideal could not be realized.
+
+And what was that ideal?  Merely to answer democracy is to dodge
+the fundamental question.  The North was too complex in its
+social structure and too multitudinous in its interests to
+confine itself to one type of life.  It included all sorts and
+conditions of men--from the most gracious of scholars who lived
+in romantic ease among his German and Spanish books, and whose
+lovely house in Cambridge is forever associated with the noble
+presence of Washington, to the hardy frontiersman, breaking the
+new soil of his Western claim, whose wife at sunset shaded her
+tired eyes, under a hand rough with labor, as she stood on the
+threshold of her log cabin, watching for the return of her man
+across the weedy fields which he had not yet fully subdued.  Far
+apart as were Longfellow and this toiler of the West, they yet
+felt themselves to be one in purpose.
+
+They were democrats, but not after the simple, elementary manner
+of the democrats at the opening of the century.  In the North,
+there had come to life a peculiar phase of idealism that had
+touched democracy with mysticism and had added to it a vague but
+genuine romance.  This new vision of the destiny of the country
+had the practical effect of making the Northerners identify
+themselves in their imaginations with all mankind and in creating
+in them an enthusiastic desire, not only to give to every
+American a home of his own, but also to throw open the gates of
+the nation and to share the wealth of America with the poor of
+all the world. In very truth, it was their dominating passion to
+give "land to the landless."  Here was the clue to much of their
+attitude toward the South.  Most of these Northern dreamers gave
+little or no thought to slavery itself; but they felt that the
+section which maintained such a system so committed to
+aristocracy that any real friendship with it was impossible.
+
+We are thus forced to conceive the American Republic in the years
+immediately following the Compromise of 1850 as, in effect, a
+dual nation, without a common loyalty between the two parts. 
+Before long the most significant of the great Northerners of the
+time was to describe this impossible condition by the appropriate
+metaphor of a house divided against itself.  It was not, however,
+until eight years after the division of the country had been
+acknowledged in 1850 that these words were uttered.  In those
+eight years both sections awoke to the seriousness of the
+differences that they had admitted.  Both perceived that, instead
+of solving their problem in 1850, they had merely drawn sharply
+the lines of future conflict.  In every thoughtful mind there
+arose the same alternative questions: Is there no solution but
+fighting it out until one side destroys the other, or we end as
+two nations confessedly independent? Or is there some conceivable
+new outlet for this opposition of energy on the part of the
+sections, some new mode of permanent adjustment?
+
+It was at the moment when thinking men were asking these
+questions that one of the nimblest of politicians took the center
+of the stage.  Stephen A. Douglas was far-sighted enough to
+understand the land-hunger of the time.  One is tempted to add
+that his ear was to the ground.  The statement will not, however,
+go unchallenged, for able apologists have their good word to say
+for Douglas.  Though in the main, the traditional view of him as
+the prince of political jugglers still holds its own, let us
+admit that his bold, rough spirit, filled as it was with
+political daring, was not without its strange vein of idealism. 
+And then let us repeat that his ear was to the ground.  Much
+careful research has indeed been expended in seeking to determine
+who originated the policy which, about 1853, Douglas decided to
+make his own.  There has also been much dispute about his
+motives. Most of us, however, see in his course of action an
+instance of playing the game of politics with an audacity that
+was magnificent.
+
+His conduct may well have been the result of a combination of
+motives which included a desire to retain the favor of the
+Northwest, a wish to pave the way to his candidacy for the
+Presidency, the intention to enlist the aid of the South as well
+as that of his own locality, and perhaps the hope that he was
+performing a service of real value to his country.  That is, he
+saw that the favor of his own Northwest would be lavished upon
+any man who opened up to settlement the rich lands beyond Iowa
+and Missouri which were still held by the Indians, and for which
+the Westerners were clamoring.  Furthermore, they wanted a
+railroad that would reach to the Pacific.  There were, however,
+local entanglements and political cross-purposes which involved
+the interests of the free State of Illinois and those of the
+slave State of Missouri.
+
+Douglas's great stroke was a programme for harmonizing all these
+conflicting interests and for drawing together the West and the
+South.  Slaveholders were to be given what at that moment they
+wanted most--an opportunity to expand into that territory to the
+north and west of Missouri which had been made free by the
+Compromise of 1820, while the free Northwest was to have its
+railroad to the coast and also its chance to expand into the
+Indian country.  Douglas thus became the champion of a bill which
+would organize two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, but
+which would leave the settlers in each to decide whether slavery
+or free labor should prevail within their boundaries.  This
+territorial scheme was accepted by a Congress in which the
+Southerners and their Northern allies held control, and what is
+known as the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was signed by President Pierce
+on May 30,1854.*
+
+*The origin of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill has been a much discussed
+subject among historians in recent years.  The older view that
+Douglas was simply playing into the hands of the "slavepower" by
+sacrificing Kansas, is no longer tenable.  This point has been
+elaborated by Allen Johnson in his study of Douglas ("Stephen A.
+Douglas: a Study in American Politics").  In his "Repeal of the
+Missouri Compromise", P.O. Ray contends that the legislation of
+1854 originated in a factional controversy in Missouri, and that
+Douglas merely served the interests of the proslavery group led
+by Senator David R. Atchinson of Missouri.  Still another point
+of view is that presented in the "Genesis of the Kansas-Nebraska
+Act," by F. H. Hodder, who would explain not only the division of
+the Nebraska Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, but the object
+of the entire bill by the insistent efforts of promoters of the
+Pacific railroad scheme to secure a right of way through
+Nebraska.  This project involved the organization of a
+territorial government and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. 
+Douglas was deeply interested in the western railroad interests
+and carried through the necessary legislation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION
+
+In order to understand Douglas one must understand the Democratic
+party of 1854 in which Douglas was a conspicuous leader.  The
+Democrats boasted that they were the only really national party
+and contended that their rivals, the Whigs and the Know-Nothings,
+were merely the representatives of localities or classes.
+Sectionalism was the favorite charge which the Democrats brought
+against their enemies; and yet it was upon these very Democrats
+that the slaveholders had hitherto relied, and it was upon
+certain members of this party that the label, "Northern men with
+Southern principles," had been bestowed.
+
+The label was not, however, altogether fair, for the motives of
+the Democrats were deeply rooted in their own peculiar
+temperament. In the last analysis, what had held their
+organization together, and what had enabled them to dominate
+politics for nearly the span of a generation, was their faith in
+a principle that then appealed powerfully, and that still
+appeals, to much in the American character.  This was the
+principle of negative action on the part of the government--the
+old idea that the government should do as little as possible and
+should confine itself practically to the duties of the policeman. 
+This principle has seemed always to express to the average mind
+that traditional individualism which is an inheritance of the
+Anglo-Saxon race.  In America, in the middle of the nineteenth
+century, it reenforced that tradition of local independence which
+was strong throughout the West and doubly strong in the South. 
+Then, too, the Democratic party still spoke the language of the
+theoretical Democracy inherited from Jefferson. And Americans
+have always been the slaves of phrases!
+
+Furthermore, the close alliance of the Northern party machine
+with the South made it, generally, an object of care for all
+those Northern interests that depended on the Southern market. 
+As to the Southerners, their relation with this party has two
+distinct chapters.  The first embraced the twenty years preceding
+the Compromise of 1850, and may be thought of as merging into the
+second during three or four years following the great
+equivocation. In that period, while the antislavery crusade was
+taking form, the aim of Southern politicians was mainly negative. 
+"Let us alone," was their chief demand.  Though aggressive in
+their policy, they were too far-sighted to demand of the North
+any positive course in favor of slavery.  The rise of a new type
+of Southern politician, however, created a different situation
+and began a second chapter in the relation between the South and
+the Democratic party machine in the North.  But of that
+hereafter.
+
+Until 1854, it was the obvious part of wisdom for Southerners to
+cooperate as far as possible with that party whose cardinal idea
+was that the government should come as near as conceivable to a
+system of non-interference; that it should not interfere with
+business, and therefore oppose a tariff; that it should not
+interfere with local government, and therefore applaud states
+rights; that it should not interfere with slavery, and therefore
+frown upon militant abolition.  Its policy was, to adopt a
+familiar phrase, one of masterly inactivity.  Indeed it may well
+be called the party of political evasion.  It was a huge, loose
+confederacy of differing political groups, embracing paupers and
+millionaires, moderate anti-slavery men and slave barons, all of
+whom were held together by the unreliable bond of an agreement
+not to tread on each other's toes.
+
+Of this party Douglas was the typical representative, both in
+strength and weakness.  He had all its pliability, its good
+humor, its broad and easy way with things, its passion for
+playing politics.  Nevertheless, in calling upon the believers in
+political evasion to consent for this once to reverse their
+principle and to endorse a positive action, he had taken a great
+risk.  Would their sporting sense of politics as a gigantic game
+carry him through successfully?  He knew that there was a hard
+fight before him, but with the courage of a great political
+strategist, and proudly confident in his hold upon the main body
+of his party, he prepared for both the attacks and the defections
+that were inevitable.
+
+Defections, indeed, began at once.  Even before the bill had been
+passed, the "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" was printed in
+a New York paper, with the signatures of members of Congress
+representing both the extreme anti-slavery wing of the Democrats
+and the organized Free-Soil party.  The most famous of these
+names were those of Chase and Sumner, both of whom had been sent
+to the Senate by a coalition of Free-Soilers and Democrats.  With
+them was the veteran abolitionist, Giddings of Ohio.  The
+"Appeal" denounced Douglas as an "unscrupulous politician" and
+sounded both the warcries of the Northern masses by accusing him
+of being engaged in "an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast
+unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers
+from our own States."
+
+The events of the spring and summer of 1854 may all be grouped
+under two heads--the formation of an antiNebraska party, and the
+quick rush of sectional patriotism to seize the territory laid
+open by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  The instantaneous refusal of
+the Northerners to confine their settlement to Nebraska, and
+their prompt invasion of Kansas; the similar invasion from the
+South; the support of both movements by societies organized for
+that purpose; the war in Kansas all the details of this thrilling
+story have been told elsewhere.* The political story alone
+concerns us here.
+
+*See Jesse Macy, "The Anti-Slavery Crusade". (In "The Chronicles
+of America".)
+
+
+When the fight began there were four parties in the field: the
+Democrats, the Whigs, the Free-Soilers, and the Know-Nothings.
+
+The Free-Soil party, hitherto a small organization, had sought to
+make slavery the main issue in politics.  Its watchword was "Free
+soil, free speech, free labor, and free men."  It is needless to
+add that it was instantaneous in its opposition to the
+Kansas-Nebraska Act.
+
+The Whigs at the moment enjoyed the greatest prestige, owing to
+the association with them of such distinguished leaders as
+Webster and Clay.  In 1854, however, as a party they were dying,
+and the very condition that had made success possible for the
+Democrats made it impossible for the Whigs, because the latter
+stood for positive ideas, and aimed to be national in reality and
+not in the evasive Democratic sense of the term.  For, as a
+matter of fact, on analysis all the greater issues of the day
+proved to be sectional.  The Whigs would not, like the Democrats,
+adopt a negative attitude toward these issues, nor would they
+consent to become merely sectional.  Yet at the moment negation
+and sectionalism were the only alternatives, and between these
+millstones the Whig organization was destined to be ground to
+bits and to disappear after the next Presidential election.
+
+Even previous to 1854, numbers of Whigs had sought a desperate
+outlet for their desire to be positive in politics and had
+created a new party which during a few years was to seem a
+reality and then vanish together with its parent.  The one chance
+for a party which had positive ideas and which wished not to be
+sectional was the definite abandonment of existing issues and the
+discovery of some new issue not connected with sectional feeling. 
+Now, it happened that a variety of causes, social and religious,
+had brought about bad blood between native and foreigner, in some
+of the great cities, and upon the issue involved in this
+condition the failing spirit of the Whigs fastened.  A secret
+society which had been formed to oppose the naturalization of
+foreigners quickly became a recognized political party.  As the
+members of the Society answered all questions with "I do not
+know," they came to be called "Know-Nothings," though they called
+themselves "Americans."  In those states where the Whigs had been
+strongest --Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania--this last
+attempt to apply their former temper, though not their
+principles, had for a moment some success; but it could not
+escape the fierce division which was forced on the country by
+Douglas.  As a result, it rapidly split into factions, one of
+which merged with the enemies of Douglas, while the other was
+lost among his supporters.
+
+What would the great dying Whig party leave behind it?  This was
+the really momentous question in 1854.  Briefly, this party
+bequeathed the temper of political positivism and at the same
+time the dread of sectionalism.  The inner clue to American
+politics during the next few years is, to many minds, to be found
+largely in the union of this old Whig temper with a new-born
+sectional patriotism, and, to other minds, in the gradual and
+reluctant passing of the Whig opposition to a sectional party. 
+But though this transformation of the wrecks of Whiggism began
+immediately, and while the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was still being
+hotly debated in Congress, it was not until 1860 that it was
+completed.
+
+In the meantime various incidents had shown that the sectional
+patriotism of the North, the fury of the abolitionists, and the
+positive temper in politics, were all drawing closer together.
+Each of these tendencies can be briefly illustrated.  For
+example, the rush to Kansas had begun, and the Massachusetts
+Emigrant Aid Society was preparing to assist settlers who were
+going west.  In May, there occurred at Boston one of the most
+conspicuous attempts to rescue a fugitive slave, in which a mob
+led by Thomas Wentworth Higginson attacked the guards of Anthony
+Burns, a captured fugitive, killed one of them, but failed to get
+the slave, who was carried to a revenue cutter between lines of
+soldiers and returned to slavery.  Among numerous details of the
+hour the burning of Douglas in effigy is perhaps worth passing
+notice.  In duly the anti-Nebraska men of Michigan held a
+convention, at which they organized as a political party and
+nominated a state ticket.  Of their nominees, two had hitherto
+ranked themselves as Free-Soilers, three as anti-slavery
+Democrats, and five as Whigs.  For the name of their party they
+chose "Republican," and as the foundation of their platform the
+resolution "That, postponing and suspending all differences with
+regard to political economy or administrative policy," they would
+"act cordially and faithfully in unison," opposing the extension
+of slavery, and would "cooperate and be known as 'Republicans'
+until the contest be terminated."
+
+The history of the next two years is, in its main outlines, the
+story of the war in Kansas and of the spread of this new party
+throughout the North.  It was only by degrees, however, that the
+Republicans absorbed the various groups of anti-Nebraska men.
+What happened at this time in Illinois may be taken as typical,
+and it is particularly noteworthy as revealing the first real
+appearance of Abraham Lincoln in American history.
+
+Though in 1854 he was not yet a national figure, Lincoln was
+locally accredited with keen political insight, and was, regarded
+in Illinois as a strong lawyer.  The story is told of him that,
+while he was attending court on the circuit, he heard the news of
+the Kansas-Nebraska Act in a tavern and sat up most of the night
+talking about it.  Next morning he used a phrase destined to
+become famous. "I tell you," said he to a fellow lawyer, "this
+nation cannot exist half slave and half free."
+
+Lincoln, however, was not one of the first to join the
+Republicans. In Illinois, in 1854, Lincoln resigned his seat in
+the legislature to become the Whig candidate for United States
+senator, to succeed the Democratic colleague of Douglas.  But
+there was little chance of his election, for the real contest was
+between the two wings of the Democrats, the Nebraska men and the
+anti-Nebraska men, and Lincoln withdrew in favor of the candidate
+of the latter, who was elected.
+
+During the following year, from the midst of his busy law
+practice, Lincoln watched the Whig party go to pieces.  He saw a
+great part of its vote lodge temporarily among the Know-Nothings,
+but before the end of the year even they began to lose their
+prominence.  In the autumn, from the obscurity of his provincial
+life, he saw, far off, Seward, the most astute politician of the
+day, join the new movement.  In New York, the Republican state
+convention and the Whig state convention merged into one, and
+Seward pronounced a baptismal oration upon the Republican party
+of New York.
+
+In the House of Representatives which met in December, 1855, the
+anti-Nebraska men were divided among themselves, and the
+Know-Nothings held the balance of power.  No  candidate for the
+speakership, however, was able to command a majority, and
+finally, after it had been agreed that a plurality would be
+sufficient, the contest closed, on the one hundred and
+thirty-third ballot, with the election of a Republican, N. P.
+Banks.  Meanwhile in the South, the Whigs were rapidly leaving
+the party, pausing a moment with the Know-Nothings, only to find
+that their inevitable resting-place, under stress of sectional
+feeling, was with the Democrats.
+
+On Washington's birthday, 1856, the Know-Nothing national
+convention met at Philadelphia.  It promptly split upon the
+subject of slavery, and a portion of its membership sent word
+offering support to another convention which was sitting at
+Pittsburgh, and which had been called to form a national
+organization for the Republican party.  A third assembly held on
+this same day was composed of the newspaper editors of Illinois,
+and may be looked upon as the organization of the Republican
+party in that state. At the dinner following this informal
+convention, Lincoln, who was one of the speakers, was toasted as
+"the next United States Senator."
+
+Some four months afterward, in Philadelphia, the Republicans held
+their first national convention.  Only a few years previous its
+members had called themselves by various names--Democrats,
+Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, Whigs.  The old hostilities of these
+different groups had not yet died out.  Consequently, though
+Seward was far and away the most eminent member of the new party,
+he was not nominated for President.  That dangerous honor was
+bestowed upon a dashing soldier and explorer of the Rocky
+Mountains and the Far West, John C. Fremont.*
+
+*For an account of Fremont, see Stewart Edward White, "The
+Forty-Niners" (in "The Chronicles of America"), Chapter II.
+
+
+The key to the political situation in the North, during that
+momentous year, was to be found in the great number of able Whigs
+who, seeing that their own party was lost but refusing to be
+sidetracked by the make-believe issue of the Know-Nothings, were
+now hesitating what to do.  Though the ordinary politicians among
+the Republicans doubtless wished to conciliate these unattached
+Whigs, the astuteness of the leaders was too great to allow them
+to succumb to that temptation.  They seem to have feared the
+possible effect of immediately incorporating in their ranks,
+while their new organization was still so plastic, the bulk of
+those conservative classes which were, after all, the backbone of
+this irreducible Whig minimum.
+
+The Republican campaign was conducted with a degree of passion
+that had scarcely been equaled in America before that day.  To
+the well-ordered spirit of the conservative classes the tone
+which the Republicans assumed appeared shocking.  Boldly
+sectional in their language, sweeping in their denunciation of
+slavery, the leaders of the campaign made bitter and effective
+use of a number of recent events.  "Uncle Tom's Cabin", published
+in 1852, and already immensely popular, was used as a political
+tract to arouse, by its gruesome picture of slavery, a hatred of
+slaveholders.  Returned settlers from Kansas went about the North
+telling horrible stories of guerrilla warfare, so colored as to
+throw the odium all on one side.  The scandal of the moment was
+the attack made by Preston Brooks on Sumner, after the latter's
+furious diatribe in the Senate, which was published as "The Crime
+Against Kansas".  With double skill the Republicans made equal
+capital out of the intellectual violence of the speech and the
+physical violence of the retort.  In addition to this, there was
+ready to their hands the evidence of Southern and Democratic
+sympathy with a filibustering attempt to conquer the republic of
+Nicaragua, where William Walker, an American adventurer, had
+recently made himself dictator.  Walker had succeeded in having
+his minister acknowledged by the Democratic Administration, and
+in obtaining the endorsement of a great Democratic meeting which
+was held in New York.  It looked, therefore, as if the party of
+political evasion had an anchor to windward, and that, in the
+event of their losing in Kansas, they intended to placate their
+Southern wing by the annexation of Nicaragua.
+
+Here, indeed, was a stronger political tempest than Douglas,
+weatherwise though he was, had foreseen.  How was political
+evasion to brave it?  With a courage quite equal to the boldness
+of the Republicans, the Democrats took another tack and steered
+for less troubled waters.  Their convention at Cincinnati was
+temperate and discreet in all its expressions, and for President
+it nominated a Northerner, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a man
+who was wholly dissociated in the public mind from the struggle
+over Kansas.
+
+The Democratic party leaders knew that they already had two
+strong groups of supporters.  Whatever they did, the South would
+have to go along with them, in its reaction against the furious
+sectionalism of the Republicans.  Besides the Southern support,
+the Democrats counted upon the aid of the professional
+politicians--those men who considered politics rather as a
+fascinating game than as serious and difficult work based upon
+principle.  Upon these the Democrats could confidently rely, for
+they already had, in Douglas in the North and Toombs in the
+South, two master politicians who knew this type and its impulses
+intimately, because they themselves belonged to it.  But the
+Democrats needed the support of a third group.  If they could
+only win over the Northern remnant of the Whigs that was still
+unattached, their position would be secure.  In their efforts to
+obtain this additional and very necessary reinforcement, they
+decided to appear as temperate and restrained as possible--a well
+bred party which all mild and conservative men could trust.
+
+This attitude they formulated in connection with Kansas, which at
+that time had two governments: one, a territorial government, set
+up by emigrants from the South; the other, a state government,
+under the constitution drawn up at Topeka by emigrants from the
+North.  One authorized slavery; the other prohibited slavery; and
+both had appealed to Washington for recognition.  It was with
+this quite definite issue that Congress was chiefly concerned in
+the spring of 1856.  During the summer Toombs introduced a bill
+securing to the settlers of Kansas complete freedom of action and
+providing for an election of delegates to a convention to draw up
+a state constitution which would determine whether slavery or
+freedom was to prevail--in other words, whether Kansas was to be
+annexed to the South or to the North.  This bill was merely the
+full expression of what Douglas had aimed at in 1854 and of what
+was nicknamed "popular sovereignty"--the right of the locality to
+choose for itself between slave and free labor.
+
+Two years before, such a measure would have seemed radical.  But
+in politics time is wonderfully elastic.  Those two years had
+been packed with turmoil.  Kansas had been the scene of a bloody
+conflict.  Regardless of which side had a majority on the ground,
+extremists on each side had demanded recognition for the
+government set up by their own party.  By contrast, Toombs's
+offer to let the majority rule appeared temperate.
+
+The Republicans saw instantly that they must discredit the
+proposal or the ground would be cut from under them.  Though the
+bill passed the Senate, they were able to set it aside in the
+House in favor of a bill admitting Kansas as a free state with
+the Topeka constitution.  The Democrats thereupon accused the
+Republicans of not wanting peace and of wishing to keep up the
+war-cry "Bleeding Kansas" until election time.
+
+That, throughout the country, the two parties continued on the
+lines of policy they had chosen may be seen from an illustration.
+A House committee which had gone to Kansas to investigate
+submitted two reports, one of which, submitted by a Democratic
+member, told the true story of the murders committed by John
+Brown at Pottawatomie.  And yet, while the Republicans spread
+everywhere their shocking tales of murders of free-state
+settlers, the Democrats made practically no use of this equally
+shocking tale of the murder of slaveholders.  Apparently they
+were resolved to appear temperate and conservative to the bitter
+end.
+
+And they had their reward.  Or, perhaps the fury of the
+Republicans had its just deserts.  From either point of view, the
+result was a choice of evils on the part of the reluctant Whigs,
+and that choice was expressed in the following words by as
+typical a New Englander as Rufus Choate: "The first duty of
+Whigs," wrote Choate to the Maine State central committee, "is to
+unite with some organization of our countrymen to defeat and
+dissolve the new geographical party calling itself Republican.... 
+The question for each and every one of us is...by what vote can I
+do most to prevent the madness of the times from working its
+maddest act the very ecstasy of its madness--the permanent
+formation and the actual triumph of a party which knows one half
+of America only to hate and dread it.  If the Republican party,"
+Choate continued, "accomplishes its object and gives the
+government to the North, I turn my eyes from the consequences. 
+To the fifteen states of the South that government will appear an
+alien government.  It will appear worse.  It will appear a
+hostile government.  It will represent to their eye a vast region
+of states organized upon anti-slavery, flushed by triumph,
+cheered onward by the voice of the pulpit, tribune, and press;
+its mission, to inaugurate freedom and put down the oligarchy;
+its constitution, the glittering and sounding generalities of
+natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.... 
+Practically the contest, in my judgment, is between Mr. Buchanan
+and Colonel Fremont.  In these circumstances, I vote for Mr.
+Buchanan."
+
+The party of political evasion thus became the refuge of the old
+original Whigs who were forced to take advantage of any port in a
+storm.  Buchanan was elected by an overwhelming majority.  To the
+careless eye, Douglas had been justified by results; his party
+had triumphed as perhaps never before; and yet, no great
+political success was ever based upon less stable foundations. 
+To maintain this position, those Northerners who reasoned as
+Choate did were a necessity; but to keep them in the party of
+political evasion would depend upon the ability of this party to
+play the game of politics without acknowledging sectional bias. 
+Whether this difficult task could be accomplished would depend
+upon the South. Toombs, on his part, was anxious to continue
+making the party of evasion play the great American game of
+politics, and in his eagerness he perhaps overestimated his hold
+upon the South.  This, however, remains to be seen.
+
+Already another faction had formed around William L. Yancey of
+Alabama--a faction as intolerant of political evasion as the
+Republicans themselves, and one that was eager to match the
+sectional Northern party by a sectional Southern party.  It had
+for the moment fallen into line with the Toombs faction because,
+like the Whigs, it had not the courage to do otherwise.  The
+question now was whether it would continue fearful, and whether
+political evasion would continue to reign.
+
+The key to the history of the next four years is in the growth of
+this positive Southern party, which had the inevitable result of
+forcing the Whig remainder to choose, not as in 1856 between a
+positive sectional policy and an evasive nonsectional policy, but
+in 1860 between two policies both of which were at once positive
+and sectional.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY
+
+The South had thus far been kept in line with the cause of
+political evasion by a small group of able politicians, chief
+among whom were Robert Toombs, Howell Cobb, and Alexander H.
+Stephens.  Curiously enough all three were Georgians, and this
+might indeed be called the day of Georgia in the history of the
+South.
+
+A different type of man, however, and one significant of a
+divergent point of view, had long endeavored to shake the
+leadership of the Georgian group.  Rhett in South Carolina,
+Jefferson Davis in Mississippi, and above all Yancey in Alabama,
+together with the interests and sentiment which they represented,
+were almost ready to contest the orthodoxy of the policy of
+"nothing doing."  To consolidate the interests behind them, to
+arouse and fire the sentiment on which they relied, was now the
+confessed purpose of these determined men.  So little attention
+has hitherto been given to motive in American politics that the
+modern student still lacks a clear-cut and intelligent perception
+of these various factions.  In spite of this fact, however, these
+men may safely be regarded as being distinctly more intellectual,
+and as having distinctly deeper natures, than the men who came
+together under the leadership of Toombs and Cobb, and who had the
+true provincial enthusiasm for politics as the great American
+sport.
+
+The factions of both Toombs and Yancey were intensely Southern
+and, whenever a crisis might come, neither meant to hesitate an
+instant over striking hard for the South.  Toombs, however,
+wanted to prevent such a situation, while Yancey was anxious to
+force one. The former conceived felicity as the joy of playing
+politics on the biggest stage, and he therefore bent all his
+strength to preserving the so-called national parties; the
+latter, scornful of all such union, was for a separate Southern
+community.
+
+Furthermore, no man could become enthusiastic about political
+evasion unless by nature he also took kindly to compromise.  So,
+Toombs and his followers were for preserving the negative
+Democratic position of 1856.  In a formal paper of great ability
+Stephens defended that position when he appeared for reelection
+to Congress in 1857.  Cobb, who had entered Buchanan's Cabinet as
+Secretary of the Treasury, and who spoke hopefully of making
+Kansas a slave state, insisted nevertheless that such a change
+must be "brought about by the recognized principles of carrying
+out the will of the majority which is the great doctrine of the
+Kansas Bill."  To Yancey, as to the Republicans, Kansas was a
+disputed border-land for which the so-called two nations were
+fighting.
+
+The internal Southern conflict between these two factions began
+anew with the Congressional elections of 1857.  It is worth
+observing that the make-up of these factions was almost a
+resurrection of the two groups which, in 1850, had divided the
+South on the question of rejecting the Compromise.  In a letter
+to Stephens in reference to one of the Yancey men, Cobb
+prophesied: "McDonald will utterly fail to get up a new Southern
+Rights party. Burnt children dread the fire, and he cannot get up
+as strong an organization as he did in 1850.  Still it is
+necessary to guard every point, as McDonald is a hard hand to
+deal with."  For the moment, he foretold events correctly.  The
+Southern elections of 1857 did not break the hold of the
+moderates.
+
+Yancey turned to different machinery, quite as useful for his
+purpose.  This he found in the Southern commercial conventions,
+which were held annually.  At this point there arises a vexed
+question which has, of late, aroused much discussion.  Was there
+then what we should call today a slave "interest"?  Was organized
+capital deliberately exploiting slavery?  And did Yancey play
+into its hands?*  The truth seems to be that, between 1856 and
+1860, both the idealist parties, the Republicans and the
+Secessionists, made peace with, shall we say, the Mammon of
+unrighteousness, or merely organized capital?  The one joined
+hands with the iron interest of the North; the other, with the
+slave interest of the South.  The Republicans preached the
+domination of the North and a protective tariff; the Yancey men
+preached the independence of the South and the reopening of the
+slave trade.
+
+* For those who would be persuaded that there was such a slave
+interest, perhaps the best presentation is to be found in
+Professor Dodd's Life of Jefferson Davis.
+
+
+These two issues Yancey, however, failed to unite, though the
+commercial convention of 1859 at last gave its support to a
+resolution that all laws, state or federal, prohibiting the
+African slave trade ought to be repealed.  That great body of
+Northern capital which had dealings with the South was ready, as
+it always had been, to finance any scheme that Southern business
+desired.  Slavers were fitted out in New York, and the city
+authorities did not prevent their sailing.  Against this somber
+background stands forth that much admired action of Lewis Cass of
+Michigan, Buchanan's Secretary of State.  Already the slave trade
+was in process of revival, and the British Navy, impelled by the
+powerful anti-slavery sentiment in England, was active in its
+suppression.  American ships suspected of being slavers were
+visited and searched.  Cass seized his opportunity, and declaring
+that such things "could not be submitted to by an independent
+nation without dishonor," sent out American warships to prevent
+this interference.  Thereupon the British government consented to
+give up trying to police the ocean against slavers. It is indeed
+true, therefore, that neither North nor South has an historical
+monopoly of the support of slavery!
+
+It is but fair to add that, so far as the movement to reopen the
+slave trade found favor outside the slave barons and their New
+York allies, it was advocated as a means of political defense, of
+increasing Southern population as an offset to the movement of
+free emigration into the North, and of keeping the proportion of
+Southern representation in Congress.  Stephens, just after Cass
+had successfully twisted the lion's tail, took this position in a
+speech that caused a sensation.  In a private letter he added,
+"Unless we get immigration from abroad, we shall have few more
+slave states.  This great truth seems to take the people by
+surprise.  Some shrink from it as they would from death. Still,
+it is as true as death."  The scheme, however, never received
+general acceptance; and in the constitution of the Southern
+Confederacy there was a section prohibiting the African slave
+trade.  On the other of these two issues--the independence of the
+South--Yancey steadily gained ground.  With each year from 1856 
+to 1860, a larger proportion of Southerners drew out of political
+evasion and gave adherence to the idea of presenting an ultimatum
+to the North, with secession as an alternative.
+
+Meanwhile, Buchanan sent to Kansas, as Governor, Robert J.
+Walker, one of the most astute of the Democrats of the opposite
+faction and a Mississippian.  The tangled situation which Walker
+found, the details of his attempt to straighten it out, belong in
+another volume.* It is enough in this connection merely to
+mention the episode of the Lecompton convention in the election
+of which the Northern settlers refused to participate, though
+Walker had promised that they should have full protection and a
+fair count as well as that the work of the convention should be
+submitted to a popular vote.  This action of Walker's was one
+more cause of contention between the warring factions in the
+South.  The fact that he had met the Northerners half-way was
+seized upon by the Yancey men as evidence of the betrayal of the
+South by the Democratic moderates.  On the other hand, Cobb,
+writing of the situation in Kansas, said that "a large majority
+are against slavery and...our friends regard the fate of Kansas
+as a free state pretty well fixed...the pro-slavery men, finding
+that Kansas was likely to become a Black Republican State,
+determined to unite with the free-state Democrats."  Here is the
+clue to Walker's course.  As a strict party man, he preferred to
+accept Kansas free, with Democrats in control, rather than risk
+losing it altogether.
+
+* See Jesse Macy, "The Anti-Slavery Crusade".  (In "The
+Chronicles of America".)
+
+
+The next step in the affair is one of the unsolved problems in
+American history.  Buchanan suddenly changed front, disgraced
+Walker, and threw himself into the arms of the Southern
+extremists. Though his reasons for doing so have been debated to
+this day, they have not yet been established beyond dispute. 
+What seems to be the favorite explanation is that Buchanan was in
+a panic.  What brought him to that condition may have been the
+following events.
+
+The free-state men, by refusing to take part in electing the
+convention, had given control to the slaveholders, who proved
+they were not slow to seize their opportunity.  They drew up a
+constitution favoring slavery, but this constitution, Walker had
+promised, was to be submitted in referendum.  If the convention
+decided, however, not to submit the constitution, would not
+Congress have the right to accept it and admit Kansas as a Mate?
+This question was immediately raised.  It now became plain that,
+by refusing to take part in the election, the free-state Kansans
+had thrown away a great tactical advantage.  Of this blunder in
+generalship the Yancey men took instant advantage.  It was known
+that the proportion of Free-Soilers in Kansas was very great--
+perhaps a majority--and the Southerners reasoned that they should
+not be obliged to give up the advantage they had won merely to
+let their enemies retrieve their mistake.  Jefferson Davis
+formulated this position in an address to the Mississippi
+Legislature in which he insisted that Congress, not the Kansas
+electorate, was entitled to create the Kansas constitution, that
+the Convention was a properly chosen body, and that its work
+should stand.  What Davis said in a stately way, others said in a
+furious way. Buchanan stated afterward that he changed front
+because certain Southern States had threatened that, if he did
+not abandon Walker, they would secede.
+
+Be that as it may, Buchanan did abandon Walker and threw all the
+influence of the Administration in favor of admitting Kansas with
+the Lecompton constitution.  But would this be true to that
+principle of "popular sovereignty" which was the very essence of
+the Kansas-Nebraska Act?  Would it be true to the principle that
+each locality should decide for itself between slavery and
+freedom? On this issue the Southerners were fairly generally
+agreed and maintained that there was no obligation to go behind
+the work of the convention.  Not so, however, the great exponent
+of popular sovereignty, Douglas.  Rising in his place in the
+Senate, he charged the President with conspiring to defeat the
+will of the majority in Kansas.  "If Kansas wants a slave state
+constitution," said he, "she has a right to it; if she wants a
+free state constitution, she has a right to it.  It is none of my
+business which way the slavery clause is decided.  I care not
+whether it is voted up or down."
+
+There followed one of those prolonged legislative battles for
+which the Congress of the United States is justly celebrated.
+Furious oratory, propositions, counter-propositions, projected
+compromises, other compromises, and at the end nothing positive.
+But Douglas had defeated the attempt to bring in Kansas with the
+Lecompton constitution.  As to the details of the story, they
+include such distinguished happenings as a brawling, all-night
+session when "thirty men, at least, were engaged in the
+fisticuff," and one Representative knocked another down.
+
+Douglas was again at the center of the stage, but his term as
+Senator was nearing its end.  He and the President had split
+their party.  Pursued by the vengeful malice of the
+Administration, Douglas went home in 1858 to Illinois to fight
+for his reelection. His issue, of course, was popular
+sovereignty.  His temper was still the temper of political
+evasion.  How to hold fast to his own doctrine, and at the same
+time keep to his programme of "nothing doing"; how to satisfy the
+negative Democrats of the North without losing his last hold on
+the positive men of the South--such were his problems, and they
+were made still more difficult by a recent decision of the
+Supreme Court.
+
+The now famous case of Dred Scott had been decided in the
+previous year.  Its bewildering legal technicalities may here be
+passed over; fundamentally, the real question involved was the
+status of a negro, Dred Scott.  A slave who had been owned in
+Missouri, and who had been taken by his master to the State of
+Illinois, to the free territory of Minnesota, and then back to
+Missouri, now claimed to be free.  The Supreme Court undertook to
+decide whether his residence in Minnesota rendered him free, and
+also whether any negro of slave descent could be a citizen of the
+United States. The official opinion of the Court, delivered by
+Chief Justice Taney, decided both questions against the
+suppliant.  It was held that the "citizens" recognized by the
+Constitution did not include negroes.  So, even if Scott were
+free, he could not be considered a citizen entitled to bring suit
+in the Federal Courts. Furthermore, he could not be considered
+free, in spite of his residence in Minnesota, because, as the
+Court now ruled, Congress, when it enacted the Missouri
+Compromise, had exceeded its authority; the enactment had never
+really been in force; there was no binding prohibition of slavery
+in the Northwestern territories.
+
+If this decision was good law, all the discussion about popular
+sovereignty went for nothing, and neither an act of Congress nor
+the vote of the population of a territory, whether for or against
+slavery, was of any value whatsoever.  Nothing mattered until the
+newmade state itself took action after its admission to the
+Union. Until that time, no power, national or local, could
+lawfully interfere with the introduction of slaves.  In the case
+of Kansas, it was no longer of the least importance what became
+of the Lecompton constitution or of any other that the settlers
+might make.  The territory was open to settlement by slaveholders
+and would continue to be so as long as it remained a territory. 
+The same conditions existed in Nebraska and in all the Northwest. 
+The Dred Scott decision was accepted as orthodox Democratic
+doctrine by the South, by the Administration, and by the
+"Northern men with Southern principles."  The astute masters of
+the game of politics on the Democratic side struck the note of
+legality.  This was law, the expression of the highest tribunal
+of the Republic; what more was to be said?  Though in truth there
+was but one other thing to be said, and that revolutionary, the
+Republicans, nevertheless, did not falter over it.  Seward
+announced it in a speech in Congress on "Freedom in Kansas," when
+he uttered this menace: "We shall reorganize the Court and thus
+reform its political sentiments and practices."
+
+In the autumn of 1858 Douglas attempted to perform the acrobatic
+feat of reconciling the Dred Scott decision, which as a Democrat
+he had to accept, with that idea of popular sovereignty without
+which his immediate followers could not be content.  In accepting
+the Republican nomination as Douglas's opponent for the
+senatorship, Lincoln used these words which have taken rank among
+his most famous utterances: "A house divided against itself
+cannot stand.  I believe this government cannot endure
+permanently half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union
+to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall but I do
+expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing
+or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the
+further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall
+rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate
+extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall
+become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new--North
+as well as South."
+
+No one had ever so tellingly expressed the deathgrapple of the
+sections: slavery the weapon of one, free labor the weapon of the
+other.  Though Lincoln was at that time forty-nine years old, his
+political experience, in contrast with that of Douglas, was
+negligible.  He afterward aptly described his early life in that
+expressive line from Gray, "The short and simple annals of the
+poor."  He lacked regular schooling, and it was altogether from
+the practice of law that he had gained such formal education as
+he had.  In law, however, he had become a master, and his
+position, to judge from the class of cases entrusted to him, was
+second to none in Illinois.  To that severe yet wholesome cast of
+mind which the law establishes in men naturally lofty, Lincoln
+added the tonic influence of a sense of style--not the verbal
+acrobatics of a rhetorician, but that power to make words and
+thought a unit which makes the artist of a man who has great
+ideas.  How Lincoln came by this literary faculty is, indeed, as
+puzzling as how Burns came by it.  But there it was, disciplined
+by the court room, made pungent by familiarity with plain people,
+stimulated by constant reading of Shakespeare, and chastened by
+study of the Bible.
+
+It was arranged that Douglas and Lincoln should tour the State
+together in a series of joint debates.  As a consequence there
+followed a most interesting opposition of methods in the use of
+words, a contest between the method formed in Congress at a time
+when Congress was a perfect rhetorical academy, and that method
+of using words which was based on an arduous study of Blackstone,
+Shakespeare, and Isaiah.  Lincoln issued from the debates one of
+the chief intellectual leaders of America, and with a place in
+English literature; Douglas came out a Senator from Illinois.
+
+But though Douglas kept his following together, and though
+Lincoln was voted down, to Lincoln belonged the real strategic
+victory. In order to save himself with his own people, Douglas
+had been forced to make admissions that ruined him with the
+South.  Because of these admissions the breach in the party of
+political evasion became irreparable.  It was in the debate at
+Freeport that Douglas's fate overtook him, for Lincoln put this
+question: "Can the people of a United States territory, in any
+lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States,
+exclude slavery from its limits, prior to the formation of a
+state constitution?"
+
+Douglas answered in his best style of political thunder.  "It
+matters not," he said, "what way the Supreme Court may hereafter
+decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not
+go into a territory under the Constitution; the people have the
+lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for
+the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere
+unless it is supported by local police regulations.  Those police
+regulations can only be established by the local legislatures;
+and if the people are opposed to slavery, they will elect
+representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation
+effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst. If,
+on the contrary, they are for it, their legislation will favor
+its extension.  Hence, no matter what the decision of the Supreme
+Court may be on that abstract question, still the right of the
+people to make a slave territory or a free territory is perfect
+and complete under the Nebraska Bill."
+
+As to the moral aspect of his actions, Douglas must ultimately be
+judged by the significance which this position in which he placed
+himself assumed in his own mind.  Friendly critics excuse him: an
+interpretation of the Dred Scott decision which explained it away
+as an irresponsible utterance on a subject outside the scope of
+the case, a mere obiter dictum, is the justification which is
+called in to save him from the charge of insincerity.  His
+friends, today, admit that this interpretation was bad law, but
+maintain that it may have been good morals, and that Douglas
+honestly held it.  But many of us have not yet advanced so far in
+critical generosity, and cannot help feeling that Douglas's
+position remains political legerdemain--an attempt by a great
+officer of the government, professing to defend the Supreme
+Court, to show the people how to go through the motions of
+obedience to the Court while defeating its intention.  If not
+double-dealing in a strict sense, it must yet be considered as
+having in it the temper of double-dealing.* This was, indeed, the
+view of many men of his own day and, among them, of Lincoln.  Yet
+the type of man on whom the masters of the game of politics
+relied saw nothing in Douglas's position at which to be
+disturbed.  It was merely playing politics, and if that absorbing
+sport required one to carry water on both shoulders, why--play
+the game! Douglas was the man for people like that.  They cheered
+him to the echo and sent him back to the Senate.  So well was
+this type understood by some of Lincoln's friends that they had
+begged him, at least according to tradition, not to put the
+question at Freeport, as by doing so he would enable Douglas to
+save himself with his constituency.  Lincoln saw further,
+however.  He understood better than they the forces then at work
+in America. The reply reported of him was: "If Douglas answers,
+he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a
+hundred of this."
+
+* There are three ways of regarding Douglas's position: (1) As a
+daring piece of evasion designed to hold all the Democrats
+together; (2) as an attempt to secure his locality at all costs,
+taking his chances on the South; (3) as a sincere expression of
+the legal interpretation mentioned above.  It is impossible in
+attempting to choose among these to escape wholly one's
+impression of the man's character.
+
+
+Well might Yancey and his followers receive with a shout of joy
+the "Freeport Doctrine," as Douglas's supreme evasion was called.
+Should Southerners trust any longer the man who had evolved from
+the principle of let-'em-alone to the principle of
+double-dealing? However, the Southerners were far from
+controlling the situation. Though the events of 1858 had created
+discord in the Democratic party, they had not consolidated the
+South.  Men like Toombs and Stephens were still hopeful of
+keeping the States together in the old bond of political evasion. 
+The Democratic machine, damaged though it was, had not yet lost
+its hold on the moderate South, and while that continued to be
+the case, there was still power in it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE CRISIS
+
+The Southern moderates in 1859 form one of those political
+groups, numerous enough in history, who at a crisis arrest our
+imagination because of the irony of their situation. 
+Unsuspecting, these men went their way, during the last summer of
+the old regime, busy with the ordinary affairs of state, absorbed
+in their opposition to the Southern radicals, never dreaming of
+the doom that was secretly moving toward them through the plans
+of John Brown.  In the soft brilliancy of the Southern summer
+when the roses were in bloom, many grave gentlemen walked slowly
+up and down together under the oaks of their plantation avenues,
+in the grateful dusk, talking eagerly of how the scales trembled
+in Southern politics between Toombs and Yancey, and questioning
+whether the extremists could ride down the moderate South and
+reopen the slave trade.  In all their wondering whether Douglas
+would ever come back to them or would prove the blind Samson
+pulling down their temple about their ears, there was never a
+word about the approaching shadow which was so much more real
+than the shades of the falling night, and yet so entirely shut
+away from their observation.
+
+In this summer, Stephens withdrew as he thought from public life.
+With an intensely sensitive nature, he had at times flashes of
+strange feeling which an unsophisticated society would regard as
+prophetic inspirations.  When he left Washington "on the
+beautiful morning of the 5th of March, 1859, he stood at the
+stern of the boat for some minutes gazing back at the capital." 
+He had announced his intention of not standing again as a
+Representative, and one of his fellow-passengers asked jokingly
+whether he was thinking of his return as a Senator.  Stephen's
+reply was full of emotion, "No, I never expect to see Washington
+again unless I am brought here as a prisoner of war."  During the
+summer he endeavored to cast off his intuition of approaching
+disaster.  At his plantation, "Liberty Hall," he endeavored to be
+content with the innumerable objects associated with his youth;
+he tried to feel again the grace of the days that were gone, the
+mysterious loveliness of the Southern landscape with its immense
+fields, its forests, its great empty spaces filled with glowing
+sunshine.  He tried to possess his troubled soul with the severe
+intellectual ardor of the law.  But his gift of second sight
+would not rest. He could not overcome his intuition that, for all
+the peace and dreaminess of the outward world, destiny was upon
+him.  Looking out from his spiritual seclusion, he beheld what
+seemed to him complete political confusion, both local and
+national.  His despairing mood found expression a little later in
+the words: "Indeed if we were now to have a Southern convention
+to determine upon the true policy of the South either in the
+Union or out of it, I should expect to see just as much
+profitless discussion, disagreement, crimination, and
+recrimination amongst the members of it from different states and
+from the same state, as we witness in the present House of
+Representatives between Democrats, Republicans, and Americans."
+
+Among the sources of confusion Stephens saw, close at home, was
+the Southern battle over the reopening of the slave trade.  The
+reality of that issue had been made plain in May, 1859, when the
+Southern commercial congress at Vicksburg entertained at the same
+time two resolutions: one, that the convention should urge all
+Southern States to amend their constitutions by a clause
+prohibiting the increase of African slavery; the other, that the
+convention urge all the Legislatures of Southern States to
+present memorials to Congress asking the repeal of the law
+against African slave trade.  Of these opposed resolutions, the
+latter was adopted on the last day of the convention*, though the
+moderates fought hard against it.
+
+*It is significant that the composition of these Southern
+commercial congresses and the Congress of the whole Southern
+people was strikingly different in personnel.  Very few members
+of the commercial congresses reappear in the Confederate
+Congress.
+
+
+The split between Southern moderates and Southern radicals was
+further indicated by their differing attitudes toward the
+adventurers from the United States in Central America.  The
+Vicksburg Convention adopted resolutions which were thinly veiled
+endorsements of southward expansion.  In the early autumn another
+Nicaraguan expedition was nipped in the bud by the vigilance of
+American naval forces.  Cobb, prime factor in the group of
+Southern moderates as well as Secretary of the Treasury, wrote to
+Buchanan expressing his satisfaction at the event, mentioning the
+work of his own department in bringing it about, and also
+alluding to his arrangments to prevent slave trading off the
+Florida coast.
+
+But the spirit of doubt was strong even among the moderates.
+Douglas was the target.  Stephens gives a glimpse of it in a
+letter written during his last session in Congress.  "Cobb called
+on me Saturday night," he writes.  "He is exceedingly bitter
+against Douglas.  I joked him a good deal, and told him he had
+better not fight, or he would certainly be whipped; that is, in
+driving Douglas out of the Democratic party.  He said that if
+Douglas ever was restored to the confidence of the Democracy of
+Georgia, it would be over his dead body politically.  This shows
+his excitement, that is all.  I laughed at him, and told him he
+would run his feelings and his policy into the ground."  The
+anger of Cobb, who was himself a confessed candidate for the
+Democratic nomination, was imperiling the Democratic national
+machine which Toombs was still struggling so resolutely to hold
+together.  Indeed, as late as the autumn of 1859 the machine
+still held together.
+
+Then came the man of destiny, the bolt from the blue, the end of
+the chapter.  A marvelous fanatic--a sort of reincarnation of the
+grimmest of the Covenanters--by one daring act shattered the
+machine and made impossible any further coalition on the
+principle of "nothing doing."  This man of destiny was John
+Brown, whose attack on Harper's Ferry took place October 16th,
+and whose execution by the authorities of Virginia on the charges
+of murder and treason occurred on the 2nd of December.
+
+The incident filled the South with consternation.  The prompt
+condemnation of it by many Republican leaders did not offset, in
+the minds of Southerners, the fury of praise accorded by others.
+The South had a ghastly tradition derived chiefly from what is
+known as Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia, a tradition of the
+massacre of white women and children by negroes.  As Brown had
+set opt to rouse a slave rebellion, every Southerner familiar
+with his own traditions shuddered, identifying in imagination
+John Brown and Nat Turner.  Horror became rage when the
+Southerners heard of enthusiastic applause in Boston and of
+Emerson's description of Brown as "that new saint" who was to
+"make the gallows glorious like the cross."  In the excitement
+produced by remarks such as this, justice was not done to
+Lincoln's censure.  In his speech at Cooper Institute in New
+York, in February, 1860, Lincoln had said: "John Brown's
+effort...in its philosophy corresponds with the many attempts
+related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors. 
+An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people, until he
+fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He
+ventures the attempt which ends in little else than in his own
+execution."  A few months afterwards, the Republican national
+convention condemned the act of Brown as "among the gravest of
+crimes."
+
+An immediate effect of the John Brown episode was a passionate
+outburst from all the radical press of the South in defense of
+slavery.  The followers of Yancey made the most of their
+opportunity.  The men who voted at Vicksburg to reopen the slave
+trade could find no words to measure their hatred of every one
+who, at this moment of crisis, would not declare slavery a
+blessing. Many of the men who opposed the slave traders also felt
+that, in the face of possible slave insurrection, the peril of
+their families was the one paramount consideration. 
+Nevertheless, it is easy for the special pleader to give a wrong
+impression of the sentiment of the time.  A grim desire for
+self-preservation took possession of the South, as well as a
+deadly fear of any person or any thing that tended directly or
+indirectly to incite the blacks to insurrection.  Northerners of
+abolitionist sympathies were warned to leave the country, and in
+some cases they were tarred and feathered.
+
+Great anger was aroused by the detection of book-agents who were
+distributing a furious polemic against slavery, "The Impending
+Crisis of the South: How to Meet It", by Hinton Rowan Helper, a
+Southerner of inferior social position belonging to the class
+known as poor whites.  The book teemed with such sentences as
+this, addressing slaveholders: "Do you aspire to become victims
+of white non-slave-holding vengeance by day and of barbarous
+massacres by the negroes at night?"  It is scarcely strange,
+therefore, that in 1859 no Southerner would hear a good word of
+anyone caught distributing the book. And yet, in the midst of all
+this vehement exaltation of slavery, the fight to prevent a
+reopening of the slave trade went bravely on.  Stephens, writing
+to a friend who was correspondent for the "Southern Confederacy",
+in Atlanta, warned him in April, 1860, "neither to advocate
+disunion or the opening of the slave trade. The people here at
+present I believe are as much opposed to it as they are at the
+North; and I believe the Northern people could be induced to open
+it sooner than the Southern people."
+
+The winter of 1859-1860 witnessed a famous congressional battle
+over the speakership.  The new Congress which met in December
+contained 109 Republicans, 101 Democrats, and 27 Know-Nothings.
+The Republican candidate for speaker was John Sherman of Ohio. 
+As the first ballot showed that he could not command a majority,
+a Democrat from Missouri introduced this resolution "Whereas
+certain members of this House, now in nomination for speaker, did
+endorse the book hereinafter mentioned, resolved, That the
+doctrines and sentiments of a certain book, called 'The Impending
+Crisis of the South: How to Meet It', are insurrectionary and
+hostile to the peace and tranquillity of the country, and that no
+member of this House, who has indorsed or recommended it, is fit
+to be speaker of the House."
+
+During two months there were strange scenes in the House, while
+the clerk acted as temporary speaker and furious diatribes were
+thundered back and forth across the aisle that separated
+Republicans from Democrats, with a passage of fisticuffs or even
+a drawn pistol to add variety to the scene.  The end of it all
+was a deal.  Pennington, of the "People's Party" of New Jersey,
+who had supported Sherman but had not endorsed Helper, was given
+the Republican support; a Know-Nothing was made sergeant-at-arms;
+and Know-Nothing votes added to the Republican votes made
+Pennington speaker.  In many Northern cities the news of his
+election was greeted with the great salute of a hundred guns, but
+at Richmond the papers came out in mourning type.
+
+Two great figures now advanced to the center of the Congressional
+stage--Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, a lean eagle of
+a man with piercing blue eyes, and Judah P. Benjamin, Senator
+from Louisiana, whose perpetual smile cloaked an intellect that
+was nimble, keen, and ruthless.  Both men were destined to play
+leading roles in the lofty drama of revolution; each was to
+experience a tragic ending of his political hope, one in exile,
+the other in a solitary proscription amid the ruins of the
+society for which he had sacrified his all.  These men, though
+often spoken of as mere mouthpieces of Yancey, were in reality
+quite different from him both in temper and in point of view.
+
+Davis, who was destined eventually to become the target of
+Yancey's bitterest enmity, had refused ten years before to join
+in the secession movement which ignored Calhoun's doctrine that
+the South had become a social unit.  Though a believer in slavery
+under the conditions of the moment, Davis had none of the passion
+of the slave baron for slavery at all costs.  Furthermore, as
+events were destined to show in a startlingly dramatic way, he
+was careless of South Carolina's passion for state rights.  He
+was a practical politician, but not at all the old type of the
+party of political evasion, the type of Toombs.  No other man of
+the moment was on the whole so well able to combine the elements
+of Southern politics against those more negative elements of
+which Toombs was the symbol.  The history of the Confederacy
+shows that the combination which Davis now effected was not as
+thorough as he supposed it was.  But at the moment he appeared to
+succeed and seemed to give common purpose to the vast majority of
+the Southern people.  With his ally Benjamin, he struck at the
+Toombs policy of a National Democratic party.
+
+On the day following the election of Pennington, Davis introduced
+in the Senate a series of resolutions which were to serve as the
+Southern ultimatum, and which demanded of Congress the protection
+of slavery against territorial legislatures.  This was but
+carrying to its logical conclusion that Dred Scott decision which
+Douglas and his followers proposed to accept.  If Congress could
+not restrict slavery in the territories, how could its creature,
+a territorial legislature do so?  And yet the Douglas men
+attempted to take away the power from Congress and to retain it
+for the territorial legislatures.  Senator Pugh of Ohio had
+already locked horns with Davis on this point, and had attempted
+to show that a territorial Legislature was independent of
+Congress. "Then I would ask the Senator further," retorted the
+logical Davis, "why it is he makes an appropriation to pay
+members of the territorial legislature; how it is that he invests
+the Governor with veto power over their acts; and how it is that
+he appoints judges to decide upon the validity of their acts."
+
+In the Democratic convention which met at Charleston in April,
+1860, the waning power of political evasion made its last real
+stand against the rising power of political positivism.  To
+accept Douglas and the idea that somehow territorial legislatures
+were free to do what Congress could not do, or to reject Douglas
+and endorse Davis's ultimatum--that in substance was the issue. 
+"In this convention where there should be confidence and
+harmony," said the "Charleston Mercury", "it is plain that men
+feel as if they were going into a battle."  In the committee on
+resolutions where the States were equally represented, the
+majority were anti-Douglas; they submitted a report affirming
+Davis's position that territorial legislatures had no right to
+prohibit slavery and that the Federal Government should protect
+slavery against them. The minority refused to go further than an
+approval of the Dred Scott case and a pledge to abide by all
+future decisions of the Supreme Court.  After both reports had
+been submitted, there followed the central event of the
+convention--the now famous speech by Yancey which repudiated
+political evasion from top to bottom, frankly defended slavery,
+and demanded either complete guarantees for its continued
+existence or, as an alternative, Southern independence.  Pugh
+instantly replied and summed up Yancey's speech as a demand upon
+Northern Democrats to say that slavery was right, and that it was
+their duty not only to let slavery alone but to aid in extending
+it.  "Gentlemen of the South," he exclaimed, "you mistake us--you
+mistake us--we will not do it."
+
+In the full convention, where the representation of the States
+was not equal, the Douglas men, after hot debate, forced the
+adoption of the minority report.  Thereupon the Alabama
+delegation protested and formally withdrew from the convention,
+and other delegations followed.  There was wild excitement in
+Charleston, where that evening in the streets Yancey addressed
+crowds that cheered for a Southern republic.  The remaining
+history of the Democratic nominations is a matter of detail.  The
+Charleston convention adjourned without making nominations.  Each
+of its fragments reorganized as a separate convention, and
+ultimately two Democratic tickets were put into the field, with
+Breckinridge of Kentucky as the candidate on the Yancey ticket
+and Douglas on the other.
+
+While the Democrats were thus making history through their
+fateful break-up into separate parties, a considerable number of
+the so-called best people of the country determined that they had
+nowhere politically to lay their heads.  A few of the old Whigs
+were still unable to consort either with Republicans or with
+Democrats, old or new.  The Know-Nothings, likewise, though their
+number had been steadily melting away, had not entirely
+disappeared.  To unite these political remnants in any definite
+political whole seemed beyond human ingenuity.  A common
+sentiment, however, they did have--a real love of the Union and a
+real unhappiness, because its existence appeared to be
+threatened.  The outcome was that they organized the
+Constitutional Union Party, nominating for President John Bell of
+Tennessee, and for Vice President Edward Everett of
+Massachusetts.  Their platform was little more than a profession
+of love of the Union and a condemnation of sectional selfishness.
+
+This Bell and Everett ticket has a deeper significance than has
+generally been admitted.  It reveals the fact that the sentiment
+of Union, in distinction from the belief in the Union, had become
+a real force in American life.  There could be no clearer
+testimony to the strength of this feeling than this spectacle of
+a great congregation of moderate people, unable to agree upon
+anything except this sentiment, stepping between the sectional
+parties like a resolute wayfarer going forward into darkness
+along a perilous strand between two raging seas.  That this
+feeling of Union was the same thing as the eager determination of
+the Republicans, in 1860, to control the Government is one of
+those historical fallacies that have had their day.  The
+Republican party became, in time and under stress of war, the
+refuge of this sentiment and proved sufficiently far-sighted to
+merge its identity temporarily in the composite Union party of
+1864.  But in 1860 it was still a sectional party.  Among its
+leaders Lincoln was perhaps the only Unionist in the same sense
+as Bell and Everett.
+
+Perhaps the truest Unionists of the North, outside the
+Constitutional Union Party, in 1860, were those Democrats in the
+following of Douglas who, after fighting to the last ditch
+against both the sectional parties, were to accept, in 1861, the
+alternative of war rather than dissolution.  The course of
+Douglas himself, as we shall see hereafter, showed that in his
+mind there was a fixed limit of concession beyond which he could
+not go. When circumstances forced him to that limit, the
+sentiment of Union took control of him, swept aside his political
+jugglery, abolished his time-serving, and drove him into
+cooperation with his bitterest foes that the Union might be
+saved.  Nor was the pure sentiment of Union confined to the North
+and West.  Though undoubtedly the sentiment of locality was more
+powerful through the South, yet when the test came in the
+election of 1860, the leading candidate of the upper South, in
+Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, was John Bell, the
+Constitutional Unionist.  In every Southern State this sentiment
+was able to command a considerable part of the vote.*
+
+*A possible exception was South Carolina.  As the presidential
+electors were appointed by the legislature, there is no certain
+record of minority sentiment.
+
+
+Widely different in temper were those stern and resolute men
+whose organization, in perfect fighting trim, faced eagerly the
+divided Democrats.  The Republicans had no division among
+themselves upon doctrine.  Such division as existed was due to
+the ordinary rivalry of political leaders.  In the opinion of all
+his enemies and of most Americans, Seward was the Republican man
+of the hour. During much of 1859 he had discreetly withdrawn from
+the country and had left to his partisans the conduct of his
+campaign, which seems to have been going well when he returned in
+the midst of the turmoil following the death of John Brown. 
+Nevertheless he was disturbed over his prospects, for he found
+that in many minds, both North and South, he was looked upon as
+the ultimate cause of all the turmoil.  His famous speech on the
+"irrepressible conflict" was everywhere quoted as an exultant
+prophecy of these terrible latter days.
+
+It was long the custom to deny to Seward any good motive in a
+speech which he now delivered, just as it was to deny Webster any
+good motive for his famous 7th of March speech.  But such
+criticism is now less frequent than it used to be.  Both men were
+seeking the Presidency; both, we may fairly believe, were shocked
+by the turmoil of political currents; each tried oiling the
+waters, and in the attempt each ruined his candidacy.  Seward's
+speech in condemnation of John Brown in February, 1860, was an
+appeal to the conservative North against the radical North, and
+to many of his followers it seemed a change of front.  It
+certainly gained him no new friends and it lost him some old
+ones, so that his star as a presidential candidate began its
+decline.
+
+The first ballot in the Republican convention surprised the
+country.  Of the votes, 233 were necessary for a choice.  Seward
+had only 173 1/2.  Next to him, with 102 votes, stood none of the
+leading candidates, but the comparatively obscure Lincoln.  A gap
+of more than 50 votes separated Lincoln from Cameron, Chase, and
+Bates.  On the second ballot Seward gained 11 votes, while
+Lincoln gained 79.  The enemies of Seward, finding it impossible
+to combine on any of the conspicuous candidates, were moving
+toward Lincoln, the man with fewest enemies.  The third ballot
+gave Lincoln the nomination.
+
+We have seen that one of the basal questions of the time was
+which new political group should absorb the Whig remainder.  The
+Constitutional Union party aimed to accomplish this.  The
+Republicans sought to out-maneuver them.  They made their
+platform as temperate as they could and yet consistent with the
+maintenance of their opposition to Douglas and popular
+sovereignty; and they went no further in their anti-slavery
+demands than that the territories should be preserved for free
+labor.
+
+Another basal question had been considered in the Republican
+platform.  Where would Northern capital stand in the
+reorganization of parties?  Was capital, like men, to become
+frankly sectional or would it remain impersonal, careless how
+nations rose or fell, so long as dividends continued?  To some
+extent capital had given an answer.  When, in the excitement
+following the John Brown incident, a Southern newspaper published
+a white list of New York merchants whose political views should
+commend them to Southerners, and a black list of those who were
+objectionable, many New Yorkers sought a place in the white list.
+Northern capital had done its part in financing the revived slave
+trade. August Belmont, the New York representative of the
+Rothschilds, was one of the close allies of Davis, Yancey, and
+Benjamin in their war upon Douglas.  In a word, a great portion
+of Northern capital had its heart where its investments were--in
+the South. But there was other capital which obeyed the same law,
+and which had investments in the North; and with this capital the
+Republicans had been trafficking.  They had succeeded in winning
+over the powerful manufacturing interests of Pennsylvania, the
+pivotal State that had elected Buchanan in 1856.
+
+The steps by which the new party of enthusiasm made its deal with
+the body of capital which was not at one with Belmont and the
+Democrats are not essential to the present narrative.  Two facts
+suffice.  In 1857 a great collapse in American business--"the
+panic of fifty-seven"--led the commercial world to turn to the
+party in power for some scheme of redress.  But their very
+principles, among which was non-intervention in business, made
+the Democrats feeble doctors for such a need, and they evaded the
+situation.  The Republicans, with their insistence on positivism
+in government, had therefore an opportunity to make a new
+application of the doctrine of governmental aid to business.  In
+the spring of 1860, the Republican House of Representatives
+passed the Morrill tariff bill, consideration of which was
+postponed by the Democratic Senate.  But it served its purpose:
+it was a Republican manifesto.  The Republicans felt that this
+bill, together with their party platform, gave the necessary
+guarantee to the Pennsylvania manufacturers, and they therefore
+entered the campaign confident they would carry Pennsylvania nor
+was their confidence misplaced.
+
+The campaign was characterized by three things: by an ominous
+quiet coupled with great intensity of feeling; by the
+organization of huge party societies in military
+form--"Wide-awakes" for Lincoln, numbering 400,000, and "Minute
+Men" for Breckenridge, with a membership chiefly Southern; and by
+the perfect frankness, in all parts of the South, of threats of
+secession in case the Republicans won.
+
+In none of the States which eventually seceded were any votes
+cast for Lincoln, with the exception of a small number in
+Virginia.  In almost all the other Southern States and in the
+slave-holding border States, all the other candidates made
+respectable showings. In Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, Bell
+led.  But everywhere else in the other slave-holding States
+Breckinridge led, excepting in Missouri where Douglas won by a
+few hundred.  Every free State except New Jersey went for
+Lincoln.  And yet he did not have a majority of the popular vote,
+which stood: Lincoln, 1,866,459; Douglas, 1,376,957;
+Breckinridge, 849,781; Bell, 588,879*.  The majority against
+Lincoln was nearly a million.  The distribution of the votes was
+such that Lincoln had in the Electoral College, 180 electors;
+Breckinridge, 72; Bell, 39; Douglas, 12.  In neither House of
+Congress did the Republicans have a majority.
+
+*The figures of the popular vote are variously given by different
+compilers.  These are taken from Stanwood, "A History of the
+Presidency".
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. SECESSION
+
+In tracing American history from 1854 to 1860 we cannot fail to
+observe that it reduces itself chiefly to a problem in that
+science which politicians understand so well--applied psychology.
+Definite types of men moulded by the conditions of those days are
+the determining factors--not the slavery question in itself; not,
+primarily, economic forces; not a theory of government, nor a
+clash of theories; not any one thing; but the fluid, changeful
+forces of human nature, battling with circumstances and
+expressing themselves in the fashion of men's minds.  To say this
+is to acknowledge the fatefulness of sheer feeling.  Davis
+described the situation exactly when he said, in 1860, "A
+sectional hostility has been substituted for a general
+fraternity."  To his own question, "Where is the remedy?" he gave
+the answer, "In the hearts of the people."  There, after all, is
+the conclusion of the whole matter.  The strife between North and
+South had ceased to be a thing of the head; it had become a thing
+of the heart.  Granted the emotions of 1860, the way in which our
+country staggered into war has all the terrible fascination of a
+tragedy on the theme of fate.
+
+That a secession movement would begin somewhere in the South
+before the end of 1860 was a foregone conclusion.  South Carolina
+was the logical place, and in South Carolina the inevitable
+occurred.  The presidential election was quickly followed by an
+election of delegates, on the 6th of December, to consider in
+convention the relations of the State with the Union.  The
+arguments before the Convention were familiar and had been
+advocated since 1851.  The leaders of the disunionists were the
+same who had led the unsuccessful movement of ten years before.
+The central figure was Rhett, who never for a moment had wavered.
+Consumed his life long by the one idea of the independence of
+South Carolina, that stern enthusiast pressed on to a triumphant
+conclusion.  The powers which had defeated him in 1851 were now
+either silent or converted, so that there was practically no
+opposition.  In a burst of passionate zeal the independence of
+South Carolina was proclaimed on December 20, 1860, by an
+ordinance of secession.
+
+Simultaneously, by one of those dramatic coincidences which make
+history stranger than fiction, Lincoln took a step which
+supplemented this action and established its tragic significance.
+What that step was will appear in a moment.
+
+Even before the secession began, various types of men in politics
+had begun to do each after his kind.  Those whom destiny drove
+first into a corner were the lovers of political evasion.  The
+issue was forced upon them by the instantaneous demand of the
+people of South Carolina for possession of forts in Charleston
+Harbor which were controlled by the Federal Government.
+Anticipating such a demand, Major Robert Anderson, the commandant
+at Charleston, had written to Buchanan on the 23d of November
+that "Fort Sumter and Castle Pinckney must be garrisoned
+immediately, if the Government determines to keep command of this
+harbor."
+
+In the mind of every American of the party of political evasion,
+there now began a sad, internal conflict.  Every one of them had
+to choose among three courses: to shut his eyes and to continue
+to wail that the function of government is to do nothing; to make
+an end of political evasion and to come out frankly in approval
+of the Southern position; or to break with his own record, to
+emerge from his evasions on the opposite side, and to confess
+himself first and before all a supporter of the Union.  One or
+another of these three courses, sooner or later, every man of the
+President's following chose.  We shall see presently the relative
+strength of the three groups into which that following broke and
+what strange courses sometimes tragic, sometimes comic--two of
+the three pursued.  For the moment our concern is how the
+division manifested itself among the heads of the party at
+Washington.
+
+The President took the first of the three courses.  He held it
+with the nervous clutch of a weak nature until overmastered by
+two grim men who gradually hypnotized his will.  The
+turning-point for Buchanan, and the last poor crisis in his
+inglorious career, came on Sunday, December 30th.  Before that
+day arrived, his vacillation had moved his friends to pity and
+his enemies to scorn. One of his best friends wrote privately,
+"The President is pale with fear"; and the hostile point of view
+found expression in such comments as this, "Buchanan, it is said,
+divides his time between praying and crying.  Such a perfect
+imbecile never held office before."
+
+With the question what to do about the forts hanging over his
+bewildered soul, Buchanan sent a message to Congress on December
+4, 1860, in which he sought to defend the traditional evasive
+policy of his party.  He denied the constitutional right of
+secession, but he was also denied his own right to oppose such a
+course.  Seward was not unfair to the mental caliber of the
+message when he wrote to his wife that Buchanan showed
+"conclusively that it is the duty of the President to execute the
+laws--unless somebody opposes him; and that no State has a right
+to go out of the Union unless it wants to."
+
+This message of Buchanan's hastened the inevitable separation of
+the Democratic party into its elements.  The ablest Southern
+member of the Cabinet, Cobb, resigned.  He was too strong an
+intellect to continue the policy of "nothing doing" now that the
+crisis had come.  He was too devoted a Southerner to come out of
+political evasion except on one side.  On the day Cobb resigned
+the South Carolina Representatives called on Buchanan and asked
+him not to make any change in the disposition of troops at
+Charleston, and particularly not to strengthen Sumter, a fortress
+on an island in the midst of the harbor, without at least giving
+notice to the state authorities.  What was said in this interview
+was not put in writing but was remembered afterward in different
+ways with unfortunate consequences.
+
+Every action of Buchanan in this fateful month continued the
+disintegration of his following.  Just as Cobb had to choose
+between his reasonings as a Democratic party man and his feelings
+as a Southerner, so the aged Cass, his Secretary of State, and an
+old personal friend, now felt constrained to choose between his
+Democratic reasoning and his Northern sympathies, and resigned
+from the Cabinet on the 11th of December.  Buchanan then turned
+instinctively to the strongest natures that remained among his
+close associates.  It is a compliment to the innate force of
+Jeremiah S. Black, the Attorney-General, that Buchanan advanced
+him to the post of Secretary of State and allowed him to name as
+his successor in the Attorney-Generalship Edwin M. Stanton.  Both
+were tried Democrats of the old style, "let-'em-alone" sort; and
+both had supported the President in his Kansas policy.  But each,
+like every other member of his party, was being forced by
+circumstances to make his choice among the three inevitable
+courses, and each chose the Northern side.  At once the question
+of the moment was whether the new Secretary of State and his
+powerful henchmen would hypnotize the President.
+
+For a couple of weeks the issue hung in the balance.  Then there
+appeared at Washington commissioners from South Carolina
+"empowered to treat...for the delivery of forts...and other real
+estate" held by the Federal Government within their State.  On
+the day following their arrival, Buchanan was informed by
+telegraph that Anderson had dismantled Fort Moultrie on the north
+side of the harbor, had spiked its guns, and had removed its
+garrison to the island fortress, Sumter, which was supposed to be
+far more defensible.  At Charleston his action was interpreted as
+preparation for war; and all South Carolinians saw in it a
+violation of a pledge which they believed the President had given
+their congressmen, three weeks previous, in that talk which had
+not been written down. Greatly excited and fearful of designs
+against them, the South Carolina commissioners held two
+conferences with the President on the 27th and 28th of December. 
+They believed that he had broken his word, and they told him so. 
+Deeply agitated and refusing to admit that he had committed
+himself at the earlier conference, he said that Anderson had
+acted on his own responsibility, but he refused to order him back
+to the now ruined Fort Moultrie.  One remark which he let fall
+has been remembered as evidence of his querulous state of mind:
+"You are pressing me too importunately" exclaimed the unhappy
+President; "you don't give me time to consider; you don't give me
+time to say my prayers; I always say my prayers when required to
+act upon any great state affair."  One remembers Hampden "seeking
+the Lord" about ship money, and one realizes that the same act
+may have a vastly different significance in different
+temperaments.
+
+Buchanan, however, was virtually ready to give way to the demand
+of the commissioners.  He drew up a paper to that effect and
+showed it to the Cabinet.  Then the turning-point came.  In a
+painful interview, Black, long one of his most trusted friends,
+told him of his intention to resign, and that Stanton would go
+with him and probably also the Postmaster-General, Holt.  The
+idea of losing the support of these strong personalities
+terrified Buchanan, who immediately fell into a panic.  Handing
+Black the paper he had drawn up, Buchanan begged him to retain
+office and to alter the paper as he saw fit.  To this Black
+agreed.  The demand for the surrender of the forts was refused;
+Anderson was not ordered back to Moultrie; and for the brief
+remainder of Buchanan's administration Black acted as prime
+minister.
+
+A very powerful section of the Northern democracy, well typified
+by their leaders at Washington, had thus emerged from political
+evasion on the Northern side.  These men, known afterwards as War
+Democrats, combined with the Republicans to form the composite
+Union party which supported Lincoln.  It is significant that
+Stanton eventually reappeared in the Cabinet as Lincoln's
+Secretary of War, and that along with him appeared another War
+Democrat, Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy.  With
+them, at last, Douglas, the greatest of all the old Democrats of
+the North, took his position.  What became of the other factions
+of the old Democratic party remains to be told.
+
+While Buchanan, early in the month, was weeping over the
+pitilessness of fate, more practical Northerners were grappling
+with the question of what was to be done about the situation.  In
+their thoughts they anticipated a later statesman and realized
+that they were confronted by a condition and not by a theory.
+Secession was at last a reality.  Which course should they take?
+
+What strikes us most forcibly, as we look back upon that day, is
+the widespread desire for peace.  The abolitionists form a
+conspicuous example.  Their watchword was "Let the erring sisters
+go in peace."  Wendell Phillips, their most gifted orator, a
+master of spoken style at once simple and melodious, declaimed
+splendidly against war.  Garrison, in "The Liberator", followed
+his example.  Whittier put the same feeling into his verse:
+
+They break the links of Union; shall we light
+The flames of hell to weld anew the chain
+On that red anvil where each blow is pain?
+
+Horace Greeley said in an editorial in the "New York Tribune":
+"If the cotton states shall decide that they can do better out of
+the Union than in it, we shall insist on letting them go in
+peace. Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall
+deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive
+measures designed to keep them in.  We hope never to live in a
+republic where one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets."
+
+The Democrats naturally clung to their traditions, and, even when
+they went over, as Black and Stanton did, to the Anti-Southern
+group, they still hoped that war would not be the result. 
+Equally earnest against war were most of the Republicans, though
+a few, to be sure, were ready to swing the "Northern hammer." 
+Summer prophesied that slavery would "go down in blood."  But the
+bulk of the Republicans were for a sectional compromise, and
+among them there was general approbation of a scheme which
+contemplated reviving the line of the Missouri Compromise, and
+thus frankly admitting the existence of two distinct sections,
+and guaranteeing to each the security of its own institutions. 
+The greatest Republican boss of that day, Thurlow Weed, came out
+in defense of this plan.
+
+No power was arrayed more zealously on the side of peace of any
+kind than the power of money.  It was estimated that two hundred
+millions of dollars were owed by Southerners to Northerners. 
+War, it was reasoned, would cause the cancellation of these
+obligations. To save their Southern accounts, the moneyed
+interests of the North joined the extremists of Abolition in
+pleading to let the erring sisters go in peace, if necessary,
+rather than provoke them to war and the confiscation of debts. 
+It was the dread of such an outcome--which finally happened and
+ruined many Northern firms--that caused the stock-market in New
+York to go up and down with feverish uncertainty.  Banks
+suspended payment in Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. 
+The one important and all-engrossing thing in the mind's eye of
+all the financial world at this moment was that specter of unpaid
+Southern accounts.
+
+At this juncture, Senator Crittenden of Kentucky submitted to the
+Senate a plan which has been known ever since as the Crittenden
+Compromise.  It was similar to Weed's plan, but it also provided
+that the division of the country on the Missouri Compromise line
+should be established by a constitutional amendment, which would
+thus forever solidify sectionalism.  Those elements of the
+population generally called the conservative and the responsible
+were delighted.  Edward Everett wrote to Crittenden, "I saw with
+great satisfaction your patriotic movement, and I wish from the
+bottom of my heart it might succeed"; and August Belmont in a
+letter to Crittenden spoke for the moneyed interest: "I have yet
+to meet the first Union-loving man, in or out of politics, who
+does not approve your compromise proposition...."
+
+The Senate submitted the Compromise to a Committee of Thirteen.
+In this committee the Southern leaders, Toombs and Davis, were
+both willing to accept the Compromise, if a majority of the
+Republican members would agree.  Indeed, if the Republicans would
+agree to it, there seemed no reason why a new understanding
+between the sections might not be reached, and no reason why
+sectionalism, if accepted as the basis of the government, might
+not solve the immediate problem and thus avert war.
+
+In this crisis all eyes were turned to Seward, that conspicuous
+Republican who was generally looked upon as the real head of his
+party.  And Seward, at that very moment, was debating whether to
+accept Lincoln's offer of the Secretaryship of State, for he
+considered it vital to have an understanding with Lincoln on the
+subject of the Compromise.  He talked the matter over with Weed,
+and they decided that Weed should go to Springfield and come to
+terms with Lincoln.  It was the interview between Weed and
+Lincoln held, it seems, on the very day on which the Ordinance of
+Secession was adopted--which gave to that day its double
+significance.
+
+Lincoln refused point-blank to accept the compromise and he put
+his refusal in writing.  The historic meaning of his refusal, and
+the significance of his determination not to solve the problem of
+the hour by accepting a dual system of government based on
+frankly sectional assumptions, were probably, in a measure, lost
+on both Weed and Seward.  They had, however, no misunderstanding
+of its practical effect.  This crude Western lawyer had certain
+ideas from which he would not budge, and the party would have to
+go along with him.  Weed and Seward therefore promptly fell into
+line, and Seward accepted the Secretaryship and came out in
+opposition to the Compromise.  Other Republicans with whom
+Lincoln had communicated by letter made known his views, and
+Greeley announced them in The Tribune.  The outcome was the solid
+alignment of all the Republicans in Congress against the
+Compromise.  As a result, this last attempt to reunite the
+sections came to nothing.
+
+Not more than once or twice, if ever, in American history, has
+there been such an anxious New Year's Day as that which ushered
+in 1861.  A few days before, a Republican Congressman had written
+to one of his constituents: "The heavens are indeed black and an
+awful storm is gathering...I see no way that either North or
+South can escape its fury."  Events were indeed moving fast
+toward disaster.  The garrison at Sumter was in need of supplies,
+and in the first week of the new year Buchanan attempted to
+relieve its wants.  But a merchant vessel, the Star of the West,
+by which supplies were sent, was fired upon by the South Carolina
+authorities as it approached the harbor and was compelled to turn
+back.  This incident caused the withdrawal from the Cabinet of
+the last opposition members--Thompson, of Mississippi, the
+Secretary of the Interior, and Thomas, of Maryland, the Secretary
+of the Treasury.  In the course of the month five Southern States
+followed South Carolina out of the Union, and their Senators and
+Representatives resigned from the Congress of the United States.
+
+The resignation of Jefferson Davis was communicated to the Senate
+in a speech of farewell which even now holds the imagination of
+the student, and which to the men of that day, with the Union
+crumbling around them, seemed one of the most mournful and
+dramatic of orations.  Davis possessed a beautiful, melodious
+voice; he had a noble presence, tall, erect, spare, even ascetic,
+with a flashing blue eye.  He was deeply moved by the occasion;
+his address was a requiem.  That he withdrew in sorrow but with
+fixed determination, no one who listened to him could doubt.
+Early in February, the Southern Confederacy was formed with Davis
+as its provisional President.  With the prophetic vision of a
+logical mind, he saw that war was inevitable, and he boldly
+proclaimed his vision.  In various speeches on his way South, he
+had assured the Southern people that war was coming, and that it
+would be long and bloody.
+
+The withdrawal of these Southern members threw the control of the
+House into the hands of the Republicans.  Their realization of
+their power was expressed in two measures which also passed the
+Senate; Kansas was admitted--as a State with an anti-slavery
+constitution; and the Morrill tariff, which they had failed to
+pass the previous spring, now became law.  Thus the Republicans
+began redeeming their pledges to the anti-slavery men on the one
+hand and to the commercial interest on the other.  The time had
+now arrived for the Republican nominee to proceed from
+Springfield to Washington.  The journey was circuitous in order
+to enable Lincoln to speak at a number of places.  Never before,
+probably, had the Northern people felt such tense strain as at
+that moment; never had they looked to an incoming President with
+such anxious doubt.  Would he prevent war?  Or, if he could not
+do that, would he be able to extricate the country--Heaven alone
+knew how!--without a terrible ordeal?  Since his election,
+Lincoln had remained quietly at Springfield.  Though he had
+influenced events through letters to Congressmen, his one
+conspicuous action during that winter was the defeat of the
+Crittenden Compromise.  The Southern President had called upon
+his people to put their house in order as preparation for war. 
+What, now, had Lincoln to say to the people of the North?
+
+The biographers of Lincoln have not satisfactorily revealed the
+state of his mind between election and inauguration.  We may
+safely guess that his silence covered a great internal struggle.
+Except for his one action in defeating the Compromise, he had
+allowed events to drift; but by that one action he had taken upon
+himself the responsibility for the drift.  Though the country at
+that time did not fully appreciate this aspect of the situation,
+who now can doubt that Lincoln did?  His mind was always a lonely
+one.  His very humor has in it, so often, the note of solitude,
+of one who is laughing to make the best of things, of one who is
+spiritually alone.  During those months when the country drifted
+from its moorings, and when war was becoming steadily more
+probable, Lincoln, after the manner of the prophets, wrestled
+alone with the problems which he saw before him.  From the little
+we know of his inward state, it is hard for us to conclude that
+he was happy.  A story which is told by his former partner, Mr.
+Herndon, seems significant.  As Lincoln was leaving his
+unpretentious law-office for the last time, he turned to Mr.
+Herndon and asked him not to take down their old sign.  "Let it
+hang there undisturbed," said he.  "Give our clients to
+understand that the election of a President makes no difference
+in the firm....  If I live, I'm coming back some time, and then
+we'll go right on practising law as if nothing had happened."
+
+How far removed from self-sufficiency was the man whose thoughts,
+on the eve of his elevation to the Presidency, lingered in a
+provincial law office, fondly insistent that only death should
+prevent his returning some time and resuming in those homely
+surroundings the life he had led previous to his greatness.  In a
+mood of wistfulness and of intense preoccupation, he began his
+journey to Washington.  It was not the mood from which to strike
+fire and kindle hope.  To the anxious, listening country his
+speeches on the journey to Washington were disappointing. 
+Perhaps his strangely sensitive mind felt too powerfully the
+fatefulness of the moment and reacted with a sort of lightness
+that did not really represent the real man.  Be that as it may,
+he was never less convincing than at that time.  Nor were people
+impressed by his bearing.  Often he appeared awkward, too much in
+appearance the country lawyer.  He acted as a man who was ill at
+ease and he spoke as a man who had nothing to say.  Gloom
+darkened the North as a consequence of these unfortunate
+speeches, for they expressed an optimism which we cannot believe
+he really felt, and which hurt him in the estimation of the
+country.  "There is no crisis but an artificial one," was one of
+his ill-timed assurances, and another, "There is nothing going
+wrong....  There is nothing that really hurts any one."  Of his
+supporters some were discouraged; others were exasperated; and an
+able but angry partisan even went so far as to write in a private
+letter, "Lincoln is a Simple Susan."
+
+The fourth of March arrived, and with it the end of Lincoln's
+blundering.  One good omen for the success of the new
+Administration was the presence of Douglas on the inaugural
+platform.  He had accepted fate, deeply as it wounded him, and
+had come out of the shattered party of evasion on the side of his
+section.  For the purpose of showing his support of the
+administration at this critical time, he had taken a place on the
+stand where Lincoln was to speak.  By one of those curious little
+dramatic touches with which chance loves to embroider history,
+the presence of Douglas became a gracious detail in the memory of
+the day.  Lincoln, worn and awkward, continued to hold his hat in
+his hand.  Douglas, with the tact born of social experience,
+stepped forward and took it from him without--exposing Lincoln's
+embarrassment.
+
+The inaugural address which Lincoln now pronounced had little
+similarity to those unfortunate utterances which he had made on
+the journey to Washington.  The cloud that had been over him,
+whatever it was, had lifted.  Lincoln was ready for his great
+labor.  The inaugural contained three main propositions.  Lincoln
+pledged himself not to interfere directly or indirectly with
+slavery in the States where it then existed; he promised to
+support the enforcement of the fugitive slave law; and he
+declared he would maintain the Union.  "No State," said he, "upon
+its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union....  To the
+extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution
+itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be
+faithfully executed in all the States....  In doing this, there
+need be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless
+it be forced upon the national authority.  The power confided to
+me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and
+places belonging to the government."  Addressing the Southerners,
+he said: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and
+not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.  The Government
+will not assail you....  We are not enemies but friends....  The
+mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and
+patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over
+this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when
+again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of
+our nature."
+
+Gentle, as was the phrasing of the inaugural, it was perfectly
+firm, and it outlined a policy which the South would not accept,
+and which, in the opinion of the Southern leaders, brought them a
+step nearer war.  Wall Street held the same belief, and as a
+consequence the price of stocks fell.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. WAR
+
+On the day following the inauguration, commissioners of the newly
+formed Confederacy appeared at Washington and applied to the
+Secretary of State for recognition as envoys of a foreign power.
+Seward refused them such recognition.  But he entered into a
+private negotiation with them which is nearly, if not quite, the
+strangest thing in our history.  Virtually, Seward intrigued
+against Lincoln for control of the Administration.  The events of
+the next five weeks have an importance out of all proportion to
+the brevity of the time.  This was Lincoln's period of final
+probation.  The psychological intensity of this episode grew from
+the consciousness in every mind that now, irretrievably, destiny
+was to be determined.  War or peace, happiness or adversity, one
+nation or two--all these were in the balance.  Lincoln entered
+the episode a doubtful quantity, not with certainty the master
+even in his own Cabinet.  He emerged dominating the situation,
+but committed to the terrible course of war.
+
+One cannot enter upon this great episode, truly the turning point
+in American history, without pausing for a glance at the
+character of Seward.  The subject is elusive.  His ablest
+biographer* plainly is so constantly on guard not to appear an
+apologist that he ends by reducing his portrait to a mere
+outline, wavering across a background of political details.  The
+most recent study of Seward** surely reveals between the lines
+the doubtfulness of the author about pushing his points home. The
+different sides of the man are hard to reconcile.  Now he seemed
+frank and honest; again subtle and insincere.  As an active
+politician in the narrow sense, he should have been sagacious and
+astute, yet he displayed at the crisis of his life the most
+absolute fatuity.  At times he had a buoyant and puerile way of
+disregarding fact and enveloping himself in a world of his own
+imagining.  He could bluster, when he wished, like any demagogue;
+and yet he could be persuasive, agreeable, and even personally
+charming.
+
+*Frederic Bancroft, "Life of William H. Seward".
+** Gamaliel Bradford, "Union Portraits".
+
+
+But of one thing with regard to Seward, in the first week of
+March, 1861, there can be no doubt: he thought himself a great
+statesman --and he thought Lincoln "a Simple Susan."  He
+conceived his role in the new administration to involve a subtle
+and patient manipulation of his childlike superior.  That Lincoln
+would gradually yield to his spell and insensibly become his
+figurehead; that he, Seward, could save the country and would go
+down to history a statesman above compare, he took for granted. 
+Nor can he fairly be called conceited, either; that is part of
+his singularity.
+
+Lincoln's Cabinet was, as Seward said, a compound body.  With a
+view to strengthening his position, Lincoln had appointed to
+cabinet positions all his former rivals for the Republican
+nomination.  Besides Seward, there was Chase as Secretary of the
+Treasury; Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania as Secretary of War;
+Edward Bates of Missouri as Attorney-General.  The appointment of
+Montgomery Blair of Maryland as Postmaster-General was intended
+to placate the border Slave States.  The same motive dictated the
+later inclusion of James Speed of Kentucky in the Cabinet.  The
+Black-Stanton wing of the Democrats was represented in the Navy
+Department by Gideon Welles, and in course of time in the War
+Department also, when Cameron resigned and Stanton succeeded him.
+The West of that day was represented by Caleb B. Smith of
+Indiana.
+
+Seward disapproved of the composition of the Cabinet so much
+that, almost at the last moment, he withdrew his acceptance of
+the State Department.  It was Lincoln's gentleness of argument
+which overcame his reluctance to serve.  We may be sure, however,
+that Seward failed to observe that Lincoln's tactlessness in
+social matters did not extend to his management of men in
+politics; we may feel sure that what remained in his mind was
+Lincoln's unwillingness to enter office without William Henry
+Seward as Secretary of State.
+
+The promptness with which Seward assumed the role of prime
+minister bears out this inference.  The same fact also reveals a
+puzzling detail of Seward's character which amounted to
+obtuseness--his forgetfulness that appointment to cabinet offices
+had not transformed his old political rivals Chase and Cameron,
+nor softened the feelings of an inveterate political enemy,
+Welles, the Secretary of the Navy.  The impression which Seward
+made on his colleagues in the first days of the new Government
+has been thus sharply recorded by Welles: "The Secretary of State
+was, of course, apprised of every meeting [of ministers] and
+never failed in his attendance, whatever was the subject-matter,
+and though entirely out of his official province.  He was
+vigilantly attentive to every measure and movement in other
+Departments, however trivial--as much so as to his own--watched
+and scrutinized every appointment that was made, or proposed to
+be made, but was not communicative in regard to the transaction
+of the State Department."  So eager was Seward to keep all the
+threads of affairs in his own hands that he tried to persuade
+Lincoln not to hold cabinet meetings but merely to consult with
+particular ministers, and with the Secretary of State, as
+occasion might demand.  A combined protest from the other
+Secretaries, however, caused the regular holding of Cabinet
+meetings.
+
+With regard to the Confederacy, Seward's policy was one of
+non-resistance.  For this he had two reasons.  The first of these
+was his rooted delusion that the bulk of the Southerners were
+opposed to secession and, if let alone, would force their leaders
+to reconsider their action.  He might have quoted the nursery
+rhyme, "Let them alone and they'll come home"; it would have been
+like him and in tune with a frivolous side of his nature.  He was
+quite as irresponsible when he complacently assured the North
+that the trouble would all blow over within ninety days.  He also
+believed that any display of force would convert these
+hypothetical Unionists of the South from friends to enemies and
+would consolidate opinion in the Confederacy to produce war.  In
+justice to Seward it must be remembered that on this point time
+justified his fears.
+
+His dealings with the Confederate commissioners show that he was
+playing to gain time, not with intent to deceive the Southerners
+but to acquire that domination over Lincoln which he felt was his
+by natural right.  Intending to institute a peace policy the
+moment he gained this ascendency, he felt perfectly safe in
+making promises to the commissioners through mutual friends.  He
+virtually told them that Sumter would eventually be given up and
+that all they need do was to wait.
+
+Seward brought to bear upon the President the opinions of various
+military men who thought the time had passed when any expedition
+for the relief of Sumter could succeed.  For some time Lincoln
+seemed about to consent, though reluctantly, to Seward's lead in
+the matter of the forts.  He was pulled up standing, however, by
+the threatened resignation of the Postmaster-General, Blair.
+After a conference with leading Republican politicians the
+President announced to his Cabinet that his policy would include
+the relief of Sumter.  "Seward," says Welles, "...was evidently
+displeased."
+
+Seward now took a new tack.  Fort Pickens, at Pensacola, was a
+problem similar to that of Sumter at Charleston.  Both were
+demanded by the Confederates, and both were in need of supplies.
+But Fort Pickens lay to one side, so to speak, of the public
+mind, and there was not conspicuously in the world's eye the
+square issue over it that there was over Sumter.  Seward
+conceived the idea that, if the President's attention were
+diverted from Sumter to Pickens and a relief expedition were sent
+to the latter but none to the former, his private negotiations
+with the Confederates might still be kept going; Lincoln might
+yet be hypnotized; and at last all would be well.
+
+On All-Fools' Day, 1861, in the midst of a press of business, he
+obtained Lincoln's signature to some dispatches, which Lincoln,
+it seems, discussed with him hurriedly and without detailed
+consideration.  There were now in preparation two relief
+expeditions, one to carry supplies to Pensacola, the other to
+Charleston.  Neither was to fight if it was not molested.  Both
+were to be strong enough to fight if their commanders deemed it
+necessary.  As flagship of the Charleston expedition, Welles had
+detailed the powerful warship Powhatan, which was rapidly being
+made ready at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  Such was the situation as
+Welles understood it when he was thinking of bed late on the
+night of the 6th of April.  Until then he had not suspected that
+there was doubt and bewilderment about the Powhatan at Brooklyn.
+One of those dispatches which Lincoln had so hastily signed
+provided for detaching the Powhatan from the Charleston
+expedition and sending it safe out of harm's way to Pensacola. 
+The commander of the ship had before him the conflicting orders,
+one from the President, one from the Secretary of the Navy.  He
+was about to sail under the President's orders for Pensacola; but
+wishing to make sure of his authority, he had telegraphed to
+Washington. Gideon Welles was a pugnacious man.  His dislike for
+Seward was deepseated.  Imagine his state of mind when it was
+accidently revealed to him that Seward had gone behind his back
+and had issued to naval officers orders which were contradictory
+to his own!  The immediate result was an interview that same
+night between Seward and Welles in which, as Welles coldly
+admitted in after days, the Secretary of the Navy showed "some
+excitement." Together they went, about midnight, to the White
+House.  Lincoln had some difficulty recalling the incident of the
+dispatch on the 1st of April; but when he did remember, he took
+the responsibility entirely upon himself, saying he had had no
+purpose but to strengthen the Pickens expedition, and no thought
+of weakening the expedition to Charleston.  He directed Seward to
+telegraph immediately cancelling the order detaching the
+Powhatan. Seward made a desperate attempt to put him off,
+protesting, it was too late to send a telegram that night.  "But
+the President was imperative," writes Secretary Welles, in
+describing the incident, and a dispatch was sent.
+
+Seward then, doubtless in his agitation, did a strange thing.
+Instead of telegraphing in the President's name, the dispatch
+which he sent read merely, "Give up the Powhatan...Seward."  When
+this dispatch was received at Brooklyn, the Powhatan was already
+under way and had to be overtaken by a fast tug.  In the eyes of
+her commander, however, a personal telegram from the Secretary of
+State appeared as of no weight against the official orders of the
+President, and he continued his voyage to Pensacola.
+
+The mercurial temper of Seward comes out even in the caustic
+narrative written afterwards by Welles.  Evidently Seward was
+deeply mortified and depressed by the incident.  He remarked,
+says Welles, that old as he was he had learned a lesson, and that
+was that he had better attend to his own business.  "To this,"
+commented his enemy, "I cordially assented."
+
+Nevertheless Seward's loss of faith in himself was only
+momentary. A night's sleep was sufficient to restore it.  His
+next communication to the commissioners shows that he was himself
+again, sure that destiny owed him the control of the situation. 
+On the following day the commissioners had got wind of the relief
+expedition and pressed him for information, recalling his
+assurance that nothing would be done to their disadvantage.  In
+reply, still through a third person, Seward sent them the famous
+message, over the precise meaning of which great debate has
+raged: "Faith as to Sumter fully kept; wait and see."  If this
+infatuated dreamer still believed he could dominate Lincoln,
+still hoped at the last moment to arrest the expedition to
+Charleston, he was doomed to bitterest disappointment.
+
+On the 9th of April, the expedition to Fort Sumter sailed, but
+without, as we have seen, the assistance of the much needed
+warship, the Powhatan.  As all the world knows, the expedition
+had been too long delayed and it accomplished nothing.  Before it
+arrived, the surrender of Sumter had been demanded and refused
+--and war had begun.  During the bombardment of Sumter, the
+relief expedition appeared beyond the bar, but its commander had
+no vessels of such a character as to enable him to carry aid to
+the fortress.  Furthermore, he had not been informed that the
+Powhatan had been detached from his squadron, and he expected to
+meet her at the mouth of the harbor.  There his ships lay idle
+until the fort was surrendered, waiting for the Powhatan--for
+whose detachment from the squadron Seward was responsible.
+
+To return to the world of intrigue at Washington, however, it
+must not be supposed, as is so often done, that Fort Sumter was
+the one concern of the new government during its first six weeks. 
+In fact, the subject occupied but a fraction of Lincoln's time. 
+Scarcely second in importance was that matter so curiously bound
+up with the relief of the forts--the getting in hand of the
+strangely vain glorious Secretary of State.  Mention has already
+been made of All-Fools' Day, 1861.  Several marvelous things took
+place on that day. Strangest of all was the presentation of a
+paper by the Secretary of State to his chief, entitled "Thoughts
+for the President's Consideration".  Whether it be regarded as a
+state paper or as a biographical detail in the career of Seward,
+it proves to be quite the most astounding thing in the whole
+episode.  The "Thoughts" outlined a course of policy by which the
+buoyant Secretary intended to make good his prophecy of domestic
+peace within ninety days. Besides calmly patronizing Lincoln,
+assuring him that his lack of "a policy either domestic or
+foreign" was "not culpable and...even unavoidable," the paper
+warned him that "policies...both domestic and foreign" must
+immediately be adopted, and it proceeded to point out what they
+ought to be.  Briefly stated, the one true policy which he
+advocated at home was to evacuate Sumter (though Pickens for some
+unexplained reason might be safely retained) and then, in order
+to bring the Southerners back into the Union, to pick quarrels
+with both Spain and France; to proceed as quickly as possible to
+war with both powers; and to have the ultimate satisfaction of
+beholding the reunion of the country through the general
+enthusiasm that was bound to come.  Finally, the paper intimated
+that the Secretary of State was the man to carry this project
+through to success.
+
+All this is not opera bouffe, but serious history.  It must have
+taxed Lincoln's sense of humor and strained his sense of the
+fitness of things to treat such nonsense with the tactful
+forbearance which he showed and to relegate it to the pigeonhole
+without making Seward angry.  Yet this he contrived to do; and he
+also managed, gently but firmly, to make it plain that the
+President intended to exercise his authority as the chief
+magistrate of the nation.  His forbearance was further shown in
+passing over without rebuke Seward's part in the affair of
+Sumter, which might so easily have been made to appear
+treacherous, and in shouldering himself with all responsibility
+for the failure of the Charleston expedition.  In the wave of
+excitement following the surrender, even so debonair a minister
+as Seward must have realized how fortunate it was for him that
+his chief did not tell all he knew.  About this time Seward began
+to perceive that Lincoln had a will of his own, and that it was
+not safe to trifle further with the President.  Seward thereupon
+ceased his interference.
+
+It was in the dark days preceding the fall of Sumter that a crowd
+of office-seekers gathered at Washington, most of them men who
+had little interest in anything but the spoils.  It is a
+distressing commentary on the American party system that, during
+the most critical month of the most critical period of American
+history, much of the President's time was consumed by these
+political vampires who would not be put off, even though a
+revolution was in progress and nations, perhaps, were dying and
+being born.  "The scramble for office," wrote Stanton, "is
+terrible."  Seward noted privately: "Solicitants for office
+besiege the President....  My duties call me to the White House
+two or three times a day.  The grounds, halls, stairways,
+closets, are filled with applicants who render ingress and egress
+difficult."
+
+Secretary Welles has etched the Washington of that time in his
+coldly scornful way:
+
+"A strange state of things existed at that time in Washington.
+The atmosphere was thick with treason.  Party spirit and old
+party differences prevailed, however, amidst these accumulated
+dangers. Secession was considered by most persons as a political
+party question, not as rebellion.  Democrats to a large extent
+sympathized with the Rebels more than with the Administration,
+which they opposed, not that they wished Secession to be
+successful and the Union divided, but they hoped that President
+Lincoln and the Republicans would, overwhelmed by obstacles and
+embarrassments, prove failures.  The Republicans on the other
+hand, were scarcely less partisan and unreasonable.  Patriotism
+was with them no test, no shield from party malevolence.  They
+demanded the proscription and exclusion of such Democrats as
+opposed the Rebel movement and clung to the Union, with the same
+vehemence that they demanded the removal of the worst Rebels who
+advocated a dissolution of the Union.  Neither party appeared to
+be apprehensive of, or to realize the gathering storm."
+
+Seen against such a background, the political and diplomatic
+frivolity of the Secretary of State is not so inexplicable as it
+would otherwise be.  This background, as well as the intrigue of
+the Secretary, helps us to understand Lincoln's great task inside
+his Cabinet.  At first the Cabinet was a group of jealous
+politicians new to this sort of office, drawn from different
+parties, and totally lacking in a cordial sense of previous
+action together.  None of them, probably, when they first
+assembled had any high opinion of their titular head.  He was
+looked upon as a political makeshift.  The best of them had to
+learn to appreciate the fact that this strange, ungainly man,
+sprung from plainest origin, without formal education, was a
+great genius.  By degrees, however, the large minds in the
+Cabinet became his cordial admirers.  While Lincoln was quietly,
+gradually exercising his strong will upon Seward, he was doing
+the same with the other members of his council.  Presently they
+awoke--the majority of them at least--to the truth that he, for
+all his odd ways, was their master.
+
+Meanwhile the gradual readjustment of all factions in the North
+was steadily going forward.  The Republicans were falling into
+line behind the Government; and by degrees the distinction
+between Seward and Lincoln, in the popular mind, faded into a
+sort of composite picture called "the Administration."  Lincoln
+had the reward of his long forbearance with his Secretary.  For
+Seward it must be said that, however he had intrigued against his
+chief at Washington, he did not intrigue with the country. 
+Admitting as he had, too, that he had met his master, he took the
+defeat as a good sportsman and threw all his vast party influence
+into the scale for Lincoln's fortunes.  Thus, as April wore on,
+the Republican party settled down to the idea that it was to
+follow the Government at Washington upon any course that might
+develop.
+
+The Democrats in the North were anti-Southern in larger
+proportion, probably, than at any other time during the struggle
+of the sections.  We have seen that numbers of them had frankly
+declared for the Union.  Politics had proved weaker than
+propinquity. There was a moment when it seemed--delusively, as
+events proved--that the North was united as one man to oppose the
+South.
+
+There is surely not another day in our history that has witnessed
+so much nervous tension as Saturday, April 13, 1861, for on that
+morning the newspapers electrified the North with the news that
+Sumter had been fired on from Confederate batteries on the shore
+of Charleston Harbor.  In the South the issue was awaited
+confidently, but many minds at least were in that state of awed
+suspense natural to a moment which the thoughtful see is the
+stroke of fate.  In the North, the day passed for the most part
+in a quiet so breathless that even the most careless could have
+foretold the storm which broke on the following day.  The account
+of this crisis which has been given by Lincoln's private
+secretary is interesting:
+
+"That day there was little change in the business routine of the
+Executive office.  Mr. Lincoln was never liable to sudden
+excitement or sudden activity....  So while the Sumter telegrams
+were on every tongue...leading men and officials called to learn
+or impart the news.  The Cabinet, as by common impulse, came
+together and deliberated.  All talk, however, was brief,
+sententious, formal.  Lincoln said but little beyond making
+inquiries about the current reports and criticizing the
+probability or accuracy of their details, and went on as usual
+receiving visitors, listening to suggestions, and signing routine
+papers throughout the day."  Meanwhile the cannon were booming at
+Charleston.  The people came out on the sea-front of the lovely
+old city and watched the duel of the cannon far down the harbor,
+and spoke joyously of the great event.  They saw the shells of
+the shore batteries ignite portions of the fortress on the
+island. They watched the fire of the defenders--driven by the
+flames into a restricted area--slacken and cease.  At last the
+flag of the Union fluttered down from above Fort Sumter.
+
+When the news flashed over the North, early Sunday morning, April
+14th, the tension broke.  For many observers then and afterward,
+the only North discernible that fateful Sabbath was an enraged,
+defiant, impulsive nation, forgetful for the moment of all its
+differences, and uniting all its voices in one hoarse cry for
+vengeance.  There seemed to be no other thought.  Lincoln gave it
+formal utterance, that same day, by assembling his Cabinet and
+drawing up a proclamation which called for 75,000 volunteer
+troops.
+
+An incident of this day which is as significant historically as
+any other was on the surface no more than a friendly talk between
+two men.  Douglas called at the White House.  For nearly two
+hours he and Lincoln conferred in private.  Hitherto it had been
+a little uncertain what course Douglas was going to take.  In the
+Senate, though condemning disunion, he had opposed war.  Few
+matters can have troubled Lincoln more deeply than the question
+which way Douglas's immense influence would be thrown.  The
+question was answered publicly in the newspapers of Monday, April
+15th.  Douglas announced that while he was still "unalterably
+opposed to the Administration on all its political issues, he was
+prepared to sustain the President in the exercise of all his
+constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the
+Government, and defend the federal capital."
+
+There remained of Douglas's life but a few months.  The time was
+filled with earnest speechmaking in support of the Government. 
+He had started West directly following his conference with
+Lincoln. His speeches in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, were perhaps
+the greatest single force in breaking up his own following,
+putting an end to the principle of doing nothing, and forcing
+every Democrat to come out and show his colors.  In Shakespeare's
+phrase, it was--"Under which king, Bezonian? speak or die!"  In
+Douglas's own phrase: "There can be no neutrals in this war; ONLY
+PATRIOTS--OR TRAITORS."
+
+Side by side with Douglas's manifesto to the Democrats there
+appeared in the Monday papers Lincoln's call for volunteers.  The
+militia of several Northern States at once responded.
+
+On Wednesday, the 17th of April, the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment
+entrained for Washington.  Two days later it was in Baltimore.
+There it was attacked by a mob; the soldiers fired; and a number
+of civilians were killed as well as several soldiers.
+
+These shots at Baltimore aroused the Southern party in Maryland.
+Led by the Mayor of the city, they resolved to prevent the
+passage of other troops across their State to Washington. 
+Railway tracks were torn up by order of the municipal
+authorities, and bridges were burnt.  The telegraph was cut.  As
+in a flash, after issuing his proclamation, Lincoln found himself
+isolated at Washington with no force but a handful of troops and
+the government clerks. And while Maryland rose against him on one
+side, Virginia joined his enemies on the other.  The day the
+Sixth Massachusetts left Boston, Virginia seceded.  The Virginia
+militia were called to their colors.  Preparations were at once
+set on foot for the seizure of the great federal arsenal at
+Harper's Ferry and the Navy Yard at Norfolk.  The next day a
+handful of federal troops, fearful of being overpowered at
+Harper's Ferry, burned the arsenal and withdrew to Washington. 
+For the same reason the buildings of the great Navy Yard were
+blown up or set on fire, and the ships at anchor were sunk.  So
+desperate and unprepared were the Washington authorities that
+they took these extreme measures to keep arms and ammunition out
+of the hands of the Virginians.  So hastily was the destruction
+carried out, that it was only partially successful and at both
+places large stores of ammunition were seized by the Virginia
+troops.  While Washington was isolated, and Lincoln did not know
+what response the North had made to his proclamation, Robert E.
+Lee, having resigned his commission in the federal army, was
+placed in command of the Virginia troops.
+
+The secretaries of Lincoln have preserved a picture of his
+desperate anxiety, waiting, day after day, for relief from the
+North which he hoped would speedily come by sea.  Outwardly he
+maintained his self-control.  "But once, on the afternoon of the
+23d, the business of the day being over, the Executive office
+being deserted, after walking the floor alone in silent thought
+for nearly half an hour, he stopped and gazed long and wistfully
+out of the window down the Potomac in the direction of the
+expected ships; and, unconscious of other presence in the room,
+at length broke out with irrepressible anguish in the repeated
+exclamation, "Why don't they come! Why don't they come!"
+
+During these days of isolation, when Washington, with the
+telegraph inoperative, was kept in an appalling uncertainty, the
+North rose.  There was literally a rush to volunteer.  "The
+heather is on fire," wrote George Ticknor, "I never before knew
+what a popular excitement can be."  As fast as possible militia
+were hurried South.  The crack New York regiment, the famous,
+dandified Seventh, started for the front amid probably the most
+tempestuous ovation which until that time was ever given to a
+military organization in America.  Of the march of the regiment
+down Broadway, one of its members wrote, "Only one who passed as
+we did, through the tempest of cheers two miles long, can know
+the terrible enthusiasm of the occasion."
+
+To reach Washington by rail was impossible.  The Seventh went by
+boat to Annapolis.  The same course was taken by a regiment of
+Massachusetts mechanics, the Eighth.  Landing at Annapolis, the
+two regiments, dandies and laborers, fraternized at once in the
+common bond of loyalty to the Union.  A branch railway led from
+Annapolis to the main line between Washington and Baltimore.  The
+rails had been torn up.  The Massachusetts mechanics set to work
+to relay them.  The Governor of Maryland protested.  He was
+disregarded.  The two regiments toiled together a long day and
+through the night following, between Annapolis and the Washington
+junction, bringing on their baggage and cannon over relaid
+tracks. There, a train was found which the Seventh appropriated. 
+At noon, on the 25th of April, that advance guard of the Northern
+hosts entered Washington, and Lincoln knew that he had armies
+behind him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. LINCOLN
+
+The history of the North had virtually become, by April, 1861,
+the history of Lincoln himself, and during the remaining four
+years of the President's life it is difficult to separate his
+personality from the trend of national history.  Any attempt to
+understand the achievements and the omissions of the Northern
+people without undertaking an intelligent estimate of their
+leader would be only to duplicate the story of "Hamlet" with
+Hamlet left out. According to the opinion of English military
+experts*, "Against the great military genius of certain Southern
+leaders fate opposed the unbroken resolution and passionate
+devotion to the Union, which he worshiped, of the great Northern
+President.  As long as he lived and ruled the people of the
+North, there could be no turning back."
+
+* Wood and Edmonds. "The Civil War in the United States."
+
+
+Lincoln has been ranked with Socrates; but he has also been
+compared with Rabelais.  He has been the target of abuse that
+knew no mercy; but he has been worshiped as a demigod.  The ten
+big volumes of his official biography are a sustained,
+intemperate eulogy in which the hero does nothing that is not
+admirable; but as large a book could be built up out of
+contemporaneous Northern writings that would paint a picture of
+unmitigated blackness--and the most eloquent portions of it would
+be signed by Wendell Phillips.
+
+The real Lincoln is, of course, neither the Lincoln of the
+official biography nor the Lincoln of Wendell Phillips.  He was
+neither a saint nor a villain.  What he actually was is not,
+however, so easily stated.  Prodigious men are never easy to sum
+up; and Lincoln was a prodigious man.  The more one studies him,
+the more individual he appears to be.  By degrees one comes to
+understand how it was possible for contemporaries to hold
+contradictory views of him and for each to believe frantically
+that his views were proved by facts.  For anyone who thinks he
+can hit off in a few neat generalities this complex,
+extraordinary personality, a single warning may suffice.  Walt
+Whitman, who was perhaps the most original thinker and the most
+acute observer who ever saw Lincoln face to face has left us his
+impression; but he adds that there was something in Lincoln's
+face which defied description and which no picture had caught. 
+After Whitman's conclusion that "One of the great portrait
+painters of two or three hundred years ago is needed," the mere
+historian should proceed with caution.
+
+There is historic significance in his very appearance.  His huge,
+loose-knit figure, six feet four inches high, lean, muscular,
+ungainly, the evidence of his great physical strength, was a fit
+symbol of those hard workers, the children of the soil, from whom
+he sprang.  His face was rugged like his figure, the complexion
+swarthy, cheek bones high, and bushy black hair crowning a great
+forehead beneath which the eyes were deep-set, gray, and
+dreaming. A sort of shambling powerfulness formed the main
+suggestion of face and figure, softened strangely by the
+mysterious expression of the eyes, and by the singular delicacy
+of the skin. The motions of this awkward giant lacked grace; the
+top hat and black frock coat, sometimes rusty, which had served
+him on the western circuit continued to serve him when he was
+virtually the dictator of his country.  It was in such dress that
+he visited the army, where he towered above his generals.
+
+Even in a book of restricted scope, such as this, one must insist
+upon the distinction between the private and public Lincoln, for
+there is as yet no accepted conception of him.  What comes
+nearest to an accepted conception is contained probably in the
+version of the late Charles Francis Adams.  He tells us how his
+father, the elder Charles Francis Adams, ambassador to London,
+found Lincoln in 1861 an offensive personality, and he insists
+that Lincoln under strain passed through a transformation which
+made the Lincoln of 1864 a different man from the Lincoln of
+1861.  Perhaps; but without being frivolous, one is tempted to
+quote certain old-fashioned American papers that used to label
+their news items "important if true."
+
+What then, was the public Lincoln?  What explains his vast
+success? As a force in American history, what does he count for? 
+Perhaps the most significant detail in an answer to these
+questions is the fact that he had never held conspicuous public
+office until at the age of fifty-two he became President. 
+Psychologically his place is in that small group of great
+geniuses whose whole significant period lies in what we commonly
+think of as the decline of life. There are several such in
+history: Rome had Caesar; America had both Lincoln and Lee.  By
+contrasting these instances with those of the other type, the
+egoistic geniuses such as Alexander or Napoleon, we become aware
+of some dim but profound dividing line separating the two groups. 
+The theory that genius, at bottom, is pure energy seems to fit
+Napoleon; but does it fit these other minds who appear to meet
+life with a certain indifference, with a carelessness of their
+own fate, a willingness to leave much to chance?  That
+irresistible passion for authority which Napoleon had is lacking
+in these others.  Their basal inspiration seems to resemble the
+impulse of the artist to express, rather than the impulse of the
+man of action to possess.  Had it not been for secession, Lee
+would probably have ended his days as an exemplary superintendent
+of West Point.  And what of Lincoln?  He dabbled in politics,
+early and without success; he left politics for the law, and to
+the law he gave during many years his chief devotion.  But the
+fortuitous break-up of parties, with the revival of the slavery
+issue, touched some hidden spring; the able provincial lawyer
+felt again the political impulse; he became a famous maker of
+political phrases; and on this literary basis he became the
+leader of a party.
+
+Too little attention has been paid to this progression of Lincoln
+through literature into politics.  The ease with which he drifted
+from one to the other is also still to be evaluated.  Did it show
+a certain slackness, a certain aimlessness, at the bottom of his
+nature?  Had it, in a way, some sort of analogy--to compare
+homespun with things Olympian--to the vein of frivolity in the
+great Caesar?  One is tempted to think so.  Surely, here was one
+of those natures which need circumstance to compel them to
+greatness and which are not foredoomed, Napoleon-like, to seize
+greatness.  Without encroaching upon the biographical task, one
+may borrow from biography this insistent echo: the anecdotes of
+Lincoln sound over and over the note of easy-going good nature;
+but there is to be found in many of the Lincoln anecdotes an
+overtone of melancholy which lingers after one's impression of
+his good nature.  Quite naturally, in such a biographical
+atmosphere, we find ourselves thinking of him at first as a
+little too good-humored, a little too easy-going, a little prone
+to fall into reverie.  We are not surprised when we find his
+favorite poem beginning "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be
+proud."
+
+This enigmatical man became President in his fifty-second year.
+We have already seen that his next period, the winter of 1860-61,
+has its biographical problems.  The impression which he made on
+the country as President-elect was distinctly unfavorable.  Good
+humor, or opportunism, or what you will, brought together in
+Lincoln's Cabinet at least three men more conspicuous in the
+ordinary sense than he was himself.  We forget, today, how
+insignificant he must have seemed in a Cabinet that embraced
+Seward, Cameron, and Chase--all large national figures.  What
+would not history give for a page of self-revelation showing us
+how he felt in the early days of that company!  Was he troubled?
+Did he doubt his ability to hold his own?  Was he fatalistic? 
+Was his sad smile his refuge?  Did he merely put things by,
+ignoring tomorrow until tomorrow should arrive?
+
+However we may guess at the answers to such questions, one thing
+now becomes certain.  His quality of good humor began to be his
+salvation.  It is doubtful if any President except Washington had
+to manage so difficult a Cabinet.  Washington had seen no
+solution to the problem but to let Jefferson go.  Lincoln found
+his Cabinet often on the verge of a split, with two powerful
+factions struggling to control it and neither ever gaining full
+control. Though there were numerous withdrawals, no resigning
+secretary really split Lincoln's Cabinet.  By what turns and
+twists and skillful maneuvers Lincoln prevented such a division
+and kept such inveterate enemies as Chase and Seward steadily at
+their jobs--Chase during three years, Seward to the end--will
+partly appear in the following pages; but the whole delicate
+achievement cannot be properly appreciated except in detailed
+biography.
+
+All criticism of Lincoln turns eventually on one question: Was he
+an opportunist?  Not only his enemies in his own time but many
+politicians of a later day were eager to prove that he was the
+latter--indeed, seeking to shelter their own opportunism behind
+the majesty of his example.  A modern instance will perhaps make
+vivid this long standing debate upon Lincoln and his motives.
+Merely for historic illumination and without becoming invidious,
+we may recall the instance of President Wilson and the
+resignation of his Secretary of War in 1916 because Congress
+would not meet the issue of preparedness.  The President accepted
+the resignation without forcing the issue, and Congress went on
+fiddling while Rome burned.  Now, was the President an
+opportunist, merely waiting to see what course events would take,
+or was he a political strategist, astutely biding his time? 
+Similar in character is this old debate upon Lincoln, which is
+perhaps best focussed in the removal of Secretary Blair which we
+shall have to note in connection with the election of 1864.
+
+It is difficult for the most objective historian to deal with
+such questions without obtruding his personal views, but there is
+nothing merely individual in recording the fact that the steady
+drift of opinion has been away from the conception of Lincoln as
+an opportunist.  What once caused him to be thus conceived
+appears now to have been a failure to comprehend intelligently
+the nature of his undertaking.  More and more, the tendency
+nowadays is to conceive his career as one of those few instances
+in which the precise faculties needed to solve a particular
+problem were called into play at exactly the critical moment. 
+Our confusions with regard to Lincoln have grown out of our
+failure to appreciate the singularity of the American people, and
+their ultra-singularity during the years in which he lived.  It
+remains to be seen hereafter what strange elements of
+sensibility, of waywardness, of lack of imagination, of
+undisciplined ardor, of selfishness, of deceitfulness, of
+treachery, combined with heroic ideality, made up the character
+of that complex populace which it was Lincoln's task to control. 
+But he did more than control it: he somehow compounded much of it
+into something like a unit. To measure Lincoln's achievement in
+this respect, two things must be remembered: on the one hand, his
+task was not as arduous as it might have been, because the most
+intellectual part of the North had definitely committed itself
+either irretrievably for, or irreconcilably against, his policy. 
+Lincoln, therefore, did not have to trouble himself with this
+portion of the population.  On the other hand, that part which he
+had to master included such emotional rhetoricians as Horace
+Greeley; such fierce zealots as Henry Winter Davis of Maryland,
+who made him trouble indeed, and Benjamin Wade, whom we have met
+already; such military egoists as McClellan and Pope; such crafty
+double-dealers as his own Secretary of the Treasury; such astute
+grafters as Cameron; such miserable creatures as certain powerful
+capitalists who sacrificed his army to their own lust for profits
+filched from army contracts.
+
+The wonder of Lincoln's achievement is that he contrived at last
+to extend his hold over all these diverse elements; that he
+persuaded some, outwitted others, and overcame them all.  The
+subtlety of this task would have ruined any statesman of the
+driving sort.  Explain Lincoln by any theory you will, his
+personality was the keystone of the Northern arch; subtract it,
+and the arch falls.  The popular element being as complex and
+powerful as it was, how could the presiding statesman have
+mastered the situation if he had not been of so peculiar a sort
+that he could influence all these diverse and powerful interests,
+slowly, by degrees, without heat, without the imperative note,
+almost in silence, with the universal, enfolding irresistibility
+of the gradual things in nature, of the sun and the rain.  Such
+was the genius of Lincoln--all but passionless, yet so quiet that
+one cannot but believe in the great depth of his nature.
+
+We are, even today, far from a definitive understanding of
+Lincoln's statecraft, but there is perhaps justification for
+venturing upon one prophecy.  The farther from him we get and the
+more clearly we see him in perspective, the more we shall realize
+his creative influence upon his party.  A Lincoln who is the
+moulder of events and the great creator of public opinion will
+emerge at last into clear view.  In the Lincoln of his ultimate
+biographer there will be more of iron than of a less enduring
+metal in the figure of the Lincoln of present tradition.  Though
+none of his gentleness will disappear, there will be more
+emphasis placed upon his firmness, and upon such episodes as that
+of December, 1860, when his single will turned the scale against
+compromise; upon his steadiness in the defeat of his party at the
+polls in 1862; or his overruling of the will of Congress in the
+summer of 1864 on the question of reconstruction; or his attitude
+in the autumn of that year when he believed that he was losing
+his second election.  Behind all his gentleness, his slowness,
+behind his sadness, there will eventually appear an inflexible
+purpose, strong as steel, unwavering as fate.
+
+The Civil War was in truth Lincoln's war.  Those modern pacifists
+who claim him for their own are beside the mark.  They will never
+get over their illusions about Lincoln until they see, as all the
+world is beginning to see, that his career has universal
+significance because of its bearing on the universal modern
+problem of democracy.  It will not do ever to forget that he was
+a man of the people, always playing the hand of the people, in
+the limited social sense of that word, though playing it with
+none of the heat usually met with in the statesmen of successful
+democracy from Cleon to Robespierre, from Andrew Jackson to Lloyd
+George. His gentleness does not remove Lincoln from that stern
+category. Throughout his life, besides his passion for the Union,
+besides his antipathy to slavery, there dwelt in his very heart
+love of and faith in the plain people.  We shall never see him in
+true historic perspective until we conceive him as the instrument
+of a vast social idea--the determination to make a government
+based on the plain people successful in war.
+
+He did not scruple to seize power when he thought the cause of
+the people demanded it, and his enemies were prompt to accuse him
+of holding to the doctrine that the end justified the means--a
+hasty conclusion which will have to be reconsidered; what
+concerns us more closely is the definite conviction that he felt
+no sacrifice too great if it advanced the happiness of the
+generality of mankind.
+
+The final significance of Lincoln as a statesman of  democracy is
+brought out most clearly in his foreign relations.  Fate put it
+into the hands of England to determine whether his Government
+should stand or fall.  Though it is doubtful how far the turning
+of the scale of English policy in Lincoln's favor was due to the
+influence of the rising power of English democracy, it is plain
+that Lincoln thought of himself as having one purpose with that
+movement which he regarded as an ally.  Beyond all doubt among
+the most grateful messages he ever received were the New Year
+greetings of confidence and sympathy which were sent by English
+workingmen in 1863.  A few sentences in his "Letter to the
+Workingmen of London" help us to look through his eyes and see
+his life and its struggles as they appeared to him in relation to
+world history:
+
+"As these sentiments [expressed by the English workmen] are
+manifestly the enduring support of the free institutions of
+England, so am I sure that they constitute the only reliable
+basis for free institutions throughout the world....  The
+resources, advantages, and power of the American people are very
+great, and they have consequently succeeded to equally great
+responsibilities. It seems to have devolved upon them to test
+whether a government established on the principles of human
+freedom can be maintained against an effort to build one upon the
+exclusive foundation of human bondage.  They will rejoice with me
+in the new evidence which your proceedings furnish that the
+magnanimity they are exhibiting is justly estimated by the true
+friends of freedom and humanity in foreign countries."
+
+Written at the opening of that terrible year, 1863, these words
+are a forward link with those more celebrated words spoken toward
+its close at Gettysburg.  Perhaps at no time during the war,
+except during the few days immediately following his own
+reelection a year later, did Lincoln come so near being free from
+care as then.  Perhaps that explains why his fundamental literary
+power reasserted itself so remarkably, why this speech of his at
+the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg on the 19th
+of November, 1863, remains one of the most memorable orations
+ever delivered:
+
+"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon
+this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated
+to the proposition that all men are created equal.
+
+"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
+nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
+endure.  We are met on a great battlefield of that war.  We have
+come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place
+for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
+It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
+
+"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
+we cannot hallow this ground.  The brave men, living and dead,
+who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to
+add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember
+what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It
+is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
+unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
+advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great
+task remaining before us: that from these honored dead we take
+increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last
+full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these
+dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God,
+shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the
+people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from
+the earth."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE RULE OF LINCOLN
+
+The fundamental problem of the Lincoln Government was the raising
+of armies, the sudden conversion of a community which was
+essentially industrial into a disciplined military organization.
+The accomplishment of so gigantic a transformation taxed the
+abilities of two Secretaries of War.  The first, Simon Cameron,
+owed his place in the Cabinet to the double fact of being one of
+the ablest of political bosses and of standing high among
+Lincoln's competitors for the Presidential nomination. 
+Personally honest, he was also a political cynic to whom
+tradition ascribes the epigram defining an honest politician as
+one who "when he is bought, will stay bought."  As Secretary of
+War he showed no particular ability.
+
+In 1861, when the tide of enthusiasm was in flood, and volunteers
+in hosts were responding to acts of Congress for the raising and
+maintenance of a volunteer army, Cameron reported in December
+that the Government had on foot 660,971 men and could have had a
+million except that Congress had limited the number of volunteers
+to be received.  When this report was prepared, Lincoln was, so
+to speak, in the trough of two seas.  The devotion which had been
+offered to him in April, 1861, when the North seemed to rise as
+one man, had undergone a reaction.  Eight months without a single
+striking military success, together with the startling defeat at
+Bull Run, had had their inevitable effect.  Democracies are
+mercurial; variability seems to be part of the price of freedom.
+With childlike faith in their cause, the Northern people, in
+midsummer, were crying, "On to Richmond!"  In the autumn, stung
+by defeat, they were ready to cry, "Down with Lincoln."
+
+In a subsequent report, the War Department confessed that at the
+beginning of hostilities, "nearly all our arms and ammunition"
+came from foreign countries.  One great reason why no military
+successes relieve the gloom of 1861 was that, from a soldier's
+point of view, there were no armies.  Soldiers, it is true, there
+were in myriads; but arms, ammunition, and above all,
+organization were lacking.  The supplies in the government
+arsenals had been provided for an army of but a few thousand. 
+Strive as they would, all the factories in the country could not
+come anywhere near making arms for half a million men; nor did
+the facilities of those days make it possible for munition plants
+to spring up overnight.  Had it not been that the Confederacy was
+equally hard pushed, even harder pushed, to find arms and
+ammunition, the war would have ended inside Seward's ninety days,
+through sheer lack of powder.
+
+Even with the respite given by the unpreparedness of the South,
+and while Lincoln hurriedly collected arms and ammunition from
+abroad, the startled nation, thus suddenly forced into a
+realization of what war meant, lost its head.  From its previous
+reckless trust in sheer enthusiasm, it reacted to a distrust of
+almost everything.  Why were the soldiers not armed?  Why did not
+millions of rounds of cartridges fall like manna out of the sky?
+Why did not the crowds of volunteers become armies at a word of
+command?  One of the darkest pages in American history records
+the way in which the crowd, undisciplined to endure strain,
+turned upon Lincoln in its desire to find in the conduct of their
+leader a pretext for venting upon him the fierceness of their
+anxiety. Such a pretext they found in his treatment of Fremont.
+
+The singular episode of Fremont's arrogance in 1861 is part of
+the story of the border States whose friendship was eagerly
+sought by both sides--Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and those
+mountainous counties which in time were to become West Virginia. 
+To retain Maryland and thus to keep open the connection between
+the Capital and the North was one of Lincoln's deepest anxieties. 
+By degrees the hold of the Government in Maryland was made
+secure, and the State never seceded.  Kentucky, too, held to the
+Union, though, during many anxious months in 1861, Lincoln did
+not know whether this State was to be for him or against him. 
+The Virginia mountains, from the first, seemed a more hopeful
+field, for the mountaineers had opposed the Virginia secession
+and, as soon as it was accomplished, had begun holding meetings
+of protest.  In the meantime George B. McClellan, with the rank
+of general bestowed upon him by the Federal Government, had been
+appointed to command the militia of Ohio.  He was sent to assist
+the insurgent mountaineers, and with him went the Ohio militia. 
+From this situation and from the small engagements with
+Confederate forces in which McClellan was successful, there
+resulted the separate State of West Virginia and the extravagant
+popular notion that McClellan was a great general.  His successes
+were contrasted in the ordinary mind with the crushing defeat at
+Bull Run, which happened at about the same time.
+
+The most serious of all these struggles in the border States,
+however, was that which took place in Missouri, where, owing to
+the strength of both factions and their promptness in organizing,
+real war began immediately.  A Union army led by General
+Nathaniel Lyon attacked the Confederates with great spirit at
+Wilson's Creek but was beaten back in a fierce and bloody battle
+in which their leader was killed.
+
+Even before these events Fremont had been appointed to chief
+command in Missouri, and here he at once began a strange course
+of dawdling and posing.  His military career must be left to the
+military historians--who have not ranked him among the great
+generals.  Civil history accuses him, if not of using his new
+position to make illegitimate profits, at least of showing
+reckless favoritism toward those who did.  It is hardly unfair to
+say that Lincoln, in bearing with Fremont as long as he did,
+showed a touch of amiable weakness; and yet, it must be
+acknowledged that the President knew that the country was in a
+dangerous mood, that Fremont was immensely popular, and that any
+change might be misunderstood.  Though Lincoln hated to appear
+anything but a friend to a fallen political rival, he was at last
+forced to act.  Frauds in government contracts at St. Louis were
+a public scandal, and the reputation of the government had to be
+saved by the removal of Fremont in November, 1861.  As an
+immediate consequence of this action the overstrained nerves of
+great numbers of people snapped.  Fremont's personal followers,
+as well as the abolitionists whom he had actively supported while
+in command in Missouri, and all that vast crowd of excitable
+people who are unable to stand silent under strain, clamored
+against Lincoln in the wildest and most absurd vein.  He was
+accused of being a "dictator"; he was called an "imbecile"; he
+ought to be impeached, and a new party, with Fremont as its
+leader, should be formed to prosecute the war.  But through all
+this clamor Lincoln kept his peace and let the heathen rage.
+
+Toward the end of the year, popular rage turned suddenly on
+Cameron, who, as Secretary of War, had taken an active but proper
+part in the investigation of Fremont's conduct.  It was one of
+those tremulous moments when people are desperately eager to have
+something done and are ready to believe anything.  Though
+McClellan, now in chief command of the Union forces, had an
+immense army which was fast getting properly equipped, month
+faded into month without his advancing against the enemy. Again
+the popular cry was raised, "On to Richmond!"  It was at this
+moment of military inactivity and popular restlessness that
+charges of peculation were brought forward against Cameron.
+
+These charges both were and were not well founded.  Himself a
+rich man, it is not likely that Cameron profited personally by
+government contracts, even though the acrimonious Thad Stevens
+said of his appointment as Secretary that it would add "another
+million to his fortune."  There seems little doubt, however, that
+Cameron showered lucrative contracts upon his political
+retainers. And no boss has ever held the State of Pennsylvania in
+a firmer grip.  His tenure of the Secretaryship of War was one
+means to that end.
+
+The restless alarm of the country at large expressed itself in
+such extravagant words as these which Senator Grimes wrote to
+Senator Fessenden: "We are going to destruction as fast as
+imbecility, corruption, and the wheels of time can carry us."  So
+dissatisfied, indeed, was Congress with the conduct of the war
+that it appointed a committee of investigation.  During December,
+1861, and January, 1862, the committee was summoning generals
+before it, questioning them, listening to all manner of views,
+accomplishing nothing, but rendering more and more feverish an
+atmosphere already surcharged with anxiety.  On the floors of
+Congress debate raged as to who was responsible for the military
+inaction--for the country's "unpreparedness," we should say today
+--and as to whether Cameron was honest.  Eventually the House in
+a vote of censure condemned the Secretary of War.
+
+Long before this happened, however, Lincoln had interfered and
+very characteristically removed the cause of trouble, while
+taking upon himself the responsibility for the situation, by
+nominating Cameron minister to Russia, and by praising him for
+his "ability, patriotism, and fidelity to the public trust." 
+Though the President had not sufficient hold upon the House to
+prevent the vote of censure, his influence was strong in the
+Senate, and the new appointment of Cameron was promptly
+confirmed.
+
+There was in Washington at this time that grim man who had served
+briefly as Attorney-General in the Cabinet of Buchanan--Edwin M.
+Stanton.  He despised the President and expressed his opinion in
+such words as "the painful imbecility of Lincoln."  The two had
+one personal recollection in common: long before, in a single
+case, at Cincinnati, the awkward Lincoln had been called in as
+associate counsel to serve the convenience of Stanton, who was
+already a lawyer of national repute.  To his less-known associate
+Stanton showed a brutal rudeness that was characteristic.  It
+would have been hard in 1861 to find another man more difficult
+to get on with.  Headstrong, irascible, rude, he had a sharp
+tongue which he delighted in using; but he was known to be
+inflexibly honest, and was supposed to have great executive
+ability.  He was also a friend of McClellan, and if anybody could
+rouse that tortoise-like general, Stanton might be supposed to be
+the man.  He had been a valiant Democrat, and Democratic support
+was needed by the government.  Lincoln astonished him with his
+appointment as Secretary of War in January, 1862.  Stanton
+justified the President's choice, and under his strong if
+ruthless hand the War Department became sternly efficient.  The
+whole story of Stanton's relations to his chief is packed, like
+the Arabian genius in the fisherman's vase, into one remark of
+Lincoln's. "Did Stanton tell you I was a fool?" said Lincoln on
+one occasion, in the odd, smiling way he had.  "Then I expect I
+must be one, for he is almost always right, and generally says
+what he means."
+
+In spite of his efficiency and personal force, Stanton was unable
+to move his friend McClellan, with whom he soon quarreled.  Each
+now sought in his own way to control the President, though
+neither understood Lincoln's character.  From McClellan, Lincoln
+endured much condescension of a kind perilously near
+impertinence.  To Stanton, Lincoln's patience seemed a mystery;
+to McClellan--a vain man, full of himself--the President who
+would merely smile at this bullyragging on the part of one of his
+subordinates seemed indeed a spiritless creature.  Meanwhile
+Lincoln, apparently devoid of sensibility, was seeking during the
+anxious months of 1862, in one case, merely how to keep his
+petulant Secretary in harness; in the other, how to quicken his
+tortoise of a general.
+
+Stanton made at least one great blunder.  Though he had been
+three months in office, and McClellan was still inactive, there
+were already several successes to the credit of the Union arms. 
+The Monitor and Virginia (Merrimac) had fought their famous duel,
+and Grant had taken Fort Donelson.  The latter success broke
+through the long gloom of the North and caused, as Holmes wrote,
+"a delirium of excitement."  Stanton rashly concluded that he now
+had the game in his hands, and that a sufficient number of men
+had volunteered.  This civilian Secretary of War, who had still
+much to learn of military matters, issued an order putting a stop
+to recruiting.  Shortly afterwards great disaster befell the
+Union arms.  McClellan, before Richmond, was checked in May. 
+Early in July, his peninsula campaign ended disastrously in the
+terrible "Seven Days' Battle."
+
+Anticipating McClellan's failure, Lincoln had already determined
+to call for more troops.  On July 1st, he called upon the
+Governors of the States to provide him with 300,000 men to serve
+three years.  But the volunteering enthusiasm--explain it as you
+will--had suffered a check.  The psychological moment had passed.
+So slow was the response to the call of July 1st, that another
+appeal was made early in August, this time for 300,000 men to
+serve only nine months.  But this also failed to rouse the
+country. A reinforcement of only 87,000 men was raised in
+response to this emergency call.  The able lawyer in the War
+Department had still much to learn about men and nations.
+
+After this check, terrible incidents of war came thick and fast
+--the defeat at Second Manassas, in late August; the horrible
+drawn battle of Antietam-Sharpsburg, in September;
+Fredericksburg, that carnival of slaughter, in December; the
+dearly bought victory of Murfreesboro, which opened 1863.  There
+were other disastrous events at least as serious.  Foreign
+affairs* were at their darkest.  Within the political coalition
+supporting Lincoln, contention was the order of the day.  There
+was general distrust of the President.  Most alarming of all,
+that ebb of the wave of enthusiasm which began in midsummer,
+1861, reached in the autumn of 1862 perhaps its lowest point. 
+The measure of the reaction against Lincoln was given in the
+Congressional election, in which, though the Government still
+retained a working majority, the Democrats gained thirty-three
+seats.
+
+* See Chapter IX.
+
+
+If there could be such a thing as a true psychological history of
+the war, one of its most interesting pages would determine just
+how far Stanton was responsible, through his strange blunder over
+recruiting, for the check to enthusiasm among the Northern
+people. With this speculation there is connected a still unsolved
+problem in statistics.  To what extent did the anti-Lincoln vote,
+in 1862, stand for sympathy with the South, and how far was it
+the hopeless surrender of Unionists who felt that their cause was
+lost?  Though certainty on this point is apparently impossible,
+there can be no doubt that at the opening of 1863, the Government
+felt it must apply pressure to the flagging spirits of its
+supporters.  In order to reenforce the armies and to push the war
+through, there was plainly but one course to be
+followed--conscription.
+
+The government leaders in Congress brought in a Conscription Act
+early in the year.  The hot debates upon this issue dragged
+through a month's time, and now make instructive reading for the
+present generation that has watched the Great War*.  The Act of
+1863 was not the work of soldiers, but was literally "made in
+Congress."  Stanton grimly made the best of it, though he
+unwaveringly condemned some of its most conspicuous provisions.
+His business was to retrieve his blunder of the previous year,
+and he was successful.  Imperfect as it was, the Conscription
+Act, with later supplementary legislation, enabled him to replace
+the wastage of the Union armies and steadily to augment them.  At
+the close of the war, the Union had on foot a million men with an
+enrolled reserve of two millions and a half, subject to call.
+
+* The battle over conscription in England was anticipated in
+America sixty-four years ago.  Bagot says that the average
+British point of view may be expressed thus: "What I am sayin' is
+this here as I was a sayin' yesterday."  The Anglo-Saxon mind is
+much the same the world over.  In America, today, the enemies of
+effective military organization would do well to search the
+arguments of their skillful predecessors in 1888, who fought to
+the last ditch for a military system that would make inescapable
+"peace at any price."  For the modern believers in conscription,
+one of their best bits of political thunder is still the defense
+of it by Lincoln.
+
+
+The Act provided for a complete military census, for which
+purpose the country was divided into enrollment districts.  Every
+able-bodied male citizen, or intending citizen, between the ages
+of twenty and forty-five, unless exempted for certain specified
+reasons, was to be enrolled as a member of the national forces;
+these forces were to be called to the colors--"drafted," the term
+was--as the Government found need of them; each successive draft
+was to be apportioned among the districts in the ratio of the
+military population, and the number required was to be drawn by
+lot; if the district raised its quota voluntarily, no draft would
+be made; any drafted man could offer a substitute or could
+purchase his discharge for three hundred dollars.  The latter
+provision especially was condemned by Stanton.  It was seized
+upon by demagogues as a device for giving rich men an advantage
+over poor men.
+
+American politics during the war form a wildly confused story, so
+intricate that it cannot be made clear in a brief statement.  But
+this central fact may be insisted upon: in the North, there were
+two political groups that were the poles around which various
+other groups revolved and combined, only to fly asunder and
+recombine, with all the maddening inconstancy of a kaleidoscope.
+The two irreconcilable elements were the "war party" made up of
+determined men resolved to see things through, and the
+"copperheads"* who for one reason or another united in a faithful
+struggle for peace at any price.  Around the copperheads gathered
+the various and singular groups who helped to make up the ever
+fluctuating "peace party."  It is an error to assume that this
+peace party was animated throughout by fondness for the
+Confederacy.  Though many of its members were so actuated, the
+core of the party seems to have been that strange type of man who
+sustained political evasion in the old days, who thought that
+sweet words can stop bullets, whose programme in 1863 called for
+a cessation of hostilities and a general convention of all the
+States, and who promised as the speedy result of a debauch of
+talk a carnival of bright eyes glistening with the tears of
+revived affection.  With these strange people in 1863 there
+combined a number of different types: the still stranger, still
+less creditable visionary, of whom much hereafter; the avowed
+friends of the principle of state rights; all those who
+distrusted the Government because of its anti-slavery sympathies;
+Quakers and others with moral scruples against war; and finally,
+sincere legalists to whom the Conscription Act appeared
+unconstitutional. In the spring of 1863 the issue of conscription
+drew the line fairly sharply between the two political
+coalitions, though each continued to fluctuate, more or less, to
+the end of the war.
+
+* The term arose, it has been said, from the use of the copper
+cent with its head of Liberty as a peace button.  But a more
+plausible explanation associates the peace advocates with the
+deadly copperhead snake.
+
+
+The peace party of 1863 has been denounced hastily rather than
+carefully studied.  Its precise machinations are not fully known,
+but the ugly fact stands forth that a portion of the foreign
+population of the North was roused in 1863 to rebellion.  The
+occasion was the beginning of the first draft under the new law,
+in July, 1863, and the scene of the rebellion was the City of New
+York.  The opponents of conscription had already made
+inflammatory attacks on the Government.  Conspicuous among them
+was Horatio Seymour, who had been elected Governor of New York in
+that wave of reaction in the autumn of 1862.  Several New York
+papers joined the crusade.  In Congress, the Government had
+already been threatened with civil war if the act was enforced. 
+Nevertheless, the public drawing by lot began on the days
+announced.  In New York the first drawing took place on Saturday,
+July 12th, and the lists were published in the Sunday papers.  As
+might be expected, many of the men drawn were of foreign birth,
+and all day Sunday, the foreign quarter of New York was a
+cauldron boiling.
+
+On Monday, the resumption of the drawing was the signal for
+revolt. A mob invaded one of the conscription offices, drove off
+the men in charge, and set fire to the building.  In a short
+while, the streets were filled with dense crowds of foreignborn
+workmen shouting, "Down with the rich men," and singing, "We'll
+hang Horace Greeley on a sour apple tree."  Houses of prominent
+citizens were attacked and set on fire, and several drafting
+offices were burned.  Many negroes who were seized were either
+clubbed to death or hanged to lamp posts.  Even an orphan asylum
+for colored children was burned.  The office of the "Tribune" was
+raided, gutted, and set on fire.  Finally a dispatch to Stanton,
+early in the night, reported that the mob had taken possession of
+the city.
+
+The events of the next day were no less shocking.  The city was
+almost stripped of soldiers, as all available reserves had
+already been hurried south when Lee was advancing toward
+Gettysburg.  But such militia as could be mustered, with a small
+force of federal troops, fought the mob in the streets. 
+Barricades were carried by storm; blood was freely shed.  It was
+not, however, until the fourth day that the rebellion was finally
+quelled, chiefly by New York regiments, hurried north by
+Stanton--among them the famous Seventh--which swept the streets
+with cannon.
+
+The aftermath of the New York riots was a correspondence between
+Lincoln and Seymour.  The latter had demanded a suspension of the
+draft until the courts could decide on the constitutionality of
+the Conscription Act.  Lincoln refused.  With ten thousand troops
+now assembled in New York, the draft was resumed, and there was
+no further trouble.
+
+The resistance to the Government in New York was but the most
+terrible episode in a protracted contention which involves, as
+Americans are beginning to see, one of the most fundamental and
+permanent questions of Lincoln's rule: how can the exercise of
+necessary war powers by the President be reconciled with the
+guarantees of liberty in the Constitution?  It is unfortunate
+that Lincoln did not draw up a fully rounded statement of his own
+theory regarding this problem, instead of leaving it to be
+inferred from detached observations and from his actions.
+Apparently, he felt there was nothing to do but to follow the
+Roman precedent and, in a case of emergency, frankly permit the
+use of extraordinary power.  We may attribute to him that point
+of view expressed by a distinguished Democrat of our own day:
+"Democracy has to learn how to use the dictator as a necessary
+war tool."* Whether Lincoln set a good model for democracy in
+this perilous business is still to be determined.  His actions
+have been freely labeled usurpation.  The first notorious
+instance occurred in 1861, during the troubles in Maryland, when
+he authorized military arrests of suspected persons.  For the
+release of one of these, a certain Merryman, Chief Justice Taney
+issued a writ of habeas corpus**.  Lincoln authorized his
+military representatives to disregard the writ.  In 1862 he
+issued a proclamation suspending the privileges of the writ of
+habeas corpus in cases of persons charged with "discouraging
+volunteer enlistments, resisting military drafts, or guilty of
+any disloyal practice...."  Such persons were to be tried by
+military commissions.
+
+*President Edwin A. Alderman, of the University of Virginia.
+
+** The Constitution permits the suspension of the privileges of
+the writ of habeas corpus "when in cases of rebellion or invasion
+the public safety may require it," but fails to provide a method
+of suspension.  Taney held that the power to suspend lay with
+Congress.  Five years afterward, when Chase was Chief Justice,
+the Supreme Court, in ex parte Milligan, took the same view and
+further declared that even Congress could not deprive a citizen
+of his right to trial by jury so long as the local civil courts
+are in operation.  The Confederate experience differed from the
+Federal inasmuch as Congress kept control of the power to suspend
+the writ.  But both governments made use of such suspension to
+set up martial law in districts where the local courts were open
+but where, from one cause or another, the Administration had not
+confidence in their effectiveness.   Under ex parte Milligan,
+both Presidents and both Congresses were guilty of usurpation. 
+The mere layman waits for the next great hour of trial to learn
+whether this interpretation will stand.  In the Milligan case the
+Chief Justice and three others dissented.
+
+
+There can be little doubt that this proclamation caused something
+like a panic in many minds, filled them with the dread of
+military despotism, and contributed to the reaction against
+Lincoln in the autumn of 1862.  Under this proclamation many
+arrests were made and many victims were sent to prison.  So
+violent was the opposition that on March 3, 1863, Congress passed
+an act which attempted to bring the military and civil courts
+into cooperation, though it did not take away from the President
+all the dictatorial power which he had assumed.  The act seems;
+however, to have had little general effect, and it was
+disregarded in the most celebrated of the cases of military
+arrest, that of Clement L. Vallandigham.
+
+A representative from Ohio and one of the most vituperative
+anti-Lincoln men in Congress, Vallandigham in a sensational
+speech applied to the existing situation Chatham's words, "My
+lords, you cannot conquer America."  He professed to see before
+him in the future nothing "but universal political and social
+revolution, anarchy, and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign
+of Terror in France was a merciful visitation."  To escape such a
+future, he demanded an armistice, to be followed by a friendly
+peace established through foreign mediation.
+
+Returning to Ohio after the adjournment of Congress, Vallandigham
+spoke to a mass-meeting in a way that was construed as rank
+treason by General Burnside who was in command at Cincinnati.
+Vallandigham was arrested, tried by court martial, and condemned
+to imprisonment.  There was an immediate hue and cry, in
+consequence of which Burnside, who reported the affair, felt
+called upon also to offer to resign.  Lincoln's reply was
+characteristic: "When I shall wish to supersede you I shall let
+you know.  All the Cabinet regretted the necessity for arresting,
+for instance, Vallandigham, some perhaps doubting there was a
+real necessity for it; but being done, all were for seeing you
+through with it."  Lincoln, however, commuted the sentence to
+banishment and had Vallandigham sent through the lines into the
+Confederacy.
+
+It seems quite plain that the condemnation of Lincoln on this
+issue of usurpation was not confined to the friends of the
+Confederacy, nor has it been confined to his enemies in later
+days. One of Lincoln's most ardent admirers, the historian
+Rhodes, condemns his course unqualifiedly.  "There can be no
+question," he writes, "that from the legal point of view the
+President should have rescinded the sentence and released
+Vallandigham."  Lincoln, he adds, "stands responsible for the
+casting into prison of citizens of the United States on orders as
+arbitrary as the lettres-de-cachet of Louis XIV."  Since Mr.
+Rhodes, uncompromising Unionist, can write as he does upon this
+issue, it is plain that the opposition party cannot be dismissed
+as through and through disunionist.
+
+The trial of Vallandigham made him a martyr and brought him the
+Democratic nomination for Governor of Ohio*.  His followers
+sought to make the issue of the campaign the acceptance or
+rejection of military despotism.  In defense of his course
+Lincoln wrote two public letters in which he gave evidence of the
+skill which he had acquired as a lawyer before a jury by the way
+in which he played upon the emotions of his readers.
+
+* Edward Everett Hale's famous story "The Man Without a Country",
+though it got into print too late to affect the election, was
+aimed at Vallandigham.  That quaint allegory on the lack of
+patriotism became a temporary classic.
+
+
+"Long experience [he wrote] has shown that armies cannot be
+maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe
+penalty of death.  The case requires, and the law and the
+Constitution sanction, this punishment.  Must I shoot a
+simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a
+hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?  This is none
+the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother,
+or friend into a public meeting, and there working upon his
+feelings till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy that he is
+fighting in a bad cause for a wicked administration and a
+contemptible government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he
+shall desert.  I think that in such a case to silence the
+agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but,
+withal, a great mercy."
+
+His real argument may be summed up in these words of his:
+
+"You ask, in substance, whether I really claim that I may
+override all the guaranteed rights of individuals, on the plea of
+conserving the public safety--when I may choose to say the public
+safety requires it.  This question, divested of the phraseology
+calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary
+prerogative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an
+affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the public safety does
+require in cases of rebellion or invasion.
+
+"The Constitution contemplates the question as likely to occur
+for decision, but it does not expressly declare who is to decide
+it. By necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes,
+the decision is to be made, from time to time; and I think the
+man, whom for the time, the people have under the Constitution,
+made the commander-in-chief of their army and navy, is the man
+who holds the power and bears the responsibility of making it. 
+If he uses the power justly, the same people will probably
+justify him; if he abuses it, he is in their hands to be dealt
+with by all the modes they have reserved to themselves in the
+Constitution."
+
+Lincoln virtually appealed to the Northern people to secure
+efficiency by setting him momentarily above all civil authority.
+He asked them in substance, to interpret their Constitution by a
+show of hands.  No thoughtful person can doubt the risks of such
+a method; yet in Ohio, in 1863, the great majority--perhaps
+everyone who believed in the war--accepted Lincoln's position. 
+Between their traditional system of legal juries and the new
+system of military tribunals the Ohio voters made their choice
+without hesitation.  They rejected Vallandigham and sustained the
+Lincoln candidate by a majority of over a hundred thousand.  That
+same year in New York the anti-Lincoln candidate for Secretary of
+State was defeated by twenty-nine thousand votes.
+
+Though these elections in 1863 can hardly be called the
+turning-point in the history of the Lincoln Government, yet it
+was clear that the tide of popularity which had ebbed so far away
+from Lincoln in the autumn of 1862 was again in the flood. 
+Another phase of his stormy course may be thought of as having
+ended.  And in accounting for this turn of the tide it must not
+be forgotten that between the nomination and the defeat of a
+Vallandigham the bloody rebellion in New York had taken place,
+Gettysburg had been fought, and Grant had captured Vicksburg. 
+The autumn of 1863 formed a breathing space for the war party of
+the North.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE CRUCIAL MATTER
+
+It is the custom of historians to measure the relative strength
+of North and South chiefly in terms of population.  The North
+numbered 23,000,000 inhabitants; the South, about 9,000,000, of
+which the slave population amounted to 3,500,000.  But these
+obvious statistics only partially indicate the real situation.
+Not what one has, but what one is capable of using is, of course,
+the true measure of strength.  If, in 1861, either side could
+have struck swiftly and with all its force, the story of the war
+would have been different.  The question of relative strength was
+in reality a question of munitions.  Both powers were glaringly
+unprepared.  Both had instant need of great supplies of arms and
+ammunition, and both turned to European manufacturers for aid.
+Those Americans who, in a later war, wished to make illegal the
+neutral trade in munitions forgot that the international right of
+a belligerent to buy arms from a neutral had prevented their own
+destruction in 1861.  In the supreme American crisis, agents of
+both North and South hurried to Europe in quest of munitions. On
+the Northern side the work was done chiefly by the three
+ministers, Charles Francis Adams, at London; William L. Dayton,
+at Paris; and Henry S. Sanford, at Brussels; by an able special
+agent, Colonel George L. Schuyler; and by the famous
+banking-house of Baring Brothers, which one might almost have
+called the European department of the United States Treasury.
+
+The eager solicitude of the War Department over the competition
+of the two groups of agents in Europe informs a number of
+dispatches that are, today, precious admonitions to the heedless
+descendants of that dreadful time.  As late as October, 1861, the
+Acting Secretary of War wrote to Schuyler, one of whose shipments
+had been delayed: "The Department earnestly hopes to
+receive...the 12,000 Enfield rifles and the remainder of the
+27,000, which you state you have purchased, by the earliest
+steamer following. Could you appreciate the circumstances by
+which we are surrounded, you would readily understand the urgent
+necessity there is for the immediate delivery of all the arms you
+are authorized to purchase. The Department expects to hear that
+you have been able to conclude the negotiations for the 48,000
+rifles from the French government arsenals."  That the
+Confederate Government acted even more promptly than the Union
+Government appears from a letter of Sanford to Seward in May: "I
+have vainly expected orders," he complains, "for the purchase of
+arms for the Government, and am tempted to order from Belgium all
+they can send over immediately.... Meanwhile the workshops are
+filling with orders from the South.... It distresses me to think
+that while we are in want of them, Southern money is taking them
+away to be used against us."
+
+At London, Adams took it upon himself to contract for arms in
+advance of instructions.  He wrote to Seward: "Aware of the
+degree to which I exceed my authority in taking such a step,
+nothing but a conviction of the need in which the country stands
+of such assistance and the joint opinion of all the diplomatic
+agents of the United States...in Paris, has induced me to
+overcome my scruples."  How real was the necessity of which this
+able diplomat was so early conscious, is demonstrated at every
+turn in the papers of the War Department.  Witness this brief
+dispatch from Harrisburg: "All ready to leave but no arms. 
+Governor not willing to let us leave State without them, as act
+of Assembly forbids. Can arms be sent here?"  When this appeal
+was made, in December, 1861, arms were pouring into the country
+from Europe, and the crisis had passed.  But if this appeal had
+been made earlier in the year, the inevitable answer may be
+guessed from a dispatch which the Ordnance Office sent, as late
+as September, to the authorities of West Virginia, refusing to
+supply them with arms because the supplies were exhausted, and
+adding, "Every possible exertion is being made to obtain
+additional supplies by contract, by manufacture, and by purchase,
+and as soon as they can be procured by any means, in any way,
+they will be supplied."
+
+Curiously enough, not only the Confederacy but various States of
+the North were more expeditious in this all-important matter than
+Cameron and the War Department.  Schuyler's first dispatch from
+London gives this singular information: "All private
+establishments in Birmingham and London are now working for the
+States of Ohio, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, except the London
+Armory, whose manufacture is supposed to go to the Rebels, but of
+this last fact I am not positively informed.  I am making
+arrangements to secure these establishments for our Government,
+if desirable after the present State contracts expire.  On the
+Continent, Messrs, Dayton and Sanford...have been making
+contracts and agreements of various kinds, of which you are by
+this time informed."  Soon afterward, from Paris, he made a long
+report detailing the difficulties of his task, the limitations of
+the existing munitions plants in Europe, and promising among
+other things those "48,000 rifles from the French government
+arsenals" for which, in the letter already quoted, the War
+Department yearned.  It was an enormous labor; and, strive as he
+would, Schuyler found American mail continuing to bring him such
+letters as this from the Assistant Secretary of War in October:
+"I notice with much regret that [in the latest consignment] there
+were no guns sent, as it was confidently expected that 20,000
+would arrive by the [steamship] Fulton, and accordingly
+arrangements had been made to distribute them through the
+different States.  Prompt and early shipments of guns are
+desirable.  We hope to hear by next steamer that you have shipped
+from 80,000 to 100,000 stand."
+
+The last word on the problem of munitions, which was so
+significant a factor in the larger problem, is the report of the
+United States Ordnance Office for the first year of the war.  It
+shows that between April, 1861, and June, 1862, the Government
+purchased from American manufacturers somewhat over 30,000
+rifles, and that from European makers it purchased 726,000.
+
+From these illustrations it is therefore obvious that the true
+measure of the immediate strength of the American contestants in
+1861 was the extent of their ability to supply themselves from
+Europe; and this, stated more concretely, became the question as
+to which was the better able to keep its ports open and receive
+the absolutely essential European aid.  Lincoln showed his clear
+realization of the situation when he issued, immediately after
+the first call for volunteers, a proclamation blockading the
+Southern coasts.  Whether the Northern people at the time
+appreciated the significance of this order is a question.  Amid
+the wild and vain clamor of the multitude in 1861, with its
+conventional and old-fashioned notion of war as a thing of
+trumpets and glittering armies, the North seems wholly to have
+ignored its fleet; and yet in the beginning this resource was its
+only strength.
+
+The fleet was small, to be sure, but its task was at first also
+small.  There were few Southern ports which were doing a regular
+business with Europe, and to close these was not difficult.  As
+other ports opened and the task of blockade grew, the Northern
+navy also increased.  Within a few months, to the few observers
+who did not lose their heads, it was plain that the North had won
+the first great contest of the war.  It had so hampered Southern
+trade that Lincoln's advantage in arming the North from Europe
+was ten to one.  At the very time when detractors of Lincoln were
+hysterical over the removal of Fremont, when Grimes wrote to
+Fessenden that the country was going to the dogs as fast as
+imbecility could carry it, this great achievement had quietly
+taken place.  An expedition sailing in August from Fortress
+Monroe seized the forts which commanded Hatteras Inlet off the
+coast of North Carolina.  In November, Commander Dupont, U. S.
+N., seized Port Royal, one of the best harbors on the coast of
+South Carolina, and established there a naval base.  Thenceforth,
+while the open Northern ports received European munitions without
+hindrance, it was a risky business getting munitions into the
+ports of the South. Only the boldest traders would attempt to
+"run the blockade," to evade the Federal patrol ships by night
+and run into a Southern port.
+
+However, for one moment in the autumn of 1861, it seemed as if
+all the masterful work of the Northern navy would be undone by
+the Northern people themselves in backing up the rashness of
+Captain Charles Wilkes, of the war-ship San Jacinto.  On the high
+seas he overhauled the British mail steamer, Trent.  Aboard her
+were two Confederate diplomatic agents, James M. Mason and John
+Slidell, who had run the blockade from Charleston to Havana and
+were now on their way to England.  Wilkes took off the two
+Confederates as prisoners of war.  The crowd in the North went
+wild. "We do not believe," said the New York Times, "that the
+American heart ever thrilled with more sincere delight."
+
+The intemperate joy of the crowd over the rashness of Wilkes was
+due in part to a feeling of bitterness against the British
+Government.  In May, 1861, the Queen had issued a proclamation of
+neutrality, whose justification in international law was hotly
+debated at the time and was generally denied by Northerners.
+England was the great cotton market of the world.  To the excited
+Northern mind, in 1861, there could be but one explanation of
+England's action: a partisan desire to serve the South, to break
+up the blockade, and to secure cotton.  Whether such was the real
+purpose of the ministry then in power is now doubted; but at that
+time it was the beginning of a sharp contention between the two
+Governments.  The Trent affair naturally increased the tension.
+So keen was the indignation of all classes of Englishmen that it
+seemed, for a moment, as if the next step would be war.
+
+In America, the prompt demand for the release of Mason and
+Slidell was met, at first, in a spirit equally bellicose. 
+Fortunately there were cool and clear heads that at once
+condemned Wilkes's action as a gross breach of international law. 
+Prominent among these was Sumner.  The American Government,
+however, admitted the justice of the British demand and the
+envoys were released.
+
+Relations with the United States now became a burning issue in
+English politics.  There were three distinct groups in
+Parliament. The representatives of the aristocracy, whether
+Liberals or Conservatives, in the main sympathized with the
+South.  So did most of the large manufacturers whose business
+interests were affected by cotton.  Great bitterness grew up
+among the Northerners against both these groups, partly because
+in the past many of their members had condemned slavery and had
+said scornful things about America for tolerating it.  To these
+Northerners the Englishmen replied that Lincoln himself had
+declared the war was not over slavery; that it was an ordinary
+civil war not involving moral issues.  Nevertheless, the third
+Parliamentary group insisted that the American war, no matter
+what the motives of the participants, would, in the event of a
+Northern victory, bring about the abolition of slavery, whereas,
+if the South won, the result would be the perpetuation of
+slavery.  This third group, therefore, threw all its weight on
+the side of the North.  In this group Lincoln recognized his
+allies, and their cause he identified with his own in his letter
+to English workmen which was quoted in the previous chapter. 
+Their leaders in Parliament were Richard Cobden, W. E. Forster,
+and John Bright.  All these groups were represented in the
+Liberal party, which, for the moment, was in power.
+
+In the Cabinet itself there was a "Northern" and a "Southern"
+faction.  Then, too, there were some who sympathized with the
+North but who felt that its cause was hopeless--so little did
+they understand the relative strength of the two sections--and
+who felt that the war was a terrible proof of the uselessness of
+mere suffering.  Gladstone, in later days, wished to be thought
+of as having been one of these, though at the time, a famous
+utterance of his was construed in the North as a declaration of
+hostility. To a great audience at Newcastle he said in October,
+1862: "We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for
+or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis
+and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are
+making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than
+either--they have made a nation."
+
+The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, wished to intervene in the
+American war and bring about an amicable separation into two
+countries, and so, apparently, did the Foreign Secretary, Lord
+John Russell.  Recently, the American minister had vainly
+protested against the sailing of a ship known as 290 which was
+being equipped at Liverpool presumably for the service of the
+Confederacy, and which became the famous Alabama.  For two years
+it roved the ocean destroying Northern commerce, and not until it
+was sunk at last in a battle with the U. S. S. Kearsarge did all
+the maritime interests of the North breathe again freely.  In
+time and as a result of arbitration, England paid for the ships
+sunk by the Alabama.  But in 1862, the protests of the American
+minister fell on deaf ears.
+
+It must be added that the sailing of the Alabama from Liverpool
+was due probably to the carelessness of British officials rather
+than to deliberate purpose.  And yet the fact is clear that about
+the first of October, 1862, the British ministry was on the verge
+of intervening to secure recognition of the independence of the
+Southern confederacy.  The chief motive pressing them forward was
+the distress in England caused by the lack of cotton which
+resulted from the American blockade.  In 1860, the South had
+exported 615,000 bales; in 1861, only 10,127 bales.  In 1862 half
+the spindles of Manchester were idle; the workmen were out of
+employment; the owners were without dividends.  It was chiefly by
+these manufacturing capitalists that pressure was put upon the
+ministry, and it was in the manufacturing district that
+Gladstone, thinking the Government was likely to intervene, made
+his allusion to the South as a nation.
+
+Meanwhile the Emperor of the French was considering a proposal to
+England and Russia to join with him in mediation between the
+American belligerents.  On October 28, 1862, Napoleon III gave
+audience to the Confederate envoy at Paris, discussed the
+Southern cause in the most friendly manner, questioned him upon
+the Maryland campaign, plainly indicated his purpose to attempt
+intervention, and at parting cordially shook hands with him.
+Within a few days the Emperor made good his implied promise.
+
+The month of November, 1862, is one of the turningpoints in
+American foreign relations.  Both Russia and England rejected
+France's proposal.  The motive usually assigned to the Emperor
+Alexander is his hatred of everything associated with slavery.
+His own most famous action was the liberation of the Russian
+serfs. The motives of the British ministry, however, appear more
+problematical.
+
+Mr. Rhodes thinks he can discern evidence that Adams communicated
+indirectly to Palmerston the contents of a dispatch from Seward
+which indicated that the United States would accept war rather
+than mediation.  Palmerston had kept his eyes upon the Maryland
+campaign, and Lee's withdrawal did not increase his confidence in
+the strength of the South.  Lord Russell, two months previous,
+had flatly told the Confederate envoy at London that the South
+need not hope for recognition unless it could establish itself
+without aid, and that "the fluctuating events of the war, the
+alternation of defeat and victory," composed such a contradictory
+situation that "Her Majesty's Government are still determined to
+wait."
+
+Perhaps the veiled American warning--assuming it was conveyed to
+Palmerston, which seems highly probable--was not the only
+diplomatic innuendo of the autumn of 1862 that has escaped the
+pages of history.  Slidell at Paris, putting together the
+statements of the British Ambassador and those of the French
+Minister of Foreign Affairs, found in them contradictions as to
+what was going on between the two governments in relation to
+America.  He took a hand by attempting to inspire M. Drouyn de
+L'huys with distrust of England, telling him he "HAD SEEN...a
+letter from a leading member of the British Cabinet...in which he
+very plainly insinuated that France was playing an unfair game,"
+trying to use England as Napoleon's catspaw.  Among the many
+motives that may well have animated the Palmerston Government in
+its waiting policy, a distrust of Napoleon deserves to be
+considered.
+
+It is scarcely rash, however, to find the chief motive in home
+politics.  The impetuous Gladstone at Newcastle lost his head and
+spoke too soon.  The most serious effect of his premature
+utterance was the prompt reaction of the "Northern party" in the
+Cabinet and in the country.  Whatever Palmerston's secret desires
+were, he was not prepared to take the high hand, and he therefore
+permitted other members of the Cabinet to state in public that
+Gladstone had been misunderstood.  In an interview with Adams,
+Lord Russell, "whilst endeavoring to excuse Mr. Gladstone,"
+assured him that "the policy of the Government was to adhere to a
+strict neutrality and leave the struggle to settle itself."  In
+the last analysis, the Northern party in England was gaining
+ground.  The news from America, possibly, and Gladstone's
+rashness, certainly, roused it to increased activity. 
+Palmerston, whose tenure of power was none too secure, dared not
+risk a break that might carry the disaffected into the ranks of
+the Opposition.
+
+From this time forward the North rapidly grew in favor in British
+public opinion, and its influence upon the Government speedily
+increased.
+
+Says Lord Charnwood in his recent life of Lincoln: "The battle of
+Antietam was followed within five days by an event which made it
+impossible for any government of this country to take action
+unfriendly to the North."  He refers of course to the
+Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued on September 23,
+1862.  Lord Charnwood's remark may be too dramatic.  But there
+can be no doubt that the Emancipation Proclamation was the
+turning-point in Lincoln's foreign policy; and because of it, his
+friends in England eventually forced the Government to play into
+his hands, and so frustrated Napoleon's scheme for intervention.
+Consequently Lincoln was able to maintain the blockade by means
+of which the South was strangled.  Thus, at bottom, the crucial
+matter was Emancipation.
+
+Lincoln's policy with regard to slavery passed through three
+distinct stages.  As we have seen, he proposed, at first, to
+pledge the Government not to interfere with slavery in the States
+where it then existed.  This was his maximum of compromise.  He
+would not agree to permitting its extension into new territory.
+He maintained this position through 1861, when it was made an
+accusation against him by the Abolitionists and contributed to
+the ebb of his popularity.  It also played a great part in the
+episode of Fremont.  At a crucial moment in Fremont's career,
+when his hold upon popularity seemed precarious, he set at naught
+the policy of the President and issued an order (August 30,
+1861), which confiscated all property and slaves of those who
+were in arms against the United States or actively aiding the
+enemy, and which created a "bureau of abolition."  Whether
+Fremont was acting from conviction or "playing politics" may be
+left to his biographers.  In a most tactful letter Lincoln asked
+him to modify the order so as to conform to the Confiscation Act
+of Congress; and when Fremont proved obdurate, Lincoln ordered
+him to do so. In the outcry against Lincoln when Fremont was at
+last removed, the Abolitionists rang the changes on this reversal
+of his policy of military abolition.
+
+Another Federal General, Benjamin F. Butler, in the course of
+1861, also raised the issue, though not in the bold fashion of
+Fremont. Runaway slaves came to his camp on the Virginia coast,
+and he refused to surrender them to the owners.  He took the
+ground that, as they had probably been used in building
+Confederate fortifications, they might be considered contraband
+of war. He was sustained by Congress, which passed what is
+commonly called the First Confiscation Act providing that slaves
+used by Confederate armies in military labor should, if captured,
+be "forfeited"--which of course meant that they should be set
+free.  But this did not settle what should be done with runaways
+whose masters, though residents of seceded States, were loyal to
+the Union.  The War Department decided that they should be held
+until the end of the war, when probably there would be made "just
+compensation to loyal masters."
+
+This first stage of Lincoln's policy rested upon the hope that
+the Union might be restored without prolonged war.  He abandoned
+this hope about the end of the year.  Thereupon, his policy
+entered its second stage.  In the spring of 1862 he formulated a
+plan for gradual emancipation with compensation.  The slaves of
+Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and the District of
+Columbia were to be purchased at the rate of $400 each, thus
+involving a total expenditure of $173,000,000.  Although Congress
+adopted the joint resolution recommended by the President, the
+"border States" would not accept the plan.  But Congress, by
+virtue of its plenary power, freed the slaves by purchase in the
+District of Columbia, and prohibited slavery in all the
+territories of the United States.
+
+During the second stage of his policy Lincoln again had to
+reverse the action of an unruly general.  The Federal forces
+operating from their base at Port Royal had occupied a
+considerable portion of the Carolina coast.  General Hunter
+issued an order freeing all the slaves in South Carolina,
+Georgia, and Florida.  In countermanding the order, Lincoln made
+another futile appeal to the people of the border States to adopt
+some plan of compensated emancipation.
+
+"I do not argue," he said; "I beseech you to make arguments for
+yourselves.  You cannot, if you would be blind to the signs of
+the times.  I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of
+them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan
+politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object,
+casting no reproaches upon any.  It acts not the Pharisee.  The
+change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven,
+not rending or wrecking anything.  Will you not embrace it?  So
+much good has not been done by one effort in all past time, as in
+the providence of God it is now your high privilege to do.  May
+the vast future not have to lament that you neglected it. "
+
+This persuasive attitude and reluctance to force the issue had
+greatly displeased the Abolitionists.  Their most gifted orator,
+Wendell Phillips, reviled Lincoln with all the power of his
+literary genius, and with a fury that might be called malevolent.
+Meanwhile, a Second Confiscation Act proclaimed freedom for the
+slaves of all those who supported the Confederate Government.
+Horace Greeley now published in the "New York Tribune" an
+editorial entitled, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions."  He
+denounced Lincoln's treatment of Fremont and Hunter and demanded
+radical action. Lincoln replied in a letter now famous.  "I would
+save the Union," said he, "I would save it the shortest way under
+the Constitution....  If I could save the Union without freeing
+any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some
+and leaving others alone, I would also do that.  What I do about
+slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to
+save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not
+believe it would help to save the Union."
+
+However, at the very time when he wrote this remarkable letter,
+he had in his own mind entered upon the third stage of his
+policy. He had even then discussed with his Cabinet an
+announcement favoring general emancipation.  The time did not
+seem to them ripe.  It was decided to wait until a Federal
+victory should save the announcement from appearing to be a cry
+of desperation.  Antietam, which the North interpreted as a
+victory, gave Lincoln his opportunity.
+
+The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the States in arms
+against the Federal Government.  Such States were given three
+months in which to return to the Union.  Thereafter, if they did
+not return, their slaves would be regarded by that Government as
+free.  No distinction was made between slaves owned by supporters
+of the Confederacy and those whose owners were in opposition to
+it.  The Proclamation had no bearing on those slave States which
+had not seceded.  Needless to add, no seceded State returned, and
+a second Proclamation making their slaves theoretically free was
+in due time issued on the first of January, 1863.
+
+It must not be forgotten that this radical change of policy was
+made in September, 1862.  We have already heard of the elections
+which took place soon after--those elections which mark perhaps
+the lowest ebb of Lincoln's popularity, when Seymour was elected
+Governor of New York, and the peace party gained over thirty
+seats in Congress.  It is a question whether, as a purely
+domestic measure, the Emancipation Proclamation was not, for the
+time, an injury to the Lincoln Government.  And yet it was the
+real turningpoint in the fortunes of the North.  It was the
+central fact in the maintenance of the blockade.
+
+In England at this time the cotton famine was at its height.
+Nearly a million people in the manufacturing districts were
+wholly dependent upon charity.  This result of the blockade had
+been foreseen by the Confederate Government which was confident
+that the distress of England's working people would compel the
+English ministry to intervene and break the blockade.  The
+employers in England whose loss was wholly financial, did as the
+Confederates hoped they would do.  The workmen, however, took a
+different course.  Schooled by a number of able debaters, they
+fell into line with that third group of political leaders who saw
+in the victory of the North, whatever its motives, the eventual
+extinction of slavery.  To these people, the Emancipation
+Proclamation gave a definite programme.  It was now, the leaders
+argued, no longer a question of eventual effect; the North had
+proclaimed a motive and that motive was the extinction of
+slavery. Great numbers of Englishmen of all classes who had
+hitherto held back from supporting Cobden and Bright now ranged
+themselves on their side.  Addresses of praise and sympathy
+"began to pour into the Legation of the United States in a steady
+and ever swelling stream."  An immense popular demonstration took
+place at Exeter Hall.  Cobden, writing to Sumner, described the
+new situation in British politics, in a letter amounting to an
+assurance that the Government never again would attempt to resist
+the popular pressure in favor of the North.
+
+On the last day of 1862 a meeting of workingmen at Manchester,
+where the cotton famine was causing untold misery, adopted one of
+those New Year greetings to Lincoln.  Lincoln's reply expressed
+with his usual directness his own view of the sympathetic
+relation that had been established between the democratic classes
+of the two countries:
+
+"I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the workingmen at
+Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this
+crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the
+attempt to overthrow this Government, which was built upon the
+foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which
+should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely
+to obtain the favor of Europe.  Through the action of our
+disloyal citizens, the workingmen of Europe have been subjected
+to severe trials, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to
+that attempt.  Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your
+decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime
+Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in
+any country.  It is indeed an energetic and reinspiring assurance
+of the inherent power of truth, and of the ultimate triumph of
+justice, humanity, and freedom.  I do not doubt that the
+sentiments you have expressed will be sustained by your great
+nation; and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in assuring
+you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most
+reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people.  I
+hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that
+whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your
+country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exists
+between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make
+them, perpetual."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY
+
+Though the defeat of the Democrats at the polls in 1863 and the
+now definitely friendly attitude of England had done much to
+secure the stability of the Lincoln Government, this success was
+due in part to a figure which now comes to the front and deserves
+attentive consideration.  Indeed the work of Salmon Portland
+Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, forms a bridge, as one might
+say, between the first and second phases of Lincoln's
+administration.
+
+The interesting Englishman who is the latest biographer of
+Lincoln says of Chase: "Unfortunately, this imposing person was a
+sneak." But is Lord Charnwood justified in that surprising
+characterization?  He finds support in the testimony of Secretary
+Welles, who calls Chase, "artful dodger, unstable, and
+unreliable." And yet there is another side, for it is the
+conventional thing in America to call him our greatest finance
+minister since Hamilton, and even a conspicuous enemy said of
+him, at a crucial moment, that his course established his
+character "as an honest and frank man."
+
+Taking these contradictory estimates as hints of a contradiction
+in the man, we are forced to the conclusion that Chase was a
+professional in politics and an amateur in finance.  Perhaps
+herein is the whole explanation of the two characteristics of his
+financial policy--his reluctance to lay taxes, and his faith in
+loans.  His two eyes did not see things alike.  One was really
+trying to make out the orthodox path of finance; the other was
+peering along the more devious road of popular caprice.
+
+The opening of the war caught the Treasury, as it caught all
+branches of the Government, utterly unprepared.  Between April
+and July, 1861, Chase had to borrow what he could.  When Congress
+met in July, his real career as director of financial policy
+began--or, as his enemies think, failed to begin.  At least, he
+failed to urge upon Congress the need of new taxes and appeared
+satisfied with himself asking for an issue of $240,000,000 in
+bonds bearing not less than seven per cent interest.  Congress
+voted to give him $250,000,000 of which $50,000,000 might be
+interest-bearing treasury notes; made slight increases in duties;
+and Prepared for excise and direct taxation the following year. 
+Later in the year Congress laid a three per cent tax on all
+incomes in excess of $800.
+
+When Congress reassembled in December, 1861, expenditures were
+racing ahead of receipts, and there was a deficit of
+$143,000,000. It must not be forgotten that this month was a time
+of intense excitability and of nervous reaction.  Fremont had
+lately been removed, and the attack on Cameron had begun.  At
+this crucial moment the situation was made still more alarming by
+the action of the New York banks, followed by all other banks, in
+suspending specie payments.  They laid the responsibility upon
+Chase.  A syndicate of banks in New York, Boston, and
+Philadelphia had come to the aid of the Government, but when they
+took up government bonds, Chase had required them to pay the full
+value cash down, though they had asked permission to hold the
+money on deposit and to pay it as needed on requisition by the
+Government.  Furthermore, in spite of their protest, Chase issued
+treasury notes, which the banks had to receive from their
+depositors, who nevertheless continued to demand specie.  On
+January 1, 1862, the banks owed $459,000,000 and had in specie
+only $87,000,000.  Chase defended his course by saying that the
+financial crisis was not due to his policy--or lack of policy, as
+it would now seem--but to a general loss of faith in the outcome
+of the war.
+
+There now arose a moral crisis for this "imposing person" who was
+Secretary of the Treasury--a crisis with regard to which there
+are still differences of opinion.  While he faced his problem
+silently, the Committee on Ways and Means in the House took the
+matter in hand: Its solution was an old one which all sound
+theorists on finance unite in condemning--the issue of
+irredeemable paper money. And what did the Secretary of the
+Treasury do?  Previously, as Governor of Ohio, he had denounced
+paper money as, in effect, a fraud upon society.  Long after,
+when the tide of fortune had landed him in the high place of
+Supreme Justice, he returned to this view and condemned as
+unconstitutional the law of 1862 establishing a system of paper
+money.  But at the time when that law was passed Chase, though he
+went through the form of protesting, soon acquiesced.  Before
+long he was asking Congress to allow a further issue of what he
+had previously called "fraudulent" money.
+
+The answer to the question whether Chase should have stuck to his
+principles and resigned rather than acquiesce in the paper money
+legislation turns on that other question--how were the politician
+and the financier related in his make-up?
+
+Before Congress and the Secretary had finished, $450,000,000 were
+issued.  Prices naturally rose, and there was speculation in
+gold. Even before the first issue of paper money, the treasury
+notes had been slightly below par.  In January, 1863, a hundred
+dollars in paper would bring, in New York, only $69.00 in gold; a
+year later, after falling, rising, and falling again, the value
+was $64.00; in July and August, 1864, it was at its lowest,
+$39.00; when the war closed, it had risen to $67.00.  There was
+powerful protest against the legislation responsible for such a
+condition of affairs.  Justin Morrill, the author of the Morrill
+tariff, said, "I would as soon provide Chinese wooden guns for
+the army as paper money alone for the army.  It will be a breach
+of public faith. It will injure creditors; it will increase
+prices; it will increase many fold the cost of the war."  Recent
+students agree, in the main, that his prophecies were fulfilled;
+and a common estimate of the probable increase in the cost of the
+war through the use of paper money and the consequent inflation
+of prices is $600,000,000.
+
+There was much more financial legislation in 1862; but Chase
+continued to stand aside and allow Congress the lead in
+establishing an excise law, an increase in the income tax, and a
+higher tariff--the last of which was necessitated by the excise
+law which has been described as a bill "that taxed everything."
+To enable American manufacturers to bear the excise duties levied
+upon their business, protection was evoked to secure them the
+possession of their field by excluding foreign competition.  All
+these taxes, however, produced but a fraction of the Government's
+revenue.  Borrowing, the favorite method of the Secretary, was
+accepted by Congress as the main resource.  It is computed that
+by means of taxation there was raised in the course of the war
+$667,163,247.00, while during the same period the Government
+borrowed $2,621,916,786.00.
+
+Whatever else he may think of Chase, no one denies that in 1862
+he had other interests besides finance.  Lincoln's Cabinet in
+those days was far from an harmonious body.  All through its
+history there was a Chase faction and a Seward faction.  The
+former had behind them the Radical Republicans, while the latter
+relied upon the support of the moderates.  This division in the
+Republican party runs deep through the politics of the time. 
+There seems to be good reason to think that Chase was not taken
+by surprise when his radical allies in Congress, in December,
+1862, demanded of Lincoln the removal of Seward.  It will be
+remembered that the elections of the autumn of 1862 had gone
+against Lincoln.  At this moment of dismay, the friends of Chase
+struck their blow.  Seward instantly offered his resignation. 
+But Lincoln skillfully temporized.  Thereupon, Chase also
+resigned.  Judging from the scanty evidence we have of his
+intention, we may conclude that he thought he had Lincoln in a
+corner and that he expected either to become first minister or
+the avowed chief of an irresistible opposition.  But he seems to
+have gone too fast for his followers. Lincoln had met them,
+together with his Cabinet, in a conference in December, 1862, and
+frankly discussed the situation, with the result that some of
+them wavered.  When Lincoln informed both Seward and Chase that
+he declined to accept their resignations, both returned--Seward
+with alacrity, Chase with reluctance.  One of the clues to
+Lincoln's cabinet policy was his determination to keep both these
+factions committed to the Government, without allowing himself to
+be under the thumb of either.
+
+During the six months following the cabinet crisis Chase appears
+at his best.  A stupendous difficulty lay before him and he
+attacked it manfully.  The Government's deficit was $276,900,000.
+Of the loans authorized in 1862--the "five-twenties" as they were
+called, bringing six per cent and to run from five to twenty
+years at the Government's pleasure---the sales had brought in, to
+December, 1862, only $23,750,000, though five hundred million had
+been expected.  The banks in declining to handle these bonds laid
+the blame on the Secretary, who had insisted that all purchasers
+should take them at par.
+
+It is not feasible, in a work of this character, to enter into
+the complexities of the financial situation of 1863, or to
+determine just what influences caused a revolution in the market
+for government bonds.  But two factors must be mentioned.  Chase
+was induced to change his attitude and to sell to banks large
+numbers of bonds at a rate below par, thus enabling the banks to
+dispose of them at a profit.  He also called to his aid Jay
+Cooke, an experienced banker, who was allowed a commission of
+one-half per cent on all bonds sold up to $10,000,000 and
+three-eighths of one per cent after that.  Cooke organized a
+countrywide agency system, with twenty-five hundred subagents
+through whom he offered directly to the people bonds in small
+denominations.  By all manner of devices, patriotism and the
+purchase of bonds were made to appear the same thing, and before
+the end of the year $400,000,000 in five-twenty bonds had been
+sold.  This campaign to dispose of the five-twenties was the
+turning-point in war finance, and later borrowings encountered no
+such difficulties as those of 1862 and 1863.
+
+Better known today than this precarious legislation is the famous
+Act of 1863, which was amended in the next year and which forms
+the basis of our present system of national banks.  To Chase
+himself the credit for this seems to be due.  Even in 1861 he
+advised Congress to establish a system of national banks, and he
+repeated the advice before it was finally taken.  The central
+feature of this system which he advocated is one with which we
+are still familiar: permission to the banks accepting government
+supervision to deposit government bonds in the Treasury and to
+acquire in return the right to issue bank-notes to the amount of
+ninety per cent of the value of the bonds.
+
+There can be no doubt that Chase himself rated very highly his
+own services to his country.  Nor is there any doubt that, alone
+among Lincoln's close associates, he continued until the end to
+believe himself a better man than the President.  He and his
+radical following made no change in their attitude to Lincoln,
+though Chase pursued a course of confidential criticism which has
+since inspired the characterization of him as a "sneak," while
+his followers were more outspoken.  In the summer of 1863 Chase
+was seriously talked of as the next President, and before the end
+of the year Chase clubs were being organized in all the large
+cities to promote his candidacy.  Chase himself took the adroit
+position of not believing that any President should serve a
+second term.
+
+Early in 1864 the Chase organization sent out a confidential
+circular signed by Senator Pomeroy of Kansas setting forth the
+case against Lincoln as a candidate and the case in favor of
+Chase. Unfortunately for Chase, this circular fell into the hands
+of a newspaper and was published.  Chase at once wrote to Lincoln
+denying any knowledge of the circular but admitting his candidacy
+and offering his resignation.  No more remarkable letter was
+written by Lincoln than his reply to Chase, in which he showed
+that he had long fully understood the situation, and which he
+closed with these words: "Whether you shall remain at the head of
+the Treasury Department is a question which I do not allow myself
+to consider from any standpoint other than my judgment of the
+public service, and, in that view, I do not perceive occasion for
+change."
+
+The Chase boom rapidly declined.  The deathblow was given by a
+caucus of the Union members of the legislature of his own State
+nominating Lincoln "at the demand of the people and the soldiers
+of Ohio."  The defeat embittered Chase.  For several months,
+however, he continued in the Cabinet, and during this time he had
+the mortification of seeing Lincoln renominated in the National
+Union Convention amid a great display of enthusiasm.
+
+More than once in the past, Chase had offered his resignation. 
+On one occasion Lincoln had gone to his house and had begged him
+to reconsider his decision.  Soon after the renomination, Chase
+again offered his resignation upon the pretext of a disagreement
+with the President over appointments to office.  This time,
+however, Lincoln felt the end had come and accepted the
+resignation. Chase's successor in the Treasury was William Pitt
+Fessenden, Senator from Maine.  During most of the summer of 1864
+Chase stood aside, sullen and envious, watching the progress of
+Lincoln toward a second election.  So much did his bitterness
+affect his judgment that he was capable of writing in his diary
+his belief that Lincoln meant to reverse his policy and consent
+to peace with slavery reestablished.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR
+
+The real effects of war on the life of nations is one of those
+old and complicated debates which lie outside the scope of a
+volume such as this.  Yet in the particular case of the Northern
+people it is imperative to answer two questions both of which
+have provoked interminable discussion: Was the moral life of the
+North good or bad in the war years?  Was its commercial life
+sound?
+
+As to the moral question, contemporary evidence seems at first
+sight contradictory.  The very able Englishman who represented
+the "Times", William H. Russell, gives this ugly picture of an
+American city in 1863:
+
+"Every fresh bulletin from the battlefield of Chickamauga, during
+my three weeks' stay in Cincinnati, brought a long list of the
+dead and wounded of the Western army, many of whom, of the
+officers, belonged to the best families of the place.  Yet the
+signs of mourning were hardly anywhere perceptible; the noisy
+gaiety of the town was not abated one jot."
+
+On the other hand, a private manuscript of a Cincinnati family
+describes the "intense gloom hanging over the city like a pall"
+during the period of that dreadful battle.  The memories of old
+people at Cincinnati in after days--if they had belonged to the
+"loyal" party--contained only sad impressions of a city that was
+one great hospital where "all our best people" worked
+passionately as volunteer assistants of the government medical
+corps.
+
+A third fact to be borne in mind in connection with this apparent
+contradiction in evidence is the source of the greater fortunes
+of Cincinnati, a large proportion of which are to be traced,
+directly or indirectly to government contracts during the war. 
+In some cases the merciless indifference of the Cincinnati
+speculators to the troubles of their country are a local scandal
+to this day, and it is still told, sometimes with scorn,
+sometimes with amusement, how perhaps the greatest of these
+fortunes was made by forcing up the price of iron at a time when
+the Government had to have iron, cost what it might.
+
+Thus we no sooner take up the moral problem of the times than we
+find ourselves involved in the commercial question, for here, as
+always, morals and business are intertwined. Was the commercial
+management of the North creditable to the Government and an honor
+to the people?  The surest way to answer such questions is to
+trace out with some fullness the commercial and industrial
+conditions of the North during the four years of war.
+
+The general reader who looks for the first time into the matter
+is likely to be staggered by what statistics seem to say. 
+Apparently they contradict what he is accustomed to hear from
+popular economists about the waste of war.  He has been told in
+the newspapers that business is undermined by the withdrawal of
+great numbers of men from "productive" consumption of the fruits
+of labor and their engagement as soldiers in "unproductive"
+consumption.  But, to his astonishment, he finds that the
+statistics of 1861-1865 show much increase in Northern business
+--as, for example, in 1865, the production of 142 million pounds
+of wool against 60 million in 1860.  The government reports show
+that 13 million tons of coal were mined in 1860 and 21 million in
+1864; in 1860, the output of pig iron was 821,000 tons, and
+1,014,282 tons in 1864; the petroleum production rose from 21
+million gallons in 1860 to 128 million in 1862; the export of
+corn, measured in money, shows for 1860 a business of $2,399,808
+compared with $10,592,704 for 1863; wheat exporting showed, also,
+an enormous increase, rising from 14 millions in 1860 to 46
+millions in 1863.  There are, to be sure, many statistics which
+seem to contradict these.  Some of them will be mentioned
+presently.  And yet, on the whole, it seems safe to conclude that
+the North, at the close of the third year of war was producing
+more and was receiving larger profits than in 1860.
+
+To deal with this subject in its entirety would lead us into the
+labyrinths of complex economic theory, yet two or three simple
+facts appear so plain that even the mere historian may venture to
+set them forth.  When we look into the statistics which seem to
+show a general increase of business during the war, we find that
+in point of fact this increase was highly specialized.  All those
+industries that dealt with the physical necessities of life and
+all those that dealt peculiarly with armies flourished amazingly.
+And yet there is another side to the story, for there were other
+industries that were set back and some that almost, if not
+entirely, disappeared.  A good instance is the manufacture of
+cotton cloth.  When the war opened, 200,000 hands were employed
+in this manufacture in New England.  With the sealing up of the
+South and the failure of the cotton supply, their work
+temporarily ceased.  What became of the workmen?  Briefly, one of
+three things happened: some went into other trades, such as
+munitions, in which the war had created an abnormal demand for
+labor; a great number of them became soldiers; and many of them
+went West and became farmers or miners.  Furthermore, many whose
+trades were not injured by the war left their jobs and fled
+westward to escape conscription.  Their places were left open to
+be filled by operatives from the injured trades. In one or
+another of these ways the laborer who was thrown out of work was
+generally able to recover employment.  But it is important to
+remember that the key to the labor situation at that time was the
+vast area of unoccupied land which could be had for nothing or
+next to nothing.  This fact is brought home by a comparison of
+the situation of the American with that of the English workman
+during the cotton famine.  According to its own ideas England was
+then fully cultivated.  There was no body of land waiting to be
+thrown open, as an emergency device, to a host of new-made
+agriculturists.  When the cotton-mills stopped at Manchester,
+their operatives had practically no openings but in other
+industrial occupations.  As such opportunities were lacking, they
+became objects of charity until they could resume their work. As
+a country with a great reserve of unoccupied land, the United
+States was singularly fortunate at this economic crisis.
+
+One of the noteworthy features of Northern life during the war is
+that there was no abnormal increase in pauperism.  A great deal
+has been written upon the extensive charities of the time, but
+the term is wrongly applied, for what is really referred to is
+the volunteer aid given to the Government in supporting the
+armies. This was done on a vast scale, by all classes of the
+population--that is, by all who supported the Union party, for
+the separation between the two parties was bitter and
+unforgiving. But of charity in the ordinary sense of the care of
+the destitute there was no significant increase because there was
+no peculiar need.  Here again the fact that the free land could
+be easily reached is the final explanation.  There was no need
+for the unemployed workman to become a pauper.  He could take
+advantage of the Homestead Act*, which was passed in 1862, and
+acquire a farm of 160 acres free; or he could secure at almost
+nominal cost farm-land which had been given to railways as an
+inducement to build. Under the Homestead Act, the Government gave
+away land amounting to 2,400,000 acres before the close of the
+war.  The Illinois Central alone sold to actual settlers 221,000
+acres in 1863 and 264,000 in 1864.  It was during the war, too,
+that the great undertaking of the transcontinental railway was
+begun, partly for military and partly for commercial reasons.  In
+this project, both as a field of labor and as a stimulus to
+Western settlement, there is also to be found one more device for
+the relief of the labor situation in the East.
+
+*This Act, which may be regarded as the culmination of the long
+battle of the Northern dreamers to win "land for the landless,"
+provided that every settler who was, or intended to be, a citizen
+might secure 180 acres of government land by living on it and
+cultivating it for five years.
+
+
+There is no more important phenomenon of the time than the
+shifting of large masses of population from the East to the West,
+while the war was in progress.  This fact begins to indicate why
+there was no shortage in the agricultural output.  The North
+suffered acutely from inflation of prices and from a speculative
+wildness that accompanied the inflation, but it did not suffer
+from a lack of those things that are produced by the soil--food,
+timber, metals, and coal.  In addition to the reason just
+mentioned--the search for new occupation by Eastern labor which
+had been thrown out of employment--three other causes helped to
+maintain the efficiency of work in the mines, in the forests, and
+on the farms.  These three factors were immigration, the labor of
+women, and labor-saving machines.
+
+Immigration, naturally, fell off to a certain degree but it did
+not become altogether negligible.  It is probable that 110,000
+able-bodied men came into the country while war was in
+progress--a poor offset to the many hundred thousand who became
+soldiers, but nevertheless a contribution that counted for
+something.
+
+Vastly more important, in the work of the North, was the part
+taken by women.  A pathetic detail with which in our own
+experience the world has again become familiar was the absence of
+young men throughout most of the North, and the presence of women
+new to the work in many occupations, especially farming.  A
+single quotation from a home missionary in Iowa tells the whole
+story:
+
+"I will mention that I met more women driving teams on the road
+and saw more at work in the fields than men.  They seem to have
+said to their husbands in the language of a favorite song,
+
+'Just take your gun and go; 
+For Ruth can drive the oxen, John,
+And I can use the hoe!'
+
+"I went first to Clarinda, and the town seemed deserted.  Upon
+inquiry for former friends, the frequent answer was, "In the
+army." From Hawleyville almost all the thoroughly loyal male
+inhabitants had gone; and in one township beyond, where I
+formerly preached, there are but seven men left, and at Quincy,
+the county seat of Adams County, but five."
+
+Even more important than the change in the personnel of labor
+were the new machines of the day.  During the fifteen years
+previous to the war American ingenuity had reached a high point. 
+Such inventions as the sewing machine and the horse-reaper date
+in their practical forms from that period, and both of these
+helped the North to fight the war.  Their further improvement,
+and the extension of the principles involved to many new forms of
+machinery, sprang from the pressing need to make up for the loss
+of men who were drained by the army from the farms and the
+workshops.  It was the horse-reaper, the horse-rake, the
+horse-thresher that enabled women and boys to work the farms
+while husbands, fathers, and elder brothers were at the front.
+
+All these causes maintained Northern farming at a high pitch of
+productivity.  This efficiency is implied in some of the figures
+already quoted, but many others could be cited.  For example, in
+1859, the total production of wheat for the whole country was 173
+million bushels; in 1862, the North alone produced 177 millions;
+even in 1864, with over a million men under arms, it still
+produced 160 million bushels.
+
+It must be remembered that the great Northern army produced
+nothing while it consumed the products of agriculture and
+manufacture--food, clothing, arms, ammunition, cannon, wagons,
+horses, medical stores--at a rate that might have led a poetical
+person to imagine the army as a devouring dragon.  Who, in the
+last analysis, provided all these supplies?  Who paid the
+soldiers? Who supplemented their meager pay and supported their
+families? The people, of course; and they did so both directly
+and indirectly.  In taxes and loans they paid to the Government
+about three thousand millions of dollars.  Their indirect
+assistance was perhaps as great, though it is impossible today to
+estimate with any approach to accuracy the amount either in money
+or service. Among obvious items are the collections made by the
+Sanitary Commission for the benefit of the hospital service,
+amounting to twenty-five million dollars, and about six millions
+raised by the Christian Commission.  In a hundred other ways both
+individuals and localities strained their resources to supplement
+those of the Government.  Immense subscription lists were
+circulated to raise funds for the families of soldiers.  The city
+of Philadelphia alone spent in this way in a single year
+$600,000.  There is also evidence of a vast amount of unrecorded
+relief of needy families by the neighbors, and in the farming
+districts, such assistance, particularly in the form of fuel
+during winter, was very generally given.
+
+What made possible this enormous total of contributions was, in a
+word, the general willingness of those supporting the war to
+forego luxuries.  They ceased buying a great multitude of
+unnecessary things.  But what became of the labor that had
+previously supplied the demand for luxuries?  A part of it went
+the way of all other Northern labor--into new trades, into the
+army, or to the West--and a part continued to manufacture
+luxuries: for their market, though curtailed, was not destroyed. 
+There were, indeed, two populations in the North, and they were
+separated by an emotional chasm.  Had all the North been a unit
+in feeling, the production of articles of luxury might have
+ceased.  Because of this emotional division of the North,
+however, this business survived; for the sacrifice of luxurious
+expenditure was made by only a part of the population, even
+though it was the majority.
+
+Furthermore, the whole matter was adjusted voluntarily without
+systematic government direction, since there was nothing in the
+financial policy of the Government to correspond to conscription.
+Consequently, both in the way of loans and in the way of
+contributions, as well as in the matter of unpaid service, the
+entire burden fell upon the war party alone.  In the absence of
+anything like economic conscription, if such a phrase may be
+used, those Northerners who did not wish to lend money, or to
+make financial sacrifice, or to give unpaid service, were free to
+pursue their own bent.  The election of 1864 showed that they
+formed a market which amounted to something between six and nine
+millions.  There is no reason to suppose that these millions in
+1864 spent less on luxuries than they did in 1860.  Two or three
+items are enough.  In 1860, the importation of silk amounted to
+32 million dollars; in 1862, in spite of inflated prices, it had
+shrunk to 7 millions; the consumption of malt liquors shrank from
+101 million gallons in 1860 to 62 million gallons in 1863; of
+coffee, hardly to be classed as a luxury, there were consumed in
+1861, 184 million pounds and in 1863, 80 millions.
+
+The clue to the story of capital is to be found in this fact, too
+often forgotten, that there was an economic-political division
+cutting deep through every stratum of the Northern people.  Their
+economic life as well as their political life was controlled on
+the one hand by a devotion to the cause of the war, and on the
+other hand by a hatred of that cause or by cynical indifference.
+And we cannot insist too positively that the Government failed
+very largely to take this fact into account.  The American spirit
+of invention, so conspicuous at that time in mechanics, did not
+apply itself to the science of government.  Lincoln confessedly
+was not a financier; his instinct was at home only in problems
+that could be stated in terms of men.  Witness his acceptance of
+conscription and his firmness in carrying it through, as a result
+of which he saved the patriotic party from bearing the whole
+burden of military service. But there was no parallel
+conservation of power in the field of industry.  The financial
+policy, left in the hands of Chase, may truly be described as
+barren of ideas.  Incidentally, it may be mentioned that the
+"loyal" North was left at the mercy of its domestic enemies and a
+prey to parasites by Chase's policy of loans instead of taxes and
+of voluntary support instead of enforced support.
+
+The consequence of this financial policy was an immense
+opportunity for the "disloyally" and the parasites to make huge
+war profits out of the "loyals" and the Government.  Of course,
+it must not be supposed that everyone who seized the chance to
+feather his nest was so careless or so impolitic as to let
+himself be classed as a "disloyal."  An incident of the autumn of
+1861 shows the temper of those professed "loyals" who were really
+parasites.  The background of the incident is supplied by a
+report of the Quartermaster-General:
+
+"Governors daily complain that recruiting will stop unless
+clothing is sent in abundance and immediately to the various
+recruiting camps and regiments.  With every exertion, this
+department has not been able to obtain clothing to supply these
+demands, and they have been so urgent that troops before the
+enemy have been compelled to do picket duty in the late cold
+nights without overcoats, or even coats, wearing only thin summer
+flannel blouses....  Could 150,000 suits of clothing, overcoats,
+coats, and pantaloons be placed today, in depot, it would scarce
+supply the calls now before us.  They would certainly leave no
+surplus."
+
+The Government attempted to meet this difficulty in the shortest
+possible time by purchasing clothing abroad.  But such disregard
+of home industry, the "patriotism" of the New England
+manufacturers could not endure.  Along with the report just
+quoted, the Quartermaster-General forwarded to the Secretary of
+War a long argumentative protest from a committee of the Boston
+Board of Trade against the purchase of army clothing in Europe. 
+Any American of the present day can guess how the protest was
+worded and what arguments were used.  Stripped of its
+insincerity, it signified this: the cotton mills were inoperative
+for lack of material; their owners saw no chance to save their
+dividends except by requipment as woolen mills; the existing
+woolen mills also saw a great chance to force wool upon the
+market as a substitute for cotton.  In Ohio, California,
+Pennsylvania, and Illinois, the growers of wool saw the
+opportunity with equal clearness.  But, one and all, these
+various groups of parasites saw that their game hinged on one
+condition: the munitions market must be kept open until they were
+ready to monopolize government contracts.  If soldiers contracted
+pneumonia doing picket duty on cold nights, in their summer
+blouses, that was but an unfortunate incident of war.
+
+Very different in spirit from the protest of the Boston
+manufacturers is a dispatch from the American minister at
+Brussels which shows what American public servants, in contrast
+with American manufacturers, were about.  Abroad the agents of
+North and South were fighting a commercial duel in which each
+strove to monopolize the munitions market.  The United States
+Navy, seeing things from an angle entirely different from that of
+the Boston Board of Trade, ably seconded the ministers by
+blockading the Southern ports and by thus preventing the movement
+of specie and cotton to Europe.  As a consequence, fourmonth
+notes which had been given by Southern agents with their orders
+fell due, had to be renewed, and began to be held in disfavor. 
+Agents of the North, getting wind of these hitches in
+negotiations, eagerly sought to take over the unpaid Confederate
+orders.  All these details of the situation help to explain the
+jubilant tone of this dispatch from Brussels late in November,
+1861:
+
+"I have now in my hands complete control of the principal rebel
+contracts on the continent, viz.: 206,000 yards of cloth ready
+for delivery, already commencing to move forward to Havre; gray
+but can be dyed blue in twenty days; 100,000 yards deliverable
+from 15th of December to 26th of January, light blue army cloth,
+same as ours; 100,000 blankets; 40,000 guns to be shipped in ten
+days; 20,000 saber bayonets to be delivered in six weeks....  The
+winter clothing for 100,000 men taken out of their hands, when
+they cannot replace it, would almost compensate for Bull Run.
+There is no considerable amount of cloth to be had in Europe; the
+stocks are very short."
+
+The Secretary of War was as devoid of ideas as the Secretary of
+the Treasury was and even less equipped with resisting power.
+Though he could not undo the work already done by the agents of
+the Government abroad, he gave way as rapidly as possible to the
+allied parasites whose headquarters, at the moment, were in
+Boston.  The story grows uglier as we proceed.  Two powerful
+commercial combinations took charge of the policy of the woolen
+interests--the National Woolgrowers' Association and the National
+Association of Wool Manufacturers, which were soon in control of
+this immense industry.  Woolen mills sprang up so fast that a
+report of the New York Chamber of Commerce pronounced their
+increase "scarcely credible."  So great was the new market
+created by the Government demand, and so ruthless were the
+parasites in forcing up prices, that dividends on mill stock rose
+to 10, 15, 25, and even 40 per cent.  And all the while the wool
+growers and the wool manufacturers were clamoring to Congress for
+protection of the home industry, exclusion of the wicked foreign
+competition, and all in the name of their devoted
+"patriotism"--patriotism with a dividend of 40 per cent!
+
+Of course, it is not meant that every wool grower and every
+woolen manufacturer was either a "disloyal" or a parasite.  By no
+means. Numbers of them were to be found in that great host of
+"loyals" who put their dividends into government bonds and gave
+their services unpaid as auxiliaries of the Commissary Department
+or the Hospital Service of the Army.  What is meant is that the
+abnormal conditions of industry, uncorrected by the Government,
+afforded a glaring opportunity for unscrupulous men of business
+who, whatever their professions, cared a hundred times more for
+themselves than for their country.  To these was due the pitiless
+hampering of the army in the interest of the wool-trade.  For
+example, many uniforms paid for at outrageous prices, turned out
+to be made of a miserable cheap fabric, called "shoddy," which
+resisted weather scarcely better than paper.  This fraud gave the
+word "shoddy" its present significance in our American speech and
+produced the phrase--applied to manufacturers newly become
+rich--"shoddy aristocracy."  An even more shameful result of the
+selfishness of the manufacturers and of the weakness of the
+Government was the use of cloth for uniforms not of the
+regulation colors, with the result that soldiers sometimes fired
+upon their comrades by mistake.
+
+The prosperity of the capitalists who financed the woolen
+business did not extend to the labor employed in it.  One of the
+ugliest details of the time was the resolute attempt of the
+parasites to seize the whole amount of the abnormal profits they
+wrung from the Government and from the people.  For it must not
+be forgotten that the whole nation had to pay their prices.  It
+is estimated that prices in the main advanced about 100 per cent
+while wages were not advanced more than sixty per cent.  It is
+not strange that these years of war form a period of bitter
+antagonism between labor and capital.
+
+What went on in the woolen business is to be found more or less
+in every business.  Immense fortunes sprang up over night.  They
+had but two roots: government contracts and excessive profits due
+to war prices.  The gigantic fortunes which characterized the
+North at the end of the war are thus accounted for.  The
+so-called prosperity of the time was a class prosperity and was
+absorbed by parasites who fattened upon the necessities of the
+Government and the sacrifices of the people.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE MEXICAN EPISODE
+
+That French demagogue whom Victor Hugo aptly called Napoleon the
+Little was a prime factor in the history of the Union and the
+Confederacy.  The Confederate side of his intrigue will be told
+in its proper place.  Here, let us observe him from the point of
+view of Washington.
+
+It is too much to attempt to pack into a sentence or two the
+complicated drama of deceit, lies, and graft, through which he
+created at last a pretext for intervention in the affairs of
+Mexico; it is enough that in the autumn of 1862 a French army of
+invasion marched from Vera Cruz upon Mexico City.  We have
+already seen that about this same time Napoleon proposed to
+England and Russia a joint intervention with France between North
+and South--a proposal which, however, was rejected.  This Mexican
+venture explains why the plan was suggested at that particular
+time.
+
+Disappointed in England and Russia, Napoleon unexpectedly
+received encouragement, as he thought, from within the United
+States through the medium of the eccentric editor of the "New
+York Tribune". We shall have occasion to return later to the
+adventures of Horace Greeley--that erratic individual who has
+many good and generous acts to his credit, as well as many
+foolish ones.  For the present we have to note that toward the
+close of 1862 he approached the French Ambassador at Washington
+with a request for imperial mediation between the North and the
+South.  Greeley was a type of American that no European can
+understand: he believed in talk, and more talk, and still more
+talk, as the cure for earthly ills.  He never could understand
+that anybody besides himself could have strong convictions.  When
+he told the Ambassador that the Emperor's mediation would lead to
+a reconciliation of  the sections, he was doubtless sincere in
+his belief.  The astute European diplomat, who could not believe
+such simplicity, thought it a mask.  When he asked for, and
+received, permission to pass the Federal lines and visit
+Richmond, he interpreted the permit in the light of his
+assumption about Greeley.  At Richmond, he found no desire for
+reunion.  Putting this and that together, he concluded that the
+North wanted to give up the fight and would welcome mediation to
+save its face.  The dreadful defeat at Fredericksburg fell in
+with this reasoning.  His reports on American conditions led
+Napoleon, in January, 1863, to attempt alone what he had once
+hoped to do supported by England and Russia. He proposed his good
+offices to the Government at Washington as a mediator between
+North and South.
+
+Hitherto, Washington had been very discreet about Mexico.  Adroit
+hints not to go too far had been given Napoleon in full measure,
+but there was no real protest.  The State Department now
+continued this caution and in the most polite terms declined
+Napoleon's offer.  Congress, however, took the matter more
+grimly, for throughout the dealings with Napoleon, it had been at
+odds with Lincoln.  It now passed the first of a series of
+resolutions which expressed the will of the country, if not quite
+the will of the President, by resolving that any further proposal
+of mediation would be regarded by it as "an unfriendly act."
+
+Napoleon then resumed his scheming for joint intervention, while
+in the meantime his armies continued to fight their way until
+they entered Mexico City in June, 1863.  The time had now come
+when Napoleon thought it opportune to show his hand.  Those were
+the days when Lee appeared invincible, and when Chancellorsville
+crowned a splendid series of triumphs.  In England, the Southern
+party made a fresh start; and societies were organized to aid the
+Confederacy.  At Liverpool, Laird Brothers were building,
+ostensibly for France, really for the Confederacy, two ironclads
+supposed to outclass every ship in the Northern navy.  In France,
+100,000 unemployed cotton hands were rioting for food.  To raise
+funds for the Confederacy the great Erlanger banking-house of
+Paris negotiated a loan based on cotton which was to be delivered
+after the breaking of the blockade.  Napoleon dreamed of a
+shattered American union, two enfeebled republics, and a broad
+way for his own scheme in Mexico.
+
+In June an English politician of Southern sympathies, Edward
+Roebuck, went over to France, was received by the Emperor, and
+came to an understanding with him.  Roebuck went home to report
+to the Southern party that Napoleon was ready to intervene, and
+that all he waited for was England's cooperation.  A motion "to
+enter into negotiations with the Great Powers of Europe for the
+purpose of obtaining their cooperation in the recognition" of the
+Confederacy was introduced by Roebuck in the House of Commons.
+
+The debate which followed was the last chance of the Southern
+party and, as events proved, the last chance of Napoleon.  How
+completely the British ministry was now committed to the North
+appears in the fact that Gladstone, for the Government, opposed
+Roebuck's motion.  John Bright attacked it in what Lord Morley
+calls "perhaps the most powerful and the noblest speech of his
+life."  The Southern party was hardly resolute in their support
+of Roebuck and presently he withdrew his motion.
+
+But there were still the ironclads at Liverpool.  We have seen
+that earlier in the war, the carelessness of the British
+authorities had permitted the escape of ship 290, subsequently
+known as the Confederate commercedestroyer, Alabama.  The
+authorities did not wish to allow a repetition of the incident.
+But could it be shown that the Laird ships were not really for a
+French purchaser?  It was in the course of diplomatic
+conversations that Mr. Adams, speaking of the possible sailing of
+the ships, made a remark destined to become famous: "It would be
+superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is
+war." At jest, the authorities were satisfied.  The ships were
+seized and in the end bought for the British Navy.
+
+Again Napoleon stood alone.  Not only had he failed to obtain aid
+from abroad, but in France itself his Mexican schemes were widely
+and bitterly condemned.  Yet he had gone too far to recede, and
+what he had been aiming at all along was now revealed.  An
+assembly of Mexican notables, convened by the general of the
+invaders, voted to set up an imperial government and offered the
+crown to Napoleon's nominee, the Archduke Maximilian of Austria.
+
+And now the Government at Washington was faced with a complicated
+problem.  What about the Monroe Doctrine?  Did the Union dare
+risk war with France?  Did it dare pass over without protest the
+establishment of monarchy on American soil by foreign arms?
+Between these horns of a dilemma, the Government maintained its
+precarious position during another year.  Seward's correspondence
+with Paris was a masterpiece of evasion.  He neither protested
+against the intervention of Napoleon nor acknowledged the
+authority of Maximilian.  Apparently, both he and Lincoln were
+divided between fear of a French alliance with the Confederacy
+and fear of premature action in the North that would render
+Napoleon desperate.  Just how far they comprehended Napoleon and
+his problems is an open question.
+
+Whether really comprehending or merely trusting to its instinct,
+Congress took a bolder course.  Two men prove the antagonists of
+a parliamentary duel--Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate
+Committee on Foreign Relations, and Henry Winter Davis, chairman
+of the corresponding committee of the House.  Sumner played the
+hand of the Administration.  Fiery resolutions demanding the
+evacuation of Mexico or an American declaration of war were
+skillfully buried in the silence of Sumner's committee.  But
+there was nevertheless one resolution that affected history: it
+was a ringing condemnation of the attempt to establish a monarchy
+in Mexico.  In the House, a joint resolution which Davis
+submitted was passed without one dissenting vote.  When it came
+to the Senate, Sumner buried it as he had buried earlier
+resolutions. None the less it went out to the world attended by
+the news of the unanimous vote in the House.
+
+Shortly afterwards, the American Ambassador at Paris called upon
+the imperial Foreign Secretary, M. Drouyn de L'huys.  News of
+this resolution had preceded him.  He was met by the curt
+question, "Do you bring peace or war?"  Again, the Washington
+Government was skillfully evasive.  The Ambassador was instructed
+to explain that the resolution had not been inspired by the
+President and "the French Government would be seasonably apprized
+of any change of policy...which the President might at any future
+time think it proper to adopt."
+
+There seems little doubt that Lincoln's course was very widely
+condemned as timid.  When we come to the political campaign of
+1864, we shall meet Henry Winter Davis among his most relentless
+personal enemies.  Dissatisfaction with Lincoln's Mexican policy
+has not been sufficiently considered in accounting for the
+opposition to him, inside the war party, in 1864.  To it may be
+traced an article in the platform of the war party, adopted in
+June, 1864, protesting against the establishment of monarchy "in
+near proximity to the United States." In the same month
+Maximilian entered Mexico City.
+
+The subsequent moves of Napoleon are explained elsewhere.* The
+central fact in the story is his virtual change of attitude, in
+the summer of 1864.  The Confederate agent at Paris complained of
+a growing coolness. Before the end of the summer, the Confederate
+Secretary of State was bitter in his denunciation of Napoleon for
+having deserted the South.  Napoleon's puppet Maximilian refused
+to receive an envoy from the Confederacy.  Though Washington did
+not formally protest against the presence of Maximilian in
+Mexico, it declined to recognize his Government, and that
+Government continued unrecognized at Washington throughout the
+war.
+
+*Nathaniel W. Stephenson, "The Day of the Confederacy". (In "The
+Chronicles of America").
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864
+
+Every great revolution among Anglo-Saxon people--perhaps among
+all people--has produced strange types of dreamers.  In America,
+however, neither section could claim a monopoly of such types,
+and even the latter-day visionaries who can see everything in
+heaven and earth, excepting fact, had their Northern and Southern
+originals in the time of the great American war.  Among these is
+a strange congregation which assembled in the spring of 1864 and
+which has come to be known, from its place of meeting, as the
+Cleveland Convention.  Its coming together was the result of a
+loose cooperation among several minor political groups, all of
+which were for the Union and the war, and violently opposed to
+Lincoln.  So far as they had a common purpose, it was to supplant
+Lincoln by Fremont in the next election.
+
+The Convention was notable for the large proportion of agnostics
+among its members.  A motion was made to amend a resolution that
+"the Rebellion must be put down" by adding the words "with God's
+assistance."  This touch of piety was stormily rejected.  Another
+group represented at Cleveland was made up of extreme
+abolitionists under the leadership of that brilliant but
+disordered genius, Wendell Phillips.  He sent a letter denouncing
+Lincoln and pledging his support of Fremont because of the
+latter's "clearsighted statesmanship and rare military ability."
+The convention declared itself a political party, under the style
+of the Radical Democracy, and nominated Fremont for President.
+
+There was another body of dreamers, still more singular, who were
+also bitter opponents of Lincoln.  They were, however, not in
+favor of war.  Their political machinery consisted of secret
+societies.  As early as 1860, the Knights of the Golden Circle
+were active in Indiana, where they did yeoman service for
+Breckinridge.  Later this society acquired some underground
+influence in other States, especially in Ohio, and did its share
+in bringing about the victories at the polls in the autumn of
+1862, when the Democrats captured the Indiana legislature.
+
+The most serious charge against the Golden Circle was complicity
+in an attempt to assassinate Oliver P. Morton, Governor of
+Indiana, who was fired at, one night, as he was leaving the state
+house. When Morton demanded an investigation of the Golden
+Circle, the legislature refused to sanction it.  On his own
+authority and with Federal aid he made investigations and
+published a report which, if it did not actually prove treason,
+came dangerously near to proof.  Thereafter, this society drops
+out of sight, and its members appear to have formed the new Order
+of the American Knights, which in its turn was eclipsed by the
+Sons of Liberty. There were several other such societies all
+organized on a military plan and with a great pretense of arming
+their members. This, however, had to be done surreptitiously. 
+Boxes of rifles purchased in the East were shipped West labeled
+"Sunday-school books," and negotiations were even undertaken with
+the Confederacy to bring in arms by way of Canada.  At a meeting
+of the supreme council of the Sons of Liberty, in New York,
+February 22, 1864, it was claimed that the order had nearly a
+million members, though the Government secret service considered
+half a million a more exact estimate.
+
+As events subsequently proved, the societies were not as
+formidable as these figures would imply.  Most of the men who
+joined them seem to have been fanciful creatures who loved
+secrecy for its own sake.  While real men, North and South, were
+laying down their lives for their principles, these make-believe
+men were holding bombastic initiations and taking oaths such as
+this from the ritual of the American Knights: "I do further
+solemnly promise and swear, that I will ever cherish the sublime
+lessons which the sacred emblems of our order suggest, and will,
+so far as in me lies, impart those lessons to the people of the
+earth, where the mystic acorn falls from its parent bough, in
+whose visible firmament Orion, Arcturus, and the Pleiades ride in
+their cold resplendent glories, and where the Southern Cross
+dazzles the eye of degraded humanity with its coruscations of
+golden light, fit emblem of Truth, while it invites our sacred
+order to consecrate her temples in the four corners of the earth,
+where moral darkness reigns and despotism holds sway....  Divine
+essence, so help me that I fail not in my troth, lest I shall be
+summoned before the tribunal of the order, adjudged and condemned
+to certain and shameful death, while my name shall be recorded on
+the rolls of infamy. Amen."
+
+The secret orders fought hard to prevent the Lincoln victory in
+the elections of 1863.  Even before that time their leaders had
+talked mysteriously of another disruption of the Union and the
+formation of a Northwestern Confederacy in alliance with the
+South. The scheme was known to the Confederates, allusions to it
+are to be found in Southern newspapers, and even the Confederate
+military authorities considered it.  Early in 1863, General
+Beauregard thought the Confederates might "get into Ohio and call
+upon the friends of Vallandigham to rise for his defense and
+support; then...call upon the whole Northwest to join in the
+movement, form a confederacy of their own, and join us by a
+treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive." Reliance on the
+support of the societies was the will-o'-the-wisp that deceived
+General John Morgan in his desperate attempt to carry out
+Beauregard's programme.  Though brushed aside as a mere detail by
+military historians, Morgan's raid, with his force of irregular
+cavalry, in July, 1863, through Indiana and Ohio, was one of the
+most romantic episodes of the war.  But it ended in his defeat
+and capture.  While his gallant troopers rode to their
+destruction, the men who loved to swear by Arcturus and to gabble
+about the Pleiades showed the fiber to be expected of such
+people, and stayed snug in their beds.
+
+But neither their own lack of hardihood nor the disasters of
+their Southern friends could dampen their peculiar ardor.  Their
+hero was Vallandigham.  That redoubtable person had fixed his
+headquarters in Canada, whence he directed his partisans in their
+vain attempt to elect him Governor of Ohio.  Their next move was
+to honor him with the office of Supreme Commander of the Sons of
+Liberty, and now Vallandigham resolved to win the martyr's crown
+in very fact.  In June, 1864, he prepared for the dramatic effect
+by carefully advertising his intention and came home.  But to his
+great disappointment Lincoln ignored him, and the dramatic
+martyrdom which he had planned did not come off.
+
+There still existed the possibility of a great uprising, and to
+that end arrangements were made with Southern agents in Canada.
+Confederate soldiers, picked men, made their way in disguise to
+Chicago.  There the worshipers of Arcturus were to join them in a
+mighty multitude; the Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas in
+Chicago were to be liberated; around that core of veterans, the
+hosts of the Pleiades were to rally.  All this was to coincide
+with the assembling at Chicago of the Democratic national
+convention, in which Vallandigham was to appear.  The organizers
+of the conspiracy dreamed that the two events might coalesce;
+that the convention might be stampeded by their uprising; that a
+great part, if not the whole, of the convention would endorse the
+establishment of a Northwestern Confederacy.
+
+Alas for him who builds on the frame of mind that delights in
+cheap rhetoric while Rome is afire!  At the moment of hazard, the
+Sons of Liberty showed the white feather, were full of specious
+words, would not act.  The Confederate soldiers, indignant at
+this second betrayal, had to make their escape from the country.
+
+It must not be supposed that this Democratic national convention
+was made up altogether of Secessionists.  The peace party was
+still, as in the previous year, a strange complex, a mixture of
+all sorts and conditions.  Its cohesion was not so much due to
+its love of peace as to its dislike of Lincoln and its hatred of
+his party.  Vallandigham was a member of the committee on
+resolutions. The permanent chairman was Governor Seymour of New
+York.  The Convention was called to order by August Belmont, a
+foreigner by birth, the American representative of the
+Rothschilds.  He was the head and front of that body of Northern
+capital which had so long financed the South and which had always
+opposed the war.  In opening the Convention he said: "Four years
+of misrule by a sectional, fanatical, and corrupt party have
+brought our country to the verge of ruin."  In the platform
+Lincoln was accused of a list of crimes which it had become the
+habit of the peace party to charge against him.  His
+administration was described as "four years of failure," and
+McClellan was nominated for President.
+
+The Republican managers called a convention at Baltimore in June,
+1864, with a view to organizing a composite Union Party in which
+the War Democrats were to participate.  Their plan was
+successful. The second place on the Union ticket was accepted by
+a War Democrat, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee.  Lincoln was
+renominated, though not without opposition, and he was so keenly
+aware that he was not the unanimous choice of the Union Party
+that he permitted the fact to appear in a public utterance soon
+afterward.  "I do not allow myself," he said, in addressing a
+delegation of the National Union League, "to suppose that either
+the Convention or the League have concluded to decide that I am
+either the greatest or the best man in America, but rather they
+have concluded it is not best to swap horses while crossing the
+river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse
+that they might not make a botch of it in trying to swap."
+
+But the Union Party was so far from being a unit that during the
+summer factional quarrels developed within its ranks.  All the
+elements that were unfriendly to Lincoln took heart from a
+dispute betweenthe President and Congress with regard to
+reconstruction in Louisiana, over a large part of which Federal
+troops had established a civil government on the President's
+authority.  As an incident in the history of reconstruction, this
+whole matter has its place in another volume.* But it also has a
+place in the history of the presidential campaign of 1864.
+Lincoln's plan of reconstruction was obnoxious to the Radicals in
+Congress inasmuch as it did not definitely abolish slavery in
+Louisiana, although it required the new Government to give its
+adherence to the Emancipation Proclamation. Congress passed a
+bill taking reconstruction out of the President's hands and
+definitely requiring the reconstructed States to abolish slavery. 
+Lincoln took the position that Congress had no power over slavery
+in the States.  When his Proclamation was thrown in his teeth, he
+replied, "I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on
+military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by
+Congress."  Incidentally there was a further disagreement between
+the President and the Radicals over negro suffrage.  Though
+neither scheme provided for it, Lincoln would extend it, if at
+all, only to the exceptional negroes, while the Radicals were
+ready for a sweeping extension.  But Lincoln refused to sign
+their bill and it lapsed.  Thereupon Benjamin Wade of Ohio and
+Henry Winter Davis of Maryland issued a savage denunciation of
+Lincoln which has been known ever since as the "Wade-Davis
+Manifesto".
+
+* Walter L. Fleming, "The Sequel of Appomattox". In "The
+Chronicles of America".
+
+
+There was a faction in the Union Party which we may justly name
+the Vindictives.  The "Manifesto" gave them a rallying cry.  At a
+conference in New York they decided to compel the retirement of
+Lincoln and the nomination of some other candidate.  For this
+purpose a new convention was to be called at Cincinnati in
+September.  In the ranks of the Vindictives at this time was the
+impetuous editor of the "New York Tribune", Horace Greeley.  His
+presence there calls for some explanation.  Perhaps the most
+singular figure of the time, he was one of the most irresponsible
+and yet, through his paper, one of the most influential.  He had
+a trick of phrase which, somehow, made him appear oracular to the
+plain people, especially in the rural districts--the very people
+on whom Lincoln relied for a large part of his support.  Greeley
+knew his power, and his mind was not large enough to carry the
+knowledge well.  Furthermore, his was the sort of nature that
+relates itself to life above all through the sensibilities.
+Kipling speaks scornfully of people who if their "own front door
+is shut will swear the world is warm."  They are relations in the
+full blood of Horace Greeley.
+
+In July, when the breach between the President and the
+Vindictives was just beginning to be evident, Greeley was
+pursuing an adventure of his own.  Among the least sensible minor
+incidents of the war were a number of fantastic attempts of
+private persons to negotiate peace.  With one exception they had
+no historic importance.  The exception is a negotiation carried
+on by Greeley, which seems to have been the ultimate cause of his
+alliance with the Vindictives.
+
+In the middle of July, 1864, gold was selling in New York at 285.
+There was distress and discontent throughout the country.  The
+horrible slaughter of the Wilderness, still fresh in everybody's
+mind, had put the whole Union Party into mourning.  The
+impressionable Greeley became frantic for peace peace at any
+price.  At the psychological moment word was conveyed to him that
+two persons in Canada held authority from the Confederacy to
+enter into negotiations for peace.  Greeley wrote to Lincoln
+demanding negotiations because "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost
+dying country longs for peace, shudders at the prospect of fresh
+conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new
+rivers of human blood."
+
+Lincoln consented to a negotiation but stipulated that Greeley
+himself should become responsible for its conduct.  Though this
+was not what Greeley wanted for his type always prefers to tell
+others what to do--he sullenly accepted.  He proceeded to Niagara
+to meet the reputed commissioners of the Confederacy.  The
+details of the futile conference do not concern us.  The
+Confederate agents were not empowered to treat for peace--at
+least not on any terms that would be considered at Washington. 
+Their real purpose was far subtler.  Appreciating the delicate
+balance in Northern politics, they aimed at making it appear that
+Lincoln was begging for terms.  Lincoln, who foresaw this
+possible turn of events, had expressly limited Greeley to
+negotiations for "the integrity of the whole Union and the
+abandonment of slavery."  Greeley chose to believe that these
+instructions, and not the subtlety of the Confederate agents and
+his own impulsiveness, were the cause of the false position in
+which the agents now placed him.  They published an account of
+the episode, thus effecting an exposure which led to sharp
+attacks upon Greeley by the Northern press.  In the bitterness of
+his mortification Greeley then went from one extreme to the other
+and joined the Vindictives.
+
+Less than three weeks after the conference at Niagara, the
+"Wade-Davis Manifesto" appeared.  It was communicated to the
+country through the columns of Greeley's paper on the 5th of
+August. Greeley, who so short a time before was for peace at any
+price, went the whole length of reaction by proclaiming that "Mr.
+Lincoln is already beaten....  We must have another ticket to
+save us from utter overthrow.  If we had such a ticket as could
+be made by naming Grant, Butler, or Sherman for President and
+Farragut for Vice, we could make a fight yet."
+
+At about this same time the chairman of the Republican national
+committee, who was a Lincoln man, wrote to the President that the
+situation was desperate.  Lincoln himself is known to have made a
+private memorandum containing the words, "It seems extremely
+probable that this Administration will not be reelected."  On the
+1st of September, 1864, with three presidential candidates in the
+field, Northern politics were bewildering, and the country was
+shrouded in the deepest gloom.  The Wilderness campaign, after
+slaughter unparalleled, had not in the popular mind achieved
+results.  Sherman, in Georgia, though his losses were not as
+terrible as Grant's, had not yet done anything to lighten the
+gloom.  Not even Farragut's victory in Mobile Bay, in August,
+far-reaching as it proved to be, reassured the North.  A bitter
+cry for peace went up even from lovers of the Union whose hearts
+had failed.
+
+Meanwhile, the brilliant strategist in Georgia was pressing his
+drive for political as well as for military effect.  To rouse
+those Unionists who had lost heart was part of his purpose when
+he hurled his columns against Atlanta, from which Hood was driven
+in one of the most disastrous of Confederate defeats.  On the 3rd
+of September Lincoln issued a proclamation appointing a day of
+thanksgiving for these great victories of Sherman and Farragut.
+
+On that day, it would seem, the tide turned in Northern politics.
+Some historians are content with Atlanta as the explanation of
+all that followed; but there are three separate events of
+importance that now occurred as incidents in the complicated
+situation.  In the first place, three weeks later the radical
+opposition had collapsed; the plan for a new convention was
+abandoned; the Vindictive leaders came out in support of Lincoln.
+Almost simultaneously occurred the remaining two surprising
+events.  Fremont withdrew from his candidacy in order to do his
+"part toward preventing the election of the Democratic
+candidate." And Lincoln asked for the resignation of a member of
+his Cabinet, Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair, who was the
+especial enemy of the Vindictives.
+
+The official biographers of Lincoln* keep these three events
+separate.  They hold that Blair's removal was wholly Lincoln's
+idea, and that from chivalrous reasons he would not abandon his
+friend as long as he seemed to be losing the game.  The historian
+Rhodes writes confidently of a bargain with Fremont, holding that
+Blair was removed to terminate a quarrel with Fremont which dated
+back even to his own removal in 1861.  A possible third theory
+turns upon Chase, whose hostility to Blair was quite equal to
+that of the illbalanced Fremont.  It had been stimulated the
+previous winter by a fierce arraignment of Chase made by Blair's
+brother in Congress, in which Chase was bluntly accused of fraud
+and of making money, or allowing his friends to make money,
+through illicit trade in cotton.  And Chase was a man of might
+among the Vindictives.  The intrigue, however, never comes to the
+foreground in history, but lurks in the background thick with
+shadows. Once or twice among those shadows we seem to catch a
+glimpse of the figure of Thurlow Weed, the master-politician of
+the time.  Taking one thing with another, we may risk the guess
+that somehow the two radical groups which were both relentless
+against Blair were led to pool their issues, and that Blair's
+removal was the price Lincoln paid not to one faction of radicals
+but to the whole unmerciful crowd.
+
+*His private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay.
+
+
+Whatever complex of purposes lay back of the triple coincidence,
+the latter part of September saw a general reunion of the
+factions within the Union Party, followed by a swift recovery of
+strength. When the election came, Lincoln received an electoral
+vote of 212 against 21, and a popular vote of 2,330,552 against
+1,835,985.
+
+The inevitable question arises as to what was the real cause of
+this success.  It is safe to say that the political campaign
+contained some adroit strategy; that Sherman was without doubt an
+enormous factor; that the Democrats made numerous blunders; and
+that the secret societies had an effect other than they intended.
+However, the real clue seems to be found in one sentence from a
+letter written by Lowell to Motley when the outlook for his party
+was darkest: "The mercantile classes are longing for peace, but I
+believe that the people are more firm than ever."  Of the great,
+silent mass of the people, the true temper seems to be struck off
+in a popular poem of the time, written in response to one of the
+calls for more troops, a poem with refrains built on the model of
+this couplet:
+
+"We're coming from the hillside, we're coming from the shore,
+We're coming, Father Abraham, six hundred thousand more."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS
+
+The victory of the Union Party in November enabled Lincoln to
+enjoy for a brief period of his career as President what may be
+thought of as a lull in the storm.  He knew now that he had at
+last built up a firm and powerful support.  With this assured,
+his policy, both domestic and foreign--the key to which was still
+the blockade--might be considered victorious at all points. 
+There remains to be noticed, however, one event of the year 1864
+which was of vital importance in maintaining the blockade.
+
+It is a principle of international law that a belligerent must
+itself attend to the great task of suppressing contraband trade
+with its enemy.  Lincoln was careful to observe this principle.
+Though British merchants were frankly speculating in contraband
+trade, he made no demand upon the British Government to relieve
+him of the difficulty of stopping it.  England also took the
+legitimate position under international law and warned her
+merchants that, while it was none of the Government's business to
+prevent such trade, they practised it at their own risk, subject
+to well-understood penalties agreed upon among nations.  The
+merchants nevertheless continued to take the risk, while both
+they and the authorities of the Confederacy thought they saw a
+way of minimizing the danger.  Instead of shipping supplies
+direct to the Confederate ports they shipped them to Matamoros,
+in Mexico, or to the West Indies.  As these ports were in neutral
+territory, the merchants thought their goods would be safe
+against capture until they left the Mexican or West Indian port
+on their brief concluding passage to the territory of the 
+Confederacy. Nassau, then a petty West India town, was the chief
+depot of such trade and soon became a great commercial center. 
+To it came vast quantities of European goods which were then
+transferred to swift, small vessels, or "blockade-runners," which
+took a gambler's chance and often succeeded in eluding the
+Federal patrol ships and in rushing their cargoes safe into a
+Confederate port.
+
+Obviously, it was a great disadvantage to the United  States to
+allow contraband supplies to be accumulated,  without
+interference, close to the blockaded coast, and the Lincoln
+Government determined to remove this disadvantage.  With this end
+in view it evoked the principle of the continuous voyage, which
+indeed was not new, but which was destined to become fixed in
+international law by the Supreme Court of the United States. 
+American cruisers were instructed to stop British ships sailing
+between the British ports of Liverpool and Nassau; they were to
+use the recognized international rights of visit and search; and
+if there was evidence that the cargo was not destined for actual
+consumption at Nassau, they were to bring the ship into an
+American port to be dealt with by an American prize court.  When
+such arrests began, the owners clamored to the British
+Government, and both dealers in contraband and professional
+blockade-runners worked themselves into a fury because American
+cruisers watched British ports and searched British ships on the
+high seas.  With regard to this matter, the British Government
+and the Government at Washington had their last important
+correspondence during the war.  The United States stood firm for
+the idea that when goods were ultimately intended for the
+Confederacy, no matter how roundabout the journey, they could be
+considered as making a single continuous voyage and were liable
+to capture from the day they left Liverpool.  Early in 1865, the
+Supreme Court of the United States fully developed the principle
+of continuous voyage in four celebrated cases that are now among
+the landmarks of international law.*
+
+* The Great war has once again led to controversy over this
+subject, so vital to neutral states.
+
+
+This was the last step in making the blockade effective.
+Thereafter, it slowly strangled the South.  The Federal armies
+enormously overmatched the Southern, and from November, 1864,
+their continuance in the field was made sure.  Grim work still
+lay before Lincoln, but the day of anxiety was past.  In this
+moment of comparative ease, the aged Chief Justice Taney died,
+and Lincoln appointed to that high position his ungenerous rival,
+Chase.
+
+Even now Lincoln had not established himself as a leader superior
+to party, but he had the satisfaction, early in 1865, of seeing
+the ranks of the opposition begin to break.  Naturally, the
+Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery
+throughout the United States, appeared to Lincoln as in a way the
+consummation of his labors.  When the House voted on the
+resolution to send this amendment to the States, several
+Democrats joined the government forces.  Two nights afterward,
+speaking to a serenading party at the White House, Lincoln made a
+brief speech, part of which is thus reported by his secretaries:
+"He thought this measure was a very fitting if not an
+indispensable adjunct to the winding up of the great difficulty.
+He wished the reunion of all the States perfected, and so
+effected as to remove all causes of disturbance in the future;
+and to attain this end, it was necessary that the original
+disturbing cause should, if possible, be rooted out."
+
+An event which in its full detail belongs to Confederate rather
+than to Union history took place soon after this.  At Hampton
+Roads, Lincoln and Seward met Confederate commissioners who had
+asked for a parley--with regard to peace.  Nothing came of the
+meeting, but the conference gave rise to a legend, false in fact
+and yet true in spirit, according to which Lincoln wrote on a
+sheet of paper the word "Union," pushed it across to Alexander H.
+Stephens and said, "Write under that anything you please."
+
+This fiction expresses Lincoln's attitude toward the sinking
+Confederacy.  On his return from Hampton Roads he submitted to
+his Cabinet a draft of a message which he proposed to send to
+Congress.  He recommended the appropriation of $400,000,000 to be
+distributed among the slave states on condition that war cease
+before April 1, 1865.  Not a member of the Cabinet approved.  His
+secretary, Mr. Nicolay, writes: "The President, in evident
+surprise and sorrow at the want of statesmanlike liberality shown
+by his executive council, folded and laid away the draft of his
+message...."  With a deep sigh he added, "But you are all opposed
+to me, and I will not send the message."
+
+His second inauguration passed without striking incidents. 
+Chase, as Chief Justice, administered the oath.  The second
+inaugural address contained words which are now famous: "With
+malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
+right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
+finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to
+care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow,
+and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just
+and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
+
+That gigantic system of fleets and armies, the creation of which
+was due to Lincoln, was closing tight around the dying
+Confederacy. Five weeks after the inauguration Lee surrendered,
+and the war was virtually at an end.  What was to come after was
+inevitably the overshadowing topic of the hour.  Many anecdotes
+represent Lincoln, in these last few days of his life, as
+possessed by a high though melancholy mood of extreme mercy. 
+Therefore, much has been inferred from the following words, in
+his last public address, made on the night of the 11th of April:
+"In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty
+to make some new announcement to the people of the South.  I am
+considering and shall not fail to act when action shall be
+proper."
+
+What was to be done for the South, what treatment should be
+accorded the Southern leaders, engrossed the President and his
+Cabinet at the meeting on the 14th of April, which was destined
+to be their last.  Secretary Welles has preserved the spirit of
+the meeting in a striking anecdote.  Lincoln said that no one
+need expect he would "take any part in hanging or killing those
+men, even the worst of them.  Frighten them out of the country,
+open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off;" said he,
+throwing up his hands as if scaring sheep.  "Enough lives have
+been sacrificed; we must extinguish our resentments if we expect
+harmony and union."
+
+While Lincoln was thus arming himself with a valiant mercy, a
+band of conspirators at an obscure boardinghouse in Washington
+were planning his assassination.  Their leader was John Wilkes
+Booth, an actor, brother of the much abler Edwin Booth.  There
+seems little doubt that he was insane.  Around him gathered a
+small group of visionary extremists in whom much brooding upon
+Southern wrongs had produced an unbalanced condition.  Only a
+morbid interest can attach today to the strange cunning with
+which Booth laid his plans, thinking of himself all the while as
+a reincarnation of the Roman Brutus.
+
+On the night of the 14th of April, the President attended a
+performance of "Our American Cousin".  While the play was in
+progress, Booth stole into the President's box, came close behind
+him, and shot him through the head.  Lincoln never spoke again
+and, shortly after seven next morning, ceased breathing.
+
+At the same time, a futile attempt was made upon the life of
+Seward.  Booth temporarily escaped.  Later he was overtaken and
+shot.  His accomplices were hanged.
+
+
+The passage of sixty years has proved fully necessary to the
+placing of Lincoln in historic perspective.  No President, in his
+own time, with the possible exception of Washington, was so
+bitterly hated and so fiercely reviled.  On the other hand, none
+has been the object of such intemperate hero-worship.  However,
+the greatest of the land were, in the main, quick to see him in
+perspective and to recognize his historic significance.  It is
+recorded of Davis that in after days he paid a beautiful tribute
+to Lincoln and said, "Next to the destruction of the Confederacy,
+the death of Abraham Lincoln was the darkest day the South has
+known."
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+There are two general histories, of conspicuous ability, that
+deal with this period:
+
+J. F. Rhodes, "History of the United States from the Compromise
+of 1850", 7 vols. (1893-1906), and J. B. McMaster, "History of
+the People of the United States", 7 vols. (1883-1912).  McMaster
+has the more "modern" point of view and is excellent but dry,
+without any sense of narrative.  Rhodes has a somewhat older
+point of view. For example, he makes only a casual reference, in
+a quotation, to the munitions problem of 1861, though analyzing
+with great force and candor such constitutional issues as the
+arrests under the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.  The
+other strong points in his work are its sense of narrative, its
+freedom from hero-worship, its independence of conventional views
+of Northern leaders.  As to the South, it suffers from a certain
+Narrowness of vision due to the comparative scantiness of the
+material used.  The same may be said of McMaster.
+
+For Lincoln, there is no adequate brief biography.  Perhaps the
+best is the most recent, "Abraham Lincoln", by Lord Charnwood
+("Makers of the Nineteenth Century", 1917).  It has a kind of
+cool detachment that hardly any biographer had shown previously,
+and yet this coolness is joined with extreme admiration.  Short
+biographies worth considering are John T. Morse, Jr., Abraham
+Lincoln" ("American Statesmen" Series, 2 vols., 1893), and Ida M.
+Tarbell, "Life of Abraham Lincoln", 2 vols. (1900). The official
+biography is in ten volumes, "Abraham Lincoln, a History", by his
+secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay (1890). It is a
+priceless document and as such is little likely to be forgotten. 
+But its events are so numerous that they swamp the figure of
+Lincoln and yet are not numerous enough to constitute a
+definitive history of the times.  It is wholly eulogistic.  The
+same authors edited "The Writings of Abraham Lincoln"
+(Biographical Edition, 2 vols., 1894), which has since been
+expanded (1905) and now fills twelve volumes.  It is the
+definitive presentation of Lincoln's mind.  A book much sought
+after by his enemies is William Henry Herndon and Jesse William
+Weik, "The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham
+Lincoln", 8 vols. (1889; unexpurgated edition).  It contains
+about all we know of his early life and paints a picture of
+sordid ugliness.  Its reliability has been disputed.  No study of
+Lincoln is complete unless one has marched through the "Diary" of
+Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, 3 vols. (1911), which is
+our most important document showing Lincoln in his Cabinet. 
+Important sidelights on his character and development are shown
+in Ward Hill Lamon, "Recollections of Lincoln" (1911); David
+Homer Bates, "Lincoln in the Telegraph Office" (1907); and
+Frederick Trevor Hill, "Lincoln as a Lawyer" (1906).  A
+bibliography of Lincoln is in the twelfth volume of the latest
+edition of the "Writings".
+
+The lesser statesmen of the time, both Northern and Southern,
+still, as a rule, await proper treatment by detached biographers.
+Two Northerners have had such treatment, in Allen Johnson's
+"Stephen A. Douglas" (1908), and Frederic Bancroft's "Life of
+William H. Seward", 2 vols. (1900).  Good, but without the
+requisite detachment, is Moorfield Storey's "Charles Sumner",
+("American Statesmen Series", 1900).  With similar excellences
+but with the same defect, though still the best in its field, is
+Albert Bushnell Hart's "Salmon P. Chase" ("American Statesmen
+Series", 1899).  Among the Southern statesmen involved in the
+events of this volume, only the President of the Confederacy has
+received adequate reconsideration in recent years, in William E.
+Dodd's "Jefferson Davis" (1907).  The latest life of "Robert
+Toombs", by Ulrich B. Phillips (1914), is not definitive, but the
+best extant.  The great need for adequate lives of Stephens and
+Yancey is not at all met by the obsolete works--R. M. Johnston
+and W. M. Browne, "Life of Alexander H. Stephens" (1878), and J.
+W. Du Bose, "The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey"
+(1892). There is a brief biography of Stephens by Louis
+Pendleton, in the "American Crisis Biographies".  Most of the
+remaining biographies of the period, whether Northern or
+Southern, are either too superficial or too partisan to be
+recommended for general use. Almost alone in their way are the
+delightful "Confederate Portraits", by Gamaliel Bradford (1914),
+and the same author's "Union Portraits "(1916).
+
+Upon conditions in the North during the war there is a vast
+amount of material; but little is accessible to the general
+reader.  A book of great value is Emerson Fite's Social and
+Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War (1910). 
+Out of unnumbered books of reminiscence, one stands forth for the
+sincerity of its disinterested, if sharp, observation--W. H.
+Russell's "My Diary North and South" (1868).  Two newspapers are
+invaluable: The "New York Tribune" for a version of events as
+seen by the war party, "The New York Herald "for the opposite
+point of view; the Chicago papers are also important, chiefly the
+"Times" and "Tribune"; the "Republican "of Springfield, Mass.,
+had begun its distinguished career, while the "Journal" and
+"Advertiser" of Boston revealed Eastern New England.  For the
+Southern point of view, no papers are more important than the
+Richmond "Examiner", the Charleston "Mercury", and the New
+Orleans "Picayune". Financial and economic problems are well
+summed up in D. R. Dewey's "Financial History of the United
+States" (3d edition, 1907), and in E. P. Oberholzer's "Jay
+Cooks", 2 vols. (1907).  Foreign affairs are summarized
+adequately in C. F. Adams's "Charles Francis Adams" ("American
+Statesmen Series", 1900), John Bigelow's "France and the
+Confederate Navy" (1888), A. P. Martin's "Maximilian in Mexico"
+(1914), and John Bassett Moore's "Digest of International Law", 8
+vols. (1906).
+
+The documents of the period ranging from newspapers to
+presidential messages are not likely to be considered by the
+general reader, but if given a fair chance will prove
+fascinating. Besides the biographical edition of Lincoln's
+Writings, should be named, first of all, "The Congressional
+Globe" for debates in Congress; the "Statutes at Large"; the
+"Executive Documents", published by the Government and containing
+a great number of reports; and the enormous collection issued by
+the War Department under the title "Official Records of the Union
+and Confederate Armies", 128 vols. (1880-1901), especially the
+groups of volumes  known as second and third series.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Abraham Lincoln and the Union, by Stephenson
+
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