THE CHRONICLES 
 
 OF AMERICA SERIES 
 
 ALLEN JOHNSON 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 AND THE LINION 
 
 E 
 
 456 
 
 S832 
 
 NATHANIEL W, 
 STEPHENSON 
 
iTY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA CRUZ 
 
S831 
 
TEXTBOOK EDITION 
 
 THE CHRONICLES 
 
 OF AMERICA SERIES 
 
 ALLEN JOHNSON 
 
 EDITOR- 
 GERHARD R. LOMER 
 CHARLES W. JEFFERYS 
 ASSISTANT EDITORS 
 
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 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Av* 
 
 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 ob- 
 viously 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 Govern- 
 ment successful? With these two questions al- 
 ways 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 
 
 is 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 explanatory comment, their relations in the histori- 
 cal 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 in- 
 dicates 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. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE TWO NATIONS OF THE RE- 
 PUBLIC Page 1 
 
 II. THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION " 19 
 
 HI. THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY " 40 
 
 IV. THE CRISIS " 59 
 
 V. SECESSION " 81 
 
 VI. WAR " 102 
 
 til. LINCOLN " 126 
 
 VIII. THE RULE OF LINCOLN " 142 
 
 IX. THE CRUCIAL MATTER " 168 
 
 X. THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY " 192 
 
 tl. NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR " 204 
 
 XII. THE MEXICAN EPISODE " 224 
 
 XIII. THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 " 233 
 
 XIV. LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS " 251 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE " 261 
 
 INDEX " 265 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 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 to- 
 ward each other than these two nations of the 
 Republic." 
 
 This remark, which is attributed to Senator 
 Benjamin Wade of Ohio, provides the key to Amer- 
 ican politics in the decade following the Compro- 
 mise 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 
 
2 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 al- 
 ready so far alienated that they involved differ- 
 ences which would scarcely admit of reconciliation. 
 It is a truism to say that these differences grad- 
 ually 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 in- 
 termediate and apparently reactionary period of 
 sectionalism. In this stage of American history, 
 slavery was without doubt one of the prime fac- 
 tors 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 
 
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC 3 
 
 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 im- 
 pulse. With all his earlier fire he encouraged the 
 Southerners to withdraw from the so-called na- 
 tional parties, Whig and Democratic, to establish 
 instead a single Southern party, and to formu- 
 late, 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 up- 
 held separate state independence, and the new one 
 which virtually acknowledged Southern national- 
 ity. 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 master-spirit of secession Robert 
 Barn well Rhett. In 1851 he fought hard to revive 
 the older idea of state independence and to carry 
 
4 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 hast- 
 ily 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 sec- 
 tional 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 
 Hhett 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 
 
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC 5 
 
 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 any- 
 thing 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 re- 
 gion and the inflow of agricultural produce. The 
 movement of the latter eastward and northward, 
 and the former westward and southward, repre- 
 sents 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 
 
6 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 incon- 
 siderable magnitude. The Northern capitalists, 
 preoccupied with their desire to secure this ac- 
 count, were naturally eager to repudiate section- 
 alism, 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 them- 
 selves and whose political convictions were un- 
 biased 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 
 
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE JttEPCJBLIC 7 
 
 those two groups which, between them, are the 
 ruin of aristocracy the class of prosperous labor- 
 ers 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 ap- 
 plauded this expression of an opinion 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 funda- 
 mentally 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 
 
 
8 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 very moment when the Northerners of the demo- 
 cratic 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 Amer- 
 ican 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 them- 
 selves, 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. 
 
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC 9 
 
 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 con- 
 scious influences, from motives that arise out of 
 the dim parts of our being, from the midst of shad- 
 ows 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 with- 
 in 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 
 
10 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 tradi- 
 tions 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 partici- 
 pated in it the same graces and somewhat the 
 same capacities which it gave to the knightly class 
 in the days of Roland courage, frankness, gen- 
 erosity, 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 
 
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC 11 
 
 of social opinion, and in which private differences 
 were settled under the code of honor. 
 
 This Southern life was carried on in the most ap- 
 propriate environment. On a landed estate, often 
 larger than many of Europe's baronies, stood the 
 great house of the planter, usually a graceful ex- 
 ample of colonial architecture, surrounded by 
 stately gardens. This mansion was the center of 
 a boundless hospitality; guests were always com- 
 ing 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 coun- 
 try after the hounds; of coaches lumbering along 
 avenues of noble oaks, bringing handsome women 
 to visit the mansion; of great f eastings; 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 South- 
 erners it was always a secret burden from which 
 they saw no means of freeing themselves. To eman- 
 cipate the slaves, and thereby to create a popula- 
 tion of free blacks, was generally considered, from 
 the white point of view, an impossible solution of 
 
12 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 senti- 
 ment 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 num- 
 ber 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 in- 
 stances, had no hatred of the blacks. In the main 
 they led their free, spirited, and gracious life, con- 
 vinced that the maintenance of slavery was but 
 making the best of circumstances which were be- 
 yond 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. 
 

 THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC 13 
 
 But of these Southern people the average North- 
 erner 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 do- 
 ing so they were warmly applauded by the North- 
 ern 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 
 
14 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 demo- 
 crats 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 Northerner? 
 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 
 
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC 15 
 
 little or no thought to slavery itself; but they felt 
 that the section which maintained such a system 
 was 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 North- 
 erners 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 solv- 
 ing 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? 
 
 
16 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 state- 
 ment 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 a, 
 
THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC 17 
 
 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 be- 
 yond 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, how- 
 ever, local entanglements and political cross-pur- 
 poses 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 har- 
 monizing all these conflicting interests and for 
 drawing together the West and the South. Slave- 
 holders were to be given what at that moment 
 they wanted most an opportunity to expand in- 
 to 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 
 
18 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 Presi- 
 dent Pierce on May 30, 1854. ' 
 
 1 The origin of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill has been a much dis- 
 cussed subject among historians in recent years. The older view 
 that Douglas was simply playing into the hands of the "slave- 
 power" 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 Re- 
 peal of the Missouri Compromise, P. O. Ray contends that the 
 legislation of 1854 originated in a factional controversy in Mis- 
 souri, and that Douglas merely served the interests of the pro- 
 slavery 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 
 c f a territorial government and the repeal of the Missouri Com- 
 promise. 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 under- 
 stand the Democratic party of 1854 in which 
 Douglas was a conspicuous leader. The Demo- 
 crats boasted that they were the only really na- 
 tional party and contended that their rivals, the 
 Whigs and the Know-Nothings, were merely the 
 representatives of localities or classes. Sectional- 
 ism 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 
 
 TO 
 
30 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 char- 
 acter. 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 in- 
 dividualism which is an inheritance o? 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 Jeffer- 
 son. 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 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 21 
 
 during three or four years following the great 
 equivocation. In that period, while the anti- 
 slavery crusade was taking form, the aim of South- 
 ern politicians was mainly negative. "Let us 
 alone," was their chief demand. Though aggres- 
 sive 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. In- 
 deed it may well be called the party of political 
 evasion. It was a huge, loose confederacy of 
 differing political groups, embracing paupers and 
 
22 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 represen- 
 tative, both in strength and weakness. He had 
 all its pliability, its good humor, its broad and 
 easy way with things, its passion for playing pol- 
 itics. 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 confi- 
 dent in his hold upon the main body of his party, 
 he prepared for both the attacks and the defec- 
 tions that were inevitable. 
 
 Defections, indeed, began at once. Even before 
 the bill had been passed, the Appeal of the Inde- 
 pendent 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 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 23 
 
 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 aboli- 
 tionist, Giddings of Ohio. The Appeal denounced 
 Douglas as an "unscrupulous politician" and 
 sounded both the war-cries of the Northern masses 
 by accusing him of being engaged in "an atrocious 
 plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region im- 
 migrants 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 forma- 
 tion of an anti-Nebraska party, and the quick 
 rush of sectional patriotism to seize the territory 
 laid open by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The in- 
 stantaneous 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. x The political story alone concerns us 
 here. 
 
 When the fight began there were four parties 
 
 1 See Jesse Macy, The Anti-Slavery Crusade. (In The Chronicle* 
 ii* America.) 
 
24 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 in the field : the Democrats, the Whigs, the Free' 
 Soilers, and the Know-No things. 
 
 The Free-Soil party, hitherto a small organiza- 
 tion, 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 W T higs, 
 because the latter stood for positive ideas, and 
 aimed to be national in reality and not in the eva- 
 sive Democratic sense of the term. For, as a mat- 
 ter 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 be- 
 come merely sectional. Yet at the moment nega- 
 tion 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. 
 
THE PASTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 25 
 
 Even previous to 1S54, numbers of Whigs had 
 sought a desperate outlet for tieir 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 defi- 
 nite abandonment of existing issues and the discov- 
 ery 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 condi- 
 tion the failing spirit of the Whigs fastened. A 
 secret society which had been formed to oppose 
 th'_ 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 
 
6 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 ques- 
 tion 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 sec- 
 tional party. But though this transformation of 
 the wrecks of W 7 higgism 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 prepar- 
 ing to assist settlers who were oing west. In 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 27 
 
 May, there occurred at Boston one of the most con- 
 spicuous 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 July the anti-Nebraska men of Michigan held 
 a convention, at which they organized as a politi- 
 cal 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, postpon- 
 ing 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 "co- 
 operate 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 
 
28 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 th^ 
 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 suc- 
 ceed the Democratic colleague of Douglas. But 
 there was little chance of his election, for the real 
 contest was between the two wings of the Demo- 
 crats, the Nebraska men and the anti-Nebraska 
 men, and Lincoln withdrew in favor of the candi- 
 date of the latter, who was elected. 
 
THE PART^ OF POLITICAL EVASION 29 
 
 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 Republi- 
 can state convention and the Whig state conven- 
 tion 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 can- 
 didate for the speakership, however, was able 
 to command a majority, and finally, after it 
 had been agreed that a plurality would be suf- 
 ficient, 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, 
 
 
30 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 com- 
 posed of the newspaper editors of Illinois, and may 
 be looked upon as the organization of the Repub- 
 lican 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 hos- 
 tilities 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 danger- 
 ous honor was bestowed upon a dashing soldier and 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 31 
 
 explorer of the Rocky Mountains and the Far 
 West, John C. Fremont, 1 
 
 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 side- 
 tracked 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 
 W T higs, 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 cam- 
 
 1 For an account of Fremont, see Stewart Edward White, 
 The Forty-Niners (in The Chronicles of America}. Chapter II. 
 
32 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 paign 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 dia^ 
 tribe in the Senate, which was published as The 
 Crime Against Kansas. With double skill the 
 Republicans made equal capital out of the intel- 
 lectual 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 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 33 
 
 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 con- 
 vention at Cincinnati was temperate and discreet 
 in all its expressions, and for President it nomi- 
 nated a Northerner, James Buchanan of Penn- 
 sylvania, 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 furi- 
 ous 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 con- 
 fidently 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 
 
34 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 govern- 
 ments: 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 recogni- 
 tion. 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 con- 
 stitution which would determine whether slav- 
 ery or freedom was to prevail in other words, 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 35 
 
 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 sov- 
 ereignty" 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 wonder- 
 fully 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 
 
36 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 may be seen from an illustration. A House com* 
 mittee 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 Potta- 
 watomie. 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 bittei 
 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 a? 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 th^ 
 times from working its maddest act the very 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 37 
 
 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, "ac- 
 complishes 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 glit- 
 tering 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. Bu- 
 chanan 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 
 
38 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 
 
THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION 39 
 
 Whig remainder to choose, not as in 1856 between 
 a positive sectional policy and an evasive non- 
 sectional 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 sig- 
 nificant of a divergent point of view, had long en- 
 deavored 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 
 
 40 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 41 
 
 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 re- 
 garded 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 pro- 
 vincial enthusiasm for politics as the great Ameri- 
 can 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 sepa- 
 rate Southern community. 
 
 Furthermore, no man could become enthusi- 
 astic about political evasion unless by nature he 
 also took kindly to compromise. So, Toombs and 
 his followers were for preserving the negative 
 
42 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 Cabi- 
 net 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 Re- 
 publicans, 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 resurrec- 
 tion of the two groups which, in 1850, had divided 
 the South on the question of rejecting the Com- 
 promise. In a letter to Stephens in reference to 
 one of the Yancey men, Cobb prophesied: "Mc- 
 Donald 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 POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 43 
 
 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 South- 
 ern commercial conventions, which were held an- 
 nually. At this point there arises a vexed ques- 
 tion 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? 1 The truth seems to be that, between 
 1856 and 1860, both the idealist parties, the Repub- 
 licans 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. 
 
 These two issues Yancey, however, failed to 
 unite, though the commercial convention of 1859 
 
 1 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. 
 
44 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 North- 
 ern 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 som- 
 ber 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 sus- 
 pected 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 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 45 
 
 slave barons and their New York allies, it was 
 advocated as a means of political defense, of in- 
 creasing Southern population as an offset to the 
 movement of free emigration into the North, and 
 of keeping the proportion of Southern representav- 
 tion in Congress. Stephens, just after Cass had 
 successfully twisted the lion's tail, took this posi- 
 tion in a speech that caused a sensation. In a 
 private letter he added, "Unless we get immigra- 
 tion 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 accept- 
 ance; 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 Gover- 
 nor, Robert J. Walker, one of the most astute 
 of the Democrats of the opoosite faction and a 
 
46 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 Mississippian. The tangled situation which Walker 
 found, the details of his attempt to straighten it 
 out, belong in another volume. 1 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 submit- 
 ted 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 
 
 1 See Jesse Macy, The Anti-Slavery Crusade. (In The Chron- 
 icles of America.) 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 47 
 
 Democrats in control, rather than risk losing it 
 altogether. 
 
 The next step in the affair is one of the unsolved 
 problems in American history. Buchanan sud- 
 denly 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 con- 
 stitution 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 
 state? 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 ad- 
 
48 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 vantage. 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 advan- 
 tage they had won merely to let their enemies re- 
 trieve their mistake. Jefferson Davis formulated 
 this position in an address to the Mississippi Legis- 
 lature in which he insisted that Congress, not the 
 Kansas electorate, was entitled to create the Kansas 
 constitution, that the Convention was a proper- 
 ly 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 Adminis- 
 tration 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 free- 
 dom? On this issue the Southerners were fairly 
 generally agreed and maintained that there was no 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 49 
 
 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 de- 
 cided. I care not whether it is voted up or down. " 
 
 There followed one of those prolonged legisla- 
 tive battles for which the Congress of the United 
 States is justly celebrated. Furious oratory, prop- 
 ositions, counter-propositions, projected com- 
 promises, 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 brawl- 
 ing, all-night session when "thirty men, at least, 
 were engaged in the fisticuff, " and one Represen- 
 tative 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 
 
50 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 went home in 1858 to Illinois to fight for his ree'leo 
 tion. 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 posi- 
 tive 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; funda- 
 mentally, 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 ter- 
 ritory of Minnesota, and then back to Missouri, 
 now claimed to be free. The Supreme Court un- 
 dertook to decide whether his residence in Min- 
 nesota 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 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 51 
 
 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 en- 
 actment had never really been in force; there was 
 no binding prohibition of slavery in the North- 
 western 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 popu- 
 lation of a territory, whether for or against slavery, 
 was of any value whatsoever. Nothing mattered 
 until the new-made 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 be- 
 came 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 
 
52 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 accepted as orthodox Democratic doctrine by the 
 South, by the Administration, and by the "North- 
 ern 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 Re- 
 public; what more was to be said? Though in 
 truth there was but one other thing to be said, 
 and that revolutionary, the Republicans, never- 
 theless, did not falter over it. Seward announced 
 it in a speech in Congress on "Freedom in Kansas, " 
 when he uttered this menace: "We shall reorgan- 
 ize the Court and thus reform its political senti- 
 ments 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 nomi- 
 nation 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 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 53 
 
 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 death- 
 grapple of the sections : slavery the weapon of one, 
 free labor the weapon of the other. Though Lin- 
 coln was at that time forty-nine years old, his 
 political experience, in contrast with that of Doug- 
 las, 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 
 
54 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 the 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, discip- 
 lined by the court room, made pungent by famil- 
 iarity 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 joinu 
 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 is- 
 sued from the debates one of the chief intellec- 
 tual 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 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 55 
 
 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 Constitu- 
 tion; the people have the lawful means to intro- 
 duce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason 
 that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour any- 
 where unless it is supported by local police regu- 
 lations. Those police regulations can only be 
 established by the local legislatures; and if the 
 people are opposed to slavery, they will elect rep- 
 resentatives 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. 
 
56 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 Hence, no matter what the decision of the Su- 
 preme Court may be on that abstract question, 
 still the right of the people to make a slave terri- 
 tory 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 utter- 
 ance 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 inten- 
 tion. If not double-dealing in a strict sense, it 
 must yet be considered as having in it the temper 
 
THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY 57 
 
 of double-dealing. 1 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 noth- 
 ing in Douglas's position at which to be disturb- 
 ed. 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 ques- 
 tion 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 an- 
 swers, he can never be President, and the battle of 
 1860 is worth a hundred of this. " 
 
 Well might Yancey and his followers receive 
 
 1 There are three ways of regarding Douglas's position : (1) As 
 merely 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 in- 
 terpretation mentioned above. It is impossible in attempting to 
 choose among these to escape wholly one's impression of the man's 
 character. 
 
58 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 South- 
 erners 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 ave- 
 nues, 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 wonder- 
 
 59 
 
60 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 ing 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 sensi- 
 tive nature, he had at times flashes of strange feel- 
 ing which an unsophisticated society would regard 
 as prophetic inspirations. When he left Washing-- 
 ton "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 CRISIS 61 
 
 the days that were gone, the mysterious loveliness 
 of the Southern landscape with its immense fields, 
 its forests, its great empty spaces filled with glow- 
 ing 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 seclu- 
 sion, he beheld what seemed to him complete po- 
 litical 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 dis- 
 cussion, disagreement, crimination, and recrimina- 
 tion 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, the Southern battle over the reopen- 
 ing of the slave trade. The reality of that issue 
 had been made plain in May, 1859, when the 
 Southern commercial congress at Vicksburg en- 
 
62 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 tertained 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 Con- 
 gress asking the repeal of the law against African 
 slave trade. Of these opposed resolutions, the 
 latter was adopted on the last day of the conven- 
 tion, 1 though the moderates fought hard against it. 
 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 Vicks- 
 burg Convention adopted resolutions which were 
 thinly veiled endorsements of southward expan- 
 sion. In the early autumn another Nicaraguan ex- 
 pedition 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 
 
 1 It is significant that the composition of these Southern com- 
 mercial congresses and the Congress of the whole Southern people 
 was strikingly different in personnel. Very few members of tbe 
 commercial congresses reappear in the Confederate Congress. 
 
THE CRISIS 63 
 
 alluding to his arrangments to prevent slave trad- 
 ing 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 im- 
 periling 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 
 
64 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 machine and made impossible any further coali 
 tion 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 Republi- 
 can leaders did not offset, in the minds of South- 
 erners, 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 out to rouse a slave rebellion, every Southerner 
 familiar with his own traditions shuddered, identi- 
 fying in imagination John Brown and Nat Turner. 
 Horror became rage when the Southerners heard 
 of enthusiastic applause in Boston and of Emer- 
 son'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: 
 
THE CRISIS 65 
 
 " John Brown's effort . . . in its philosophy cor- 
 responds 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 fol- 
 lowers of Yancey made the most of their opportu- 
 nity. 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 con- 
 sideration. 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 
 
66 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 distribut- 
 ing a furious polemic against slavery, The Impend- 
 ing Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, by Hinton 
 Rowan Helper, a Southerner of inferior social posi- 
 tion belonging to the class known as poor whites. 
 The book teemed with such sentences as this, 
 addressing slaveholders: "Do you aspire to be- 
 come 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 Con- 
 federacy, 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 in- 
 duced to open it sooner than the Southern people. " 
 
THE CRISIS 67 
 
 The winter of 1859-1860 witnessed a famous con- 
 gressional battle over the speakership. The new 
 Congress which met in December contained 109 
 Republicans, 101 Democrats, and 27 Know-No th- 
 ings. The Republican candidate for speaker was 
 John Sherman of Ohio. As the first ballot showed 
 that he could not command a majority, a Demo- 
 crat 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 doc- 
 trines 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 Repub- 
 licans 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 sup- 
 ported Sherman but had not endorsed Helper, 
 
(68 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 was given the Republican support; a Know-Noth- 
 ing was made sergeant-at-arms; and Know-No th- 
 ing 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 pierc- 
 ing 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 expe- 
 rience 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 dif- 
 ferent 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 re- 
 fused ten years before to join in the secession 
 movement which ignored Calhoun's doctrine that 
 
THE CRISIS 69 
 
 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 poli- 
 tician, 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 Con- 
 federacy 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 reso- 
 lutions which were to serve as the Southern ulti- 
 matum, and which demanded of Congress the 
 protection of slavery against territorial legislatures. 
 This was but carrying to its logical conclusion that 
 
70 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 Dred Scott decision which Douglas and his follow- 
 ers 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 ter- 
 ritorial legislatures. Senator Pugh of Ohio had 
 already locked horns with Davis on this point, and 
 had attempted to show that a territorial legis- 
 lature 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 leg- 
 islatures were free to do what Congress could not 
 do, or to reject Douglas and endorse Davis's ulti- 
 matum that in substance was the issue. "In 
 this convention where there should be confidence 
 and harmony," said the Charleston Mercury, "it is 
 
THE CRISIS 71 
 
 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 affirm- 
 ing 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 ap- 
 proval 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 fol- 
 lowed the central event of the convention the 
 now famous speech by Yancey which repudiated 
 political evasion from top to bottom, frankly de- 
 fended slavery, and demanded either complete 
 guarantees for its continued existence or, as an 
 alternative, Southern independence. Pugh in- 
 stantly 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 extend- 
 ing it. "Gentlemen of the South," he exclaimed, 
 "you mistake us you mistake us we will not 
 doit." 
 
 In the full convention, where the representation 
 of the States was not equal, the Douglas men, after 
 
72 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 hot debate, forced the adoption of the minority 
 report. Thereupon the Alabama delegation pro- 
 tested and formally withdrew from the conven- 
 tion, and other delegations followed. There was 
 wild excitement in Charleston, where that even- 
 ing 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 frag- 
 ments 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 Re- 
 publicans 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 
 
THE CRISIS 73 
 
 ingenuity. A common sentiment, however, they 
 did have a real love of the Union and a real un- 
 happiness, 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 sig- 
 nificance than has generally been admitted. It 
 reveals the fact that the sentiment of Union, in 
 distinction from the belief in the Union, had be- 
 come a real force in American life. There could 
 be no clearer testimony to the strength of this feel- 
 ing than this spectacle of a great congregation of 
 moderate people, unable to agree upon anything 
 except this sentiment, stepping between the sec- 
 tional parties like a resolute wayfarer going for- 
 ward 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 
 
74 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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, out- 
 side 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 al- 
 ternative 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 senti- 
 ment 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 Con- 
 
THE CRISIS 75 
 
 stitutional Unionist. In every Southern State this 
 sentiment was able to command a considerable 
 part of the vote. z 
 
 Widely different in temper were those stern and 
 resolute men whose organization, in perfect fight- 
 ing 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 "ir- 
 repressible conflict" was everywhere quoted as an 
 exultant prophecy of these terrible latter days. 
 
 It was long the custom to deny to Seward any 
 
 1 A possible exception was South Carolina. As the presidential 
 electors were appointed by the legislature, there is no certain record of 
 minority sentiment. 
 
76 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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. Sew- 
 ard'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 presiden- 
 tial 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 173j^. 
 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 Lin- 
 coln gained 79. The enemies of Seward, finding 
 it impossible to combine on any of the conspicuous 
 candidates, were moving toward Lincoln, the man 
 
THE CRISIS 77 
 
 with fewest enemies. The third ballot gave Lin- 
 coln 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 Re- 
 publicans 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 pre- 
 served 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 inci- 
 dent, 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 
 
78 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 capital had done its part in financing the revived 
 slave trade. August Belmont, the New York re- 
 presentative of the Rothschilds, was one of the 
 close allies of Davis, Yancey, and Benjamin in 
 their war upon Douglas. In a word, a great por- 
 tion 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 power- 
 ful manufacturing interests of Pennsylvania, the 
 pivotal State that had elected Buchanan in 1856. 
 
 The steps by which the new party of enthusi- 
 asm 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 prin- 
 ciples, among which was non-intervention in busi- 
 ness, made the Democrats feeble doctors for such 
 a need, and they evaded the situation. The Re- 
 publicans, with their insistence on positivism in 
 government, had therefore an opportunity to make 
 
THE CRISIS 79 
 
 a new application of the doctrine of governmental 
 aid to business. In the spring of 1860, the Re- 
 publican House of Representatives passed the 
 Morrill tariff bill, consideration of which was post- 
 poned 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 there- 
 fore 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 so- 
 cieties in military form "Wide-awakes" for Lin- 
 coln, numbering 400,000, and "Minute Men" for 
 Breckinridge, with a membership chiefly South- 
 ern; and by the perfect frankness, in all parts of 
 the South, of threats of secession in case the Re- 
 publicans won. 
 
 In none of the States which eventually seceded 
 were any votes cast for Lincoln, with the excep- 
 tion of a small number in Virginia. In almost all 
 the other Southern States and in the slave-hold- 
 ing border States, all the other candidates made 
 
80 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 respectable showings. In Virginia, Tennessee, and 
 Kentucky, Bell led. But everywhere else in the 
 other slave-holding States Breckinridge led, ex- 
 cepting 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 ma- 
 jority of the popular vote, which stood: Lincoln, 
 1,866,452; Douglas, 1,376,957; Breckinridge, 849,- 
 781; Bell, 588,879. x 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 Repub- 
 licans have a majority. 
 
 1 The figures of the popular vote are variously given by different 
 compilers. These are taken from Stanwood, A History of the Presi- 
 dency. 
 
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 poli- 
 ticians 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, eco- 
 nomic 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 ac- 
 knowledge 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 
 
 6 81 
 
82 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 conclusion of the whole matter. The strife be- 
 tween 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 some- 
 where 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 rela- 
 tions of the State with the Union. The arguments 
 before the Convention were familiar and had been 
 advocated since 1851. The leaders of the dis- 
 unionists were the same who had led the unsuccess- 
 ful 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 pas- 
 sionate zeal the independence of South Carolina 
 
SECESSION 83 
 
 was proclaimed on December 20, 1860, by an ordi- 
 nance of secession. 
 
 Simultaneously, by one of those dramatic coin- 
 cidences which make history stranger than fiction, 
 Lincoln took a step which supplemented this ac- 
 tion 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 pos- 
 session of forts in Charleston Harbor whi'eh were 
 controlled by the Federal Government. Antici- 
 pating 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 
 
84 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 fol- 
 lowing chose. We shall see presently the relative 
 strength of the three groups into which that fol- 
 lowing broke and what strange courses some- 
 times tragic, sometimes comic two of the three 
 pursued. For the moment our concern is how the 
 division manifested itself among the heads of the 
 oarty at Washington. 
 
 ^he 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 Bu- 
 chanan, 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, "Buch- 
 anan, it is said, divides his time between praying 
 
SECESSION 85 
 
 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 "con- 
 clusively 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 in- 
 evitable 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 de- 
 voted a Southerner to come out of political evas- 
 ion except on one side. On the day Cobb resign- 
 ed the South Carolina Representatives called on 
 Buchanan and asked him not to make any change 
 in the disposition of troops at Charleston, and par- 
 
86 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 ticularly not to strengthen Sumter, a fortress on au 
 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 South- 
 erner, 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 Cab- 
 inet on the llth of December. Buchanan then 
 turned instinctively to the strongest natures that 
 remained among his close associates. It is a com- 
 pliment 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 Kan- 
 sas policy. But each, like every other member 
 of his party, was being forced by circumstances 
 
SECESSION 87 
 
 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 hench- 
 men would hypnotize the President. 
 
 For a couple of weeks the issue hung in the bal- 
 ance. Then there appeared at Washington com- 
 missioners 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 de- 
 fensible. 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 de- 
 signs against them, the South Carolina commis- 
 sioners 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. 
 
88 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 Deeply agitated and refusing to admit that he had 
 committed himself at the earlier conference, he 
 said that Anderson had acted on his own respon- 
 sibility, but he refused to order him back to the 
 now ruined Fort Moultrie. One remark which he 
 let fall has been remembered as evidence ot his 
 querulous state of mind: "You are pressing me 
 too importunately, " exclaimed the unhappy Presi- 
 dent; "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 dif- 
 ferent 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 
 
SECESSION 89 
 
 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 Moul- 
 trie; and for the brief remainder of Buchanan's 
 administration Black acted as prime minister. 
 
 A very powerful section of the Northern democ- 
 racy, 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 sup- 
 ported Lincoln. It is significant that Stanton 
 eventually reappeared in the Cabinet as Lincoln's 
 Secretary of War, and that along with him ap- 
 peared another War Democrat, Gideon Welles, 
 Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy. With them, at 
 last, Douglas, the greatest of all the old Demo- 
 crats of the North, took his position. What be- 
 came of the other factions of the old Democratic 
 party remains to be told. 
 
 While Buchanan, early in the month, was weep- 
 ing 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 
 
00 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 realized that they were confronted by 9 condi- 
 tion 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 tradi- 
 tions, and, even when they went over, as Black 
 
SECESSION 91 
 
 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 Re- 
 publicans, though a few, to be sure, were ready 
 to swing the "Northern hammer." Sumner pro- 
 phesied that slavery would "go down in blood." 
 But the bulk of the Republicans were for a sec- 
 tional compromise, and among them there was 
 general approbation of a scheme which contem- 
 plated reviving the line of the Missouri Compro- 
 mise, 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 ac- 
 counts, 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 
 
92 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 which finally happened and ruined many North- 
 ern firms that caused the stock-market in New 
 York to go up and down with feverish uncer- 
 tainty. Banks suspended payment in Washing- 
 ton, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The one im- 
 portant 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 Ken- 
 tucky submitted to the Senate a plan which has 
 been known ever since as the Crittenden Com- 
 promise. 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 Eve- 
 rett wrote to Crittenden, "I saw with great sat- 
 isfaction 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. ..." 
 
SECESSION 93 
 
 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 govern- 
 ment, 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 Secretary- 
 ship 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 Ordi- 
 nance of Secession was adopted which gave to 
 that day its double significance. 
 
 Lincoln refused point-blank to accept the com- 
 promise and he put his refusal in writing. The 
 
94 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 historic meaning of his refusal, and the signifi- 
 cance of his determination not to solve the problem 
 of the hour by accepting a dual system of govern- 
 ment based on frankly sectional assumptions, were 
 probably, in a measure, lost on both Weed and 
 Seward. They had, however, no misunderstand- 
 ing 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 com- 
 municated by letter made known his views, and 
 Greeley announced them in The Tribune. The 
 outcome was the solid alignment of all the Repub- 
 licans 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 
 
SECESSION 95 
 
 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 Sena- 
 tors and Representatives resigned from the Con- 
 gress of the United States. 
 
 The resignation of Jefferson Davis was commu- 
 nicated 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 pos- 
 sessed 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 
 
36 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 as- 
 sured the Southern people that y/ar 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 tar- 
 iff, 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 inter- 
 est on the other. The time had now arrived for 
 the Republican nominee to proceed from Spring- 
 field 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 
 
SECESSION 97 
 
 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 elec- 
 tion, 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 Com- 
 promise. 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 satisfac- 
 torily revealed the state of his mind between elec- 
 tion and inauguration. We may safely guess that 
 his silence covered a great internal struggle. Ex- 
 cept 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 responsibil- 
 ity for the drift. Though the country at that time 
 did not fully appreciate this aspect of the situa- 
 tion, 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 
 
98 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 the country drifted from its moorings, and when 
 war was becoming steadily more probable, Lin- 
 coln, 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 leav- 
 ing 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 un- 
 derstand 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 pre- 
 vent his returning some time and resuming in 
 those homely surroundings the life he had led pre- 
 vious 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, 
 
SECESSION 99 
 
 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 un- 
 fortunate speeches, for they expressed an opti- 
 mism 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 
 liis 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. 
 
100 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 He had accepted fate, deeply as it wounded him, 
 and had come out of the shattered party of eva- 
 sion 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, con- 
 tinued 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 pro- 
 nounced 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 con- 
 tained 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 
 
SECESSION 101 
 
 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 en- 
 joins 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 
 n<e 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 hearth- 
 stone, 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, commis- 
 sioners 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 Lin- 
 coln 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 psy- 
 chological intensity of this episode grew from the 
 consciousness in every mind that now, irretriev- 
 ably, 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 
 
 102 
 
WAR 103 
 
 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 1 
 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 2 surely reveals between the lines the doubt- 
 fulness 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 dema- 
 gogue; and yet he could be persuasive, agreeable, 
 and even personally charming. 
 
 1 Frederic Bancroft, Life of William H. Seward. 
 3 Gamaliel Bradford, Union Portraits. 
 
104 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 sub- 
 tle and patient manipulation of his childlike su- 
 perior. 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 con- 
 ceited, either; that is part of his singularity. 
 
 Lincoln's Cabinet was, as Seward said, a com* 
 pound body. With a view to strengthening his 
 position, Lincoln had appointed to cabinet posi- 
 tions all his former rivals for the Republican no- 
 mination. 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 appoint- 
 ment of Montgomery Blair of Maryland as Post- 
 master-General was intended to placate the border 
 Slave States. The same motive dictated the later 
 inclusion of James Speed of Kentucky in the Cabi- 
 net. The Black-Stanton wing of the Democrats 
 was represented in the Navy Department by 
 
WAR 105 
 
 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 mo- 
 ment, he withdrew his acceptance of the State 
 Department. It was Lincoln's gentleness of ar- 
 gument which overcame his reluctance to serve. 
 We may be sure, however, that Seward failed to 
 observe that Lincoln's tactlessness in social mat- 
 ters 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 ol 
 the Navy. The impression which Seward made on 
 his colleagues in the first days of the new Govern- 
 
106 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 ment 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 move- 
 ment 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 re- 
 gard 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 pol- 
 icy 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 
 
WAR 107 
 
 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 compla- 
 cently assured the North that the trouble would all 
 blow over within ninety days. He also believed 
 that any display of force would convert these hy- 
 pothetical Unionists of the South from friends to 
 enemies and would consolidate opinion in the Con- 
 federacy to produce war. In justice to Seward it 
 must be remembered that on this point time justi- 
 fied 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 com- 
 missioners 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 
 
108 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 Seward's lead in the matter of the forts. He 
 Vvas pulled up standing, however, by the threat- 
 ened resignation of the Postmaster-General, Blair. 
 After a conference with leading Republican poli- 
 ticians 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, dis- 
 cussed with him hurriedly and without detailed 
 
WAR 109 
 
 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 expe- 
 dition, Welles had detailed the powerful warship 
 Powhatan, which was rapidly being made ready 
 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Such was the situa- 
 tion 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 Presi- 
 dent's orders for Pensacola; but wishing to make 
 sure of his authority, he had telegraphed to Wash- 
 ington. Gideon Welles was a pugnacious man. 
 His dislike for Seward was deep-seated. Imagine 
 his state of mind when it was accidently revealed 
 to him that Seward had gone behind his back and 
 
110 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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, say- 
 ing 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 de- 
 taching 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 de- 
 scribing 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 com- 
 
WAR 111 
 
 mander, however, a personal telegram from the 
 Secretary of State appeared as of no weight against 
 the official orders of the President, and he con- 
 tinued his voyage to Pensacola. 
 
 The mercurial temper of Seward comes* out 
 even in the caustic narrative written afterwards 
 by Welles. Evidently Seward was deeply morti- 
 fied 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 com- 
 missioners 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 
 
112 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 hoped at the last moment to arrest the expedition 
 to Charleston, he was doomed to bitterest disap- 
 pointment. 
 
 On the 9th of April, the expedition to Fort Sum- 
 ter sailed, but without, as we have seen, the assist- 
 ance of the much-needed warship, the Powhatan. 
 As all the world knows, the expedition had been 
 too long delayed and it accomplished nothing. Be- 
 fore it arrived, the surrender of Sumter had been 
 demanded and refused and war had begun. Dur- 
 ing the bombardment of Sumter, the relief expedi- 
 tion 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, wait- 
 ing 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 Lin- 
 coln's time. Scarcely second in importance was 
 
 
WAR 113 
 
 that matter so curiously bound up with the relief 
 of the forts the getting in hand of the strangely 
 vainglorious 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 re- 
 garded 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 un- 
 avoidable," the paper warned him that "policies 
 . . . both domestic and foreign" must immedi- 
 ately 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 un- 
 explained reason might be safely retained) and 
 then, in order to bring the Southerners back into 
 the Union, to pick quarrels with both Spain and 
 
114 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 France; to proceed as quickly as possible to war 
 with both powers; and to have the ultimate sat- 
 isfaction 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 pro- 
 ject 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 with- 
 out 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 excite- 
 ment following the surrender, even so debonair a 
 minister as Seward must have realized how for- 
 tunate it was for him that his chief did not tell all 
 he knew. About this time Seward began to per- 
 
WAR 115 
 
 ceive 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 dis- 
 tressing commentary on the American party sys- 
 tem that, during the most critical month of the 
 most critical period of American history, much of 
 the President's time was consumed by these po- 
 litical 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, how- 
 
116 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 ever, amidst these accumulated dangers. Secession was 
 considered by most persons as a political party ques- 
 tion, not as rebellion. Democrats to a large extent 
 sympathized with the Rebels more than with the Ad- 
 ministration, 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. Patri- 
 otism 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 vehe- 
 mence 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 to- 
 gether. None of them, probably, when they first 
 assembled had any high opinion of their titular 
 
WAR 117 
 
 ) lead. 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 plain- 
 est origin, without formal education, was a great 
 genius. By degrees, however, the large minds in the 
 Cabinet became his cordial admirers. While Lin- 
 coln 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 fac- 
 tions in the North was steadily going forward. 
 The Republicans were falling into line behind the 
 Government; and by degrees the distinction be- 
 tween 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 
 
118 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 thought- 
 ful see is the stroke of fate. In the North, the 
 day passed for the most part in a quiet so breath- 
 less that even the most careless could have fore- 
 told the storm which broke on the following 
 day. The account of this crisis which has been 
 given by Lincoln's private secretary is interesting: 
 
 
WAR 119 
 
 "That day there was little change in the busi- 
 ness 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 offi- 
 cials called to learn or impart the news. The Cabi- 
 net, as by common impulse, came together and 
 deliberated. All talk, however, was brief, senten- 
 tious, formal. Lincoln said but little beyond mak- 
 ing inquiries about the current reports and criti- 
 cizing the probability or accuracy of their details, 
 and went on as usual receiving visitors, listening 
 to suggestions, and signing routine papers through- 
 out the day. " Meanwhile the cannon were boom- 
 ing 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 fort- 
 ress on the island. They watched the fire of the 
 defenders driven by the flames into a restrict- 
 ed 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. 
 
120 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 con- 
 demning 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 
 TOI all its political issues, he was prepared to sus- 
 tain the President in the exercise of all his con- 
 stitutional functions to preserve the Union, and 
 
WAR 121 
 
 maintain the Government, and defend the federal 
 capital. " 
 
 There remained of Douglas's life but a few 
 months. The time was filled with earnest speech- 
 making 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 prin- 
 ciple 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 sev- 
 eral Northern States at once responded. 
 
 On Wednesday, the 17th of April, the Sixth 
 Massachusetts Regiment entrained for Washing- 
 ton. 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 sev- 
 eral soldiers. 
 
 These shots at Baltimore aroused the Southern 
 
LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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, Lin- 
 coln found himself isolated at Washington with 
 no force but a handful of troops and the govern- 
 ment 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 Wash- 
 ington. 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 Virgin- 
 ians. So hastily was the destruction carried out, 
 that it was only partially successful and at both 
 
WAR 123 
 
 places large stores of ammunition were seized by 
 the Virginia troops. While Washington was iso- 
 lated, 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 pic- 
 ture of his desperate anxiety, waiting, day after 
 day, for relief from the North which he hoped 
 would speedily come by sea. Outwardly he main- 
 tained his self-control. "But once, on the after- 
 noon 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 wist- 
 fully 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 exclama- 
 tion, 'Why don't they come! Why don't they 
 come!" 
 
 During these days of isolation, when Washing- 
 ton, with the telegraph inoperative, was kept in 
 an appalling uncertainty, the North rose. There 
 was literally a rush to volunteer. "The heather 
 
124 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 is on fire," wrote George Ticknor, "I never be- 
 fore 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 Amer- 
 ica. Of the march of the regiment down Broad- 
 way, 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 Massa- 
 chusetts mechanics, the Eighth. Landing at An- 
 napolis, the two regiments, dandies and labor- 
 ers, fraternized at once in the common bond of 
 loyalty to the Union. A branch railway led 
 from Annapolis to the main line between Wash- 
 ington 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 to- 
 gether a long day and through the night follow- 
 ing, between Annapolis and the Washington June- 
 
WAR 125 
 
 tion, 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 
 aad 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 intel- 
 ligent estimate of their leader would be only to 
 duplicate the story of Hamlet with Hamlet left out 
 According to the opinion of English military ex- 
 perts, 1 "Against the great military genius of cer- 
 tain Southern leaders fate opposed the unbroken 
 resolution and passionate devotion to the Union, 
 which he worshiped, of the great Northern Presi- 
 dent. As long as he lived and ruled the people of 
 the North, there could be no turning back. " 
 
 1 Wood and Edmonds, The Civil War in the United States. 
 126 
 
LINCOLN 127 
 
 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 no- 
 thing that is not admirable; but as large a book 
 could be built up out of contemporaneous North- 
 ern writings that would paint a picture of unimti^ 
 gated blackness and the most eloquent portions 
 of it would be signed by Wendell Phillips. 
 
 The real Lincoln is, of course, neither the Lin- 
 coln 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 under- 
 stand 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 
 
128 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 hun* 
 dred years ago is needed," the mere historian 
 should proceed with caution. 
 
 There is historic significance in his very appear- 
 ance. His huge, loose-knit figure, six feet four 
 inches high, lean, muscular, ungainly, the evi- 
 dence of his great physical strength, was a fit sym- 
 bol 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 fore- 
 head 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 con- 
 tinued to serve him when he was virtually the dic- 
 tator of his country. It was in such dress that 
 
LINCOLN 129 
 
 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 conies 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. Per- 
 haps; 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 ex- 
 plains his vast success? As a force in American 
 history, what does he count for? Perhaps the 
 most significant detail in an answer to these ques- 
 tions is the fact that he had never held conspic- 
 uous public office until at the age of fifty-two 
 he became President. Psychologically his place 
 is in that small group of great geniuses whose 
 
130 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 in- 
 stances with those of the other type, the egoistic 
 geniuses such as Alexander or Napoleon, we be- 
 come 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 superintend- 
 ent 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 im- 
 
LINCOLN 131 
 
 pulse; 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 pro- 
 gression 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 circum- 
 stance 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 over- 
 tone of melancholy which lingers after one's im- 
 pression 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 
 
132 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 bio- 
 graphical problems. The impression which he 
 made on the country as President-elect was dis- 
 tinctly 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 for- 
 get, 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 show- 
 ing us how he felt in the early days of that com- 
 pany! 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 
 
LINCOLN 133 
 
 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 with- 
 drawals, no resigning secretary really split Lin- 
 coln's Cabinet. By what turns and twists and 
 skillful maneuvers Lincoln prevented such a di- 
 vision 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 opportun- 
 ism behind the majesty of his example. A modern 
 instance will perhaps make vivid this long stand- 
 ing debate upon Lincoln and his motives. Merely 
 for historic illumination and without becoming in- 
 vidious, we may recall the instance of President 
 Wilson and the resignation of his Secretary of War 
 in 1916 because Congress would not meet the is- 
 sue of preparedness. The President accepted the 
 
134 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 politi- 
 cal 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 in- 
 dividual 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 fail- 
 ure 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 
 
LINCOLN 135 
 
 what strange elements of sensibility, of wayward- 
 ness, of lack of imagination, of undisciplined ardor, 
 of selfishness, of deceitfulness, of treachery, com- 
 bined 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 some- 
 thing like a unit. To measure Lincoln's achieve- 
 ment in this respect, two things must be re- 
 membered: 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 com- 
 mitted itself either irretrievably for, or irrecon- 
 cilably 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 Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury; such astute grafters as Cam- 
 eron; such miserable creatures as certain powerful 
 capitalists who sacrificed his army to their own lust 
 or profits filched from army contracts. 
 
136 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 states- 
 man 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 states- 
 man 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 impera- 
 tive 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 under- 
 standing of Lincoln's statecraft, but there is per- 
 haps 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 
 
LINCOLN 137 
 
 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 com- 
 promise; upon his steadiness in the defeat of his 
 party at the polls in 1862; or his over-ruling 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 gentle- 
 ness, 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 
 
138 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 people, always playing the hand of the people, in 
 the limited social sense of that word, though play- 
 ing 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 an- 
 tipathy 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 govern- 
 ment 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 re- 
 considered; 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 
 
LINCOLN 139 
 
 Government should stand or fall. Though it is 
 doubtful how far the turning of the scale of Eng- 
 lish policy in Lincoln's favor was due to the in- 
 fluence of the rising power of English democracy, 
 it is plain that Lincoln thought of himself as having 
 one purpose with that movement which he re- 
 garded 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 
 
140 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 re- 
 asserted itself so remarkably, why this speech of 
 his at the dedication of the National Cemetery at 
 Gettysburg on the 19th of November, 1863, re- 
 mains 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. 
 
LINCOLN 141 
 
 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 conse- 
 crated 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 
 
 THE RULE OF LINCOLN 
 
 THE fundamental problem of the Lincoln Gov- 
 ernment 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 transforma- 
 tion 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 nomina- 
 tion. Personally honest, he was also a political 
 cynic to whom tradition ascribes the epigram de- 
 fining 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 
 
 142 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 143 
 
 of a volunteer army, Cameron reported in Decem- 
 ber 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 re- 
 ceived. 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 inevi- 
 table effect. Democracies are mercurial; variabil- 
 ity 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 mili- 
 tary 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 
 
144 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 any- 
 where near making arms for half a million men; 
 nor did the facilities of those days make it pos- 
 sible for munition plants to spring up over- 
 night. 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 unprepared- 
 ness of the South, and while Lincoln hurriedly col- 
 lected arms and ammunition from abroad, the 
 startled nation, thus suddenly forced into a real- 
 ization 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 mil- 
 lions 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 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 145 
 
 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 moun- 
 tainous 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 Mary- 
 land 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 moun- 
 taineers 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 situa- 
 tion and from the small engagements with Con- 
 
146 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 federate 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 il- 
 legitimate profits, at least of showing reckless 
 favoritism toward those who did. It is hardly 
 unfair to say that Lincoln, in bearing with Fre- 
 mont as long as he did, showed a touch of amiable 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 147 
 
 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 misunder- 
 stood. Though Lincoln hated to appear anything 
 but a friend to a fallen political rival, he was at 
 last forced to act. Frauds in government con- 
 tracts 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 over- 
 strained nerves of great numbers of people snapped. 
 Fremont's personal followers, as well as the aboli- 
 tionists 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 wild - 
 est 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 prose- 
 cute 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 investi- 
 
148 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 gation of Fremont's conduct. It was one of those 
 tremulous moments when people are desperately 
 eager to have something done and are ready to be- 
 lieve 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 mo- 
 ment of military inactivity and popular restless- 
 ness that charges of peculation were brought for- 
 ward 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 for- 
 tune." 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 ex- 
 pressed itself in such extravagant words as these 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 149 
 
 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 con- 
 duct of th 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 respon- 
 sible 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 Secre- 
 tary 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 
 
150 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 opin- 
 ion in such words as "the painful imbecility of 
 Lincoln. " The two had one personal recollection 
 in common: long before, in a single case, at Cin- 
 cinnati, the awkward Lincoln had been called in 
 as associate counsel to serve the convenience of 
 Stanton, who was already a lawyer of national re- 
 pute. 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, iras- 
 cible, rude, he had a sharp tongue which he de- 
 lighted 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 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 151 
 
 President's choice, and under his strong if ruth- 
 less 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 Lin- 
 coln'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 Mc- 
 Clellan, Lincoln endured much condescension of a 
 kind perilously near impertinence. To Stanton, 
 Lincoln's patience seemed a mystery; to McClel- 
 lan 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, appar- 
 ently 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. 
 
152 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 volun- 
 teered. 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 dis- 
 astrously in the terrible "Seven Days' Battles." 
 
 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 
 
 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 153 
 
 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 reenforcement 
 of only &7,000 men was raised in response to this 
 emergency call. The able lawyer in the War De- 
 partment 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 Antie- 
 tam 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 1 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 Con- 
 gressional election, in which, though the Govern- 
 ment still retained a working majority, the Demo- 
 crats gained thirty-three seats. 
 
 1 See Chanter IX. 
 
154 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 If there could be such a thing as a true psy- 
 chological 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 en- 
 thusiasm 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 ap- 
 parently 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 
 & 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. 1 The Act of 1863 was not the work of 
 
 1 The battle ^ver conscription in England was anticipated in 
 America sixty-four years ago. Ba^ot says that the average British 
 point of view may be expressed thus: "What I am say in' is this here 
 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 155 
 
 soldiers, but was literally "made in Congress." 
 Stanton grimly made the best of it, though he 
 unwaveringly condemned some of its most con- 
 spicuous 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 Act provided for a complete military census, 
 for which purpose the country was divided into 
 enrollment districts. Every able-bodied male citi- 
 zen, 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 cal- 
 led to the colors "drafted," the term was as 
 the Government found need of them; each sue- 
 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 1863, who fought to the last ditch for a mili- 
 tary 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 
 
156 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 cessive 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 sub- 
 stitute 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" 1 who for one 
 reason or another united in a faithful struggle 
 for peace at any price. Around the copperheads 
 
 1 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 ex- 
 planation associates the peace advocates with the deadly copperhead 
 snake. 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 157 
 
 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 sym- 
 pathies; 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. 
 
158 LINCOLN AND THE UNION * 
 
 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 for- 
 eign 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^ 
 
 

 THE RULE OF LINCOLN 159 
 
 and set fire to the building. In a short while, the 
 streets were filled with dense crowds of foreign- 
 born 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 sev- 
 eral 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 
 swept the streets with cannon. 
 
160 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 The aftermath of the New York riots was a cor- 
 respondence between Lincoln and Seymour. The 
 latter had demanded a suspension of the draft 
 until the courts could decide on the constitu- 
 tionality 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 be- 
 ginning 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 prob- 
 lem, 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 extraordi- 
 nary power. We may attribute to him that point 
 of view expressed by a distinguished Democrat 
 of our own day: "Democracy has to learn hov; 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 161 
 
 to use the dictator as a necessary war tool." 1 
 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 au- 
 thorized military arrests of suspected persons. 
 For the release of one of these, a certain Merry- 
 man, Chief Justice Taney issued a writ of habeas 
 corpus. 2 Lincoln authorized his military repre- 
 sentatives 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, 
 
 1 President Edwin A. Alderman, of the University of Virginia. 
 
 2 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. 
 
162 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 resisting military drafts, or guilty of any disloyal 
 practice. ..." Such persons were to be tried 
 by military commissions. 
 
 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, how- 
 ever, to have had little general effect, and it 
 was disregarded in the most celebrated of the 
 cases of military arrest, that of Clement L. Val- 
 landigham. 
 
 A representative from Ohio and one of the most 
 vituperative anti-Lincoln men in Congress, Val- 
 landigham 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 blood- 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 163 
 
 shed, 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 conse- 
 quence 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 Vallapdigham sent through the lines into 
 the Confederacy. 
 
 It seems quite plain that the condemnation of 
 Lincoln on this issue of usurpation was not con- 
 fined to the friends of the Confederacy, nor has 
 
164 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 it been confined to his enemies in later days. 
 One of Lincoln's most ardent admirers, the his- 
 torian 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 Val- 
 landigham." Lincoln, he adds, "stands re- 
 sponsible 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 op- 
 position 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. 1 His followers sought to make 
 the issue of the campaign the acceptance or re- 
 jection 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. 
 
 1 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 be- 
 came a temporary classic. 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 165 
 
 Long experience [he wrote] has shown that armies can- 
 not 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 in- 
 duces 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 adminis- 
 tration 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 re- 
 present me as struggling for an arbitrary prerogative, 
 is either simply a question who shall decide, or an af- 
 firmation 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 
 
166 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 peo- 
 ple to secure efficiency by setting him momentarily 
 above all civil authority. He asked them in sub- 
 stance, to interpret their Constitution by a show 
 of hands. No thoughtful person can doubt tht 
 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 Lin- 
 coln Government, yet it was clear that the tide 
 o* popularity which had ebbed so far away from 
 
THE RULE OF LINCOLN 167 
 
 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 for- 
 
 1.68 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 169 
 
 got 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 min- 
 isters, 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 W r ar 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 
 
170 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 the urgent necessity there is for the immediate 
 delivery of all the arms you are authorized to pur- 
 chase. The Department expects to hear that you 
 have been able to conclude the negotiations for 
 the 48,000 rifles from the French government ar- 
 senals. " 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 com- 
 plains, "for the purchase of arms for the Govern- 
 ment, 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, no- 
 thing 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, 
 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 171 
 
 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 with- 
 out 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, re- 
 fusing to supply them with arms because the sup- 
 plies 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 expedi- 
 tious in this all-important matter than Cameron 
 and the War Department. Sehuyler's first dis- 
 patch from London gives this singular informa- 
 tion: "All private establishments in Birming- 
 ham and London are now working for the States 
 of Ohio, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, except 
 
172 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 the London Armory, whose manufacture is sup 
 posed to go to the Rebels, but of this last fact 
 I am not positively informed. I am making ar- 
 rangements to secure these establishments for our 
 Government, if desirable after the present State 
 contracts expire. On the Continent, Messrs. Day- 
 ton and Sanford . . . have been making con- 
 tracts 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 ex- 
 isting munitions plants in Europe, and promising 
 among other things those "48,000 rifles from the 
 French government arsenals" for which, in the let- 
 ter 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 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 173 
 
 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 Ord- 
 nance Office for the first year of the war. It 
 shows that between April, 1861, and June, 1862, 
 the Government purchased from American manu- 
 facturers 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 appre- 
 ciated 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 
 motion of war as a thing of trumpets and glittering 
 
174 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 hysteri- 
 cal 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, LL 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 re- 
 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 175 
 
 ceived 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 North- 
 ern people themselves in backing up the rashness 
 of Captain Charles Wilkes, of the war-ship San 
 Jacinto. On the high seas he overhauled the Brit- 
 ish 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 rash- 
 ness 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 
 
176 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 law was hotly debated at the time and was gen- 
 erally denied by Northerners. England was the 
 great cotton market of the world. To the ex- 
 cited 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 block- 
 ade, 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 Eng- 
 lishmen 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. Promin- 
 ent among these was Sumner. The American Gov- 
 ernment, however, admitted the justice of the Brit- 
 ish demand and the envoys were released. 
 
 Relations with the United States now became n 
 burning issue in English politics. There were three 
 distinct groups in Parliament. The representa- 
 tives of the aristocracy, whether Liberals or Con- 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 177 
 
 servatives, 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 slav- 
 ery and had said scornful things about America for 
 tolerating it. To these Northerners the English- 
 men 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 North- 
 ern victory, bring about the abolition of slavery, 
 whereas, if the South won, the result would be the 
 perpetuation of slavery. This third group, there- 
 fore, 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 pre- 
 vious 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" 
 
178 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 and a "Southern" faction. Then, too, there were 
 some who sympathized with the North but w r ho 
 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 ter- 
 rible 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 Octo- 
 ber, 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 Liver- 
 pool presumably for the service of the Confederacy, 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 179 
 
 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 mari- 
 time 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 careless- 
 ness 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, 
 
180 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 thinking the Government was likely to intervene, 
 made his allusion to the South as a nation. 
 
 Meanwhile the Emperor of the French was con- 
 sidering a proposal to England and Russia to join 
 with him in mediation between the American bel- 
 ligerents. 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 cam- 
 paign, plainly indicated his purpose to attempt 
 intervention, and at parting cordial^ shook hands 
 with him. Within a few days the Emperor made 
 good his implied promise. 
 
 The month of November, 1862, is one of the 
 turning-points 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 
 

 THE CRUCIAL MATTER 181 
 
 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 recogni- 
 tion 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 assum- 
 ing 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 Ambassa- 
 dor and those of the French Minister of Foreign 
 Affairs, found in them contradictions as to what 
 was going on between the two governments in re- 
 lation to America. He took a hand by attempt- 
 ing 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 Eng- 
 
 
182 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 land as Napoleon's catspaw. Among the many 
 motives that may well have animated the Palmer- 
 ston 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 Glad- 
 stone at Newcastle lost his head and spoke too 
 soon. The most serious effect of his premature 
 utterance was the prompt reaction of the "North- 
 ern 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 mis- 
 understood. 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 gain- 
 ing 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. 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 183 
 
 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 im- 
 possible 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 Pro- 
 clamation was the turning-point in Lincoln's for- 
 eign policy; and because of it, his friends in Eng- 
 land eventually forced the Government to play in- 
 to 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 
 
184 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 into new territory. He maintained this posit ioi/ 
 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 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 185 
 
 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 com- 
 monly called the First Confiscation Act providing 
 that slaves used by Confederate armies in mili- 
 tary 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 with- 
 out 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 for- 
 mulated a plan for gradual emancipation with 
 compensation. The slaves of Maryland, Delaware, 
 Kentucky, Missouri, and the District of Colum- 
 bia were to be purchased at the rate of $400 each, 
 thus involving a total expenditure of $173,000,- 
 000. Although Congress adopted the joint resolu- 
 tion recommended by the President, the "border 
 
186 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 pro- 
 hibited 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 is- 
 sued an order freeing all the slaves in South Caro- 
 lina, 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 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 187 
 
 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 edito- 
 rial entitled, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions." 
 He denounced Lincoln's treatment of Fremont and 
 Hunter and demanded radical action. Lincoln re- 
 plied 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 
 che 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 be- 
 cause 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." 
 
188 LINCOLN AND 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. An- 
 tietam, which the North interpreted as a victory, 
 gave Lincoln his opportunity. 
 
 The Emancipation Proclamation applied only 
 to the States in arms against the Federal Govern- 
 ment. 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 Con- 
 federacy and those whose owners were in opposi- 
 tion to it. The Proclamation had no bearing on 
 those slave States which had not seceded. Need- 
 less to add, no seceded State returned, and a 
 second Proclamation making their slaves theoreti- 
 cally 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 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 189 
 
 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 turning-point 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 em- 
 ployers in England whose loss was wholly finan- 
 cial, 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 
 
190 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 its motives, the eventual extinction of slavery. 
 To these people, the Emancipation Proclamation 
 gave a definite programme. It was now, the lead- 
 ers argued, no longer a question of eventual ef- 
 fect; 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. Ad- 
 dresses of praise and sympathy "began to pour in- 
 to the Legation of the United States in a steady 
 and ever swelling stream. " An immense popular 
 demonstration took place at Exeter Hall. Cob- 
 den, writing to Sumner, described the new situa- 
 tion 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 working- 
 men at Manchester, where the cotton famine was 
 causing untold misery, adopted one of those New 
 Year greetings to Lincoln. Lincoln's reply ex- 
 pressed with his usual directness his own view 
 of the sympathetic relation that had been estab- 
 lished between the democratic classes of the two 
 countries : 
 
 
THE CRUCIAL MATTER 191 
 
 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 sur- 
 passed 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 admi- 
 ration, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of 
 friendship among the American people. I hail this in- 
 terchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that 
 whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may 
 befall your country or my own, the peace and friend- 
 ship 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, be- 
 tween the first and second phases of Lincoln's 
 administration. 
 
 The interesting Englishman who is the latest 
 biographer of Lincoln says of Chase: "Unfor- 
 tunately, this imposing person was a sneak." 
 But is Lord Charnwood justified in that surpris- 
 ing 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 conven- 
 
 192 
 

 THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 193 
 
 
 tional thing in America to call him our greatest 
 finance minister since Hamilton, and even a con- 
 spicuous enemy said of him, at a crucial mo- 
 ment, 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 here- 
 in is the whole explanation of the two charac- 
 teristics 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. 
 
 13 
 
194 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 pre- 
 pared 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 in- 
 tense excitability and of nervous reaction. Fre- 
 mont 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 syn- 
 dicate of banks in New York, Boston, and Phila- 
 delphia 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 
 
THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 195 
 
 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 fi- 
 nancial 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 differ- 
 ences 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 irre- 
 deemable paper money. And what did the Secre- 
 tary 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, 
 goon acquiesced. Before long he was asking Con- 
 
196 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 gress to allow a further issue of what he had pre- 
 viously 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 legisla- 
 tion 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. Jus- 
 tin Merrill, 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 ful- 
 
 
THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 197 
 
 filled; 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 ex- 
 cluding foreign competition. All these taxes, how- 
 ever, 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 taxa- 
 tion 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 
 
198 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 there was a Chase faction and a Seward faction. 
 The former had behind them the Radical Repub- 
 licans, 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 Lin- 
 coln the removal of Seward. It will be remem- 
 bered 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 alac- 
 
THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 199 
 
 rity, Chase with reluctance. One of the clues to 
 Lincoln's cabinet policy was his determination te 
 keep both these factions committed to the Gov- 
 ernment, 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 man- 
 fully. The Government's deficit was $276,900,000. 
 Of the loans authorized in 1862 the "five-twen- 
 ties" as they were called, bringing six per cent 
 and to run from five to twenty years at the Gov- 
 ernment'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 sit- 
 uation of 1863, or to determine just what influ- 
 ences caused a revolution in the market for govern- 
 ment bonds. But two factors must be mentioned. 
 i 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 
 
200 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 country- 
 wide agency system, with twenty-five hundred 
 sub-agents 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 leg- 
 islation 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 
 
THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 201 
 
 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 Lin- 
 coln'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. Un- 
 fortunately for Chase, this circular fell into the 
 hands of a newspaper and was published. Chase 
 
202 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 v/hich 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 ques- 
 tion 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 death- 
 blow 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 morti' 
 fication of seeing Lincoln renominated in the Na- 
 tional 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 recon- 
 sider his decision. Soon after the renomination, 
 
THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 203 
 
 Chase again offered his resignation upon the pretext 
 of a disagreement with the President over appoint- 
 ments 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 af- 
 fect his judgment that he was capable of writing 
 in his diary his belief that Lincoln meant to re- 
 verse 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 on 
 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 I 
 Chickamauga, during my three weeks' stay in 
 Cincinnati, brought a long list of the dead and i 
 wounded of the Western army, many of whom, of i 
 the officers, belonged to the best families of the 
 
 204 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 205 
 
 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 hospi- 
 tal where "all our best people" worked passion- 
 ately 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. 
 
206 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 commer- 
 cial 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 indus- 
 trial 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 contra- 
 dict 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 "unproduc- 
 tive" 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 
 rained in 1860 and 21 million in 1864; in 1860, 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 207 
 
 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 mil- 
 lion 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 ex- 
 porting 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 men- 
 tioned 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 indus- 
 tries 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 indus- 
 
 
208 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 tries 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 seal- 
 ing up of the South and the failure of the cot- 
 ton 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. Further- 
 more, 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 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 209 
 
 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 ob- 
 jects of charity until they could resume their 
 work. As a country with a great reserve of un- 
 occupied 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 abnor- 
 mal 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 popula- 
 tion 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 explana- 
 
 
210 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 tion. There was no need for the unemployed 
 workman to become a pauper. He could take 
 advantage of the Homestead Act, 1 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. 
 
 There is no more important phenomenon of the 
 time than the shifting of large masses of popula- 
 tion from the East to the West, while the war 
 was in progress. This fact begins to indicate why 
 
 1 This Act, which may be regarded as the culmination of the long 
 jattle of the Northern dreamers to win "land for the landless," 
 provided that e^ery settler who was, or intended to be, a citizen 
 might secure 160 acres of government land by living on it and cul- 
 tivating it for five vears. 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 211 
 
 there was no shortage in the agricultural out- 
 put. 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 ad- 
 dition 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 de- 
 gree 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 
 
LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 occupations, especially farming. A single quota- 
 tion 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 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 
 
 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 pro- 
 duced 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 
 l<;d a poetical person to imagine the army as a 
 devouring dragon. Who, in the last analysis, pro- 
 v'ded all these supplies? Who paid the soldiers? 
 
214 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 Who supplemented their meager pay and sup 
 ported 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 Chris- 
 tian 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 Phila- 
 delphia 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 neigh- 
 bors, 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 willing- 
 ness of those supporting the war to forego luxuries. 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 215 
 
 They ceased buying a great multitude of unneces- 
 sary 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 popu- 
 lations 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 sur- 
 vived; 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 direc- 
 tion, 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 
 

 216 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 money, or to make financial sacrifice, or to give' 
 unpaid service, were free to pursue their owu 
 bent. The election of 1864 showed that they\ 
 formed a market which amounted to something^ 
 between six and nine millions. There is no reason 1 
 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 ofi 
 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 im 
 this fact, too often forgotten, that there was api 
 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 
 mto account. The American spirit of invention; 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 217 
 
 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 con- 
 scription 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 men- 
 tioned 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 "disloyals" and the 
 parasites to make huge war profits out of the "loy- 
 als" 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 in- 
 cident of the autumn of 1861 shows the temper of 
 those professed "loyals" who were really para- 
 
 
218 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 sites. 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 sum- 
 mer 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 diffi- 
 culty in the shortest possible time by purchas- 
 ing 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 argu- 
 mentative protest from a committee of the Boston 
 Board of Trade against the purchase of army 
 clothing in Europe. Any American of the present 
 
220- LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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, four- 
 month notes which had been given by Southern , 
 agents with their orders fell due, had to be re- 
 newed, and began to be held in disfavor. Agents 
 of the North, getting wind of these hitches in 
 negotiations, eagerly sought to take over the un- 
 paid 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." 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 221 
 
 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 Wool-growers' 
 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 
 
222 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 grower and every woolen manufacturer was either 
 a "disloyal" or a parasite. By no means. Num- 
 bers 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 them- 
 selves 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 be- 
 come rich " shoddy aristocracy." An even more 
 shameful result of the selfishness of the manu- 
 facturers and of the weakness of the Government 
 was the use of cloth for uniforms not of the regula- 
 tion colors, with the result that soldiers sometimes 
 fired upon their comrades by mistake. 
 
NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR 223 
 
 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 esti- 
 mated that prices in the main advanced about 
 1 00 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 XH 
 
 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 re- 
 jected. This Mexican venture explains why the 
 plan was suggested at that particular time. 
 
 224 
 

 THE MEXICAN EPISODE 225 
 
 Disappointed in England and Russia, Napo- 
 leon 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 gen- 
 erous acts to his credit, as well as many foolish 
 ones. For the present we have to note that to- 
 ward 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 con- 
 victions. When he told the Ambassador that the 
 Emperor's mediation would lead to a reconcilia- 
 tion 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 assump- 
 tion about Greeley. At Richmond, he found no 
 
226 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 at- 
 tempt alone what he had once hoped to do sup- 
 ported 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, how- 
 ever, 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 
 

 THE MEXICAN EPISODE 227 
 
 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 Eng- 
 land, the Southern party made a fresh start; and 
 societies were organized to aid the Confederacy. 
 At Liverpool, Laird Brothers were building, os- 
 tensibly for France, really for the Confederacy, 
 two ironclads supposed to outclass every ship in 
 the Northern navy. In France, 100,000 unem- 
 ployed 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 re- 
 publics, and a broad way for his own scheme in 
 Mexico. 
 
 In June an English politician of Southern sym- 
 pathies, 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 
 
228 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 Govern- 
 ment, 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 care- 
 lessness of the British authorities had permitted 
 the escape of ship 290, subsequently known as the 
 Confederate commerce-destroyer, 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 pur- 
 chaser? It was in the course of diplomatic con- 
 versations that Mr. Adams, speaking of the pos- 
 sible sailing of the ships, made a remark destined to 
 
 
THE MEXICAN EPISODE 229 
 
 become famous: "It would be superfluous in me to 
 point out to your lordship that this is war." At 
 last, 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 bit- 
 terly condemned. Yet he had gone too far to re- 
 cede, and what he had been aiming at all along 
 was now revealed. An assembly of Mexican not- 
 ables, convened by the general of the invaders, 
 voted to set up an imperial government and of- 
 fered the crown to Napoleon's nominee, the Arch- 
 duke 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 Ameri- 
 can soil by foreign arms? Between these horns of 
 a dilemma, the Government maintained its pre- 
 carious position during another year. Seward's 
 correspondence with Paris was a masterpiece of 
 evasion. He neither protested against the inter- 
 vention of Napoleon nor acknowledged the au- 
 
230 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 thority of Maximilian. Apparently, both he and 
 Lincoln were divided between fear of a French 
 alliance with the Confederacy and fear of prema- 
 ture action in the North that would render Napo- 
 leon desperate. Just how far they comprehended 
 Napoleon and his problems is an open question. 
 
 Whether really comprehending or merely trust- 
 ing to its instinct, Congress took a bolder course. 
 Two men prove the antagonists of a parliamen- 
 tary duel Charles Sumner, chairman of the Sen- 
 ate Committee on Foreign Relations, and Henry 
 Winter Davis, chairman of the corresponding com- 
 mittee of the House. Sumner played the hand 
 of the Administration. Fiery resolutions demand- 
 ing the evacuation of Mexico or an American de- 
 claration of war were skillfully buried in the silence 
 of Sumner's committee. But there was neverthe- 
 less one resolution that affected history: it was a 
 ringing condemnation of the attempt to establish 
 a monarchy in Mexico. In the House, a joint re- 
 solution which Davis submitted was passed with- 
 out 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. 
 
 
THE MEXICAN EPISODE 231 
 
 Shortly afterwards, the American Ambassador 
 at Paris called upon the imperial Foreign Secre- 
 tary, M. Drouyn de L'huys. News of this resolu- 
 tion had preceded him. He was met by the curt 
 question, "Do you bring peace or war?" Again, 
 the Washington Government was skillfully eva- 
 sive. 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 relent- 
 less personal enemies. Dissatisfaction with Lin- 
 coln'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 es- 
 tablishment of monarchy "in near proximity to the 
 United States." In the same month Maximilian 
 entered Mexico City. 
 
 The subsequent moves of Napoleon are ex- 
 
232 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 plained elsewhere. 1 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 sum- 
 mer, the Confederate Secretary of State was bit- 
 ter in his denunciation of Napoleon for having 
 deserted the South. Napoleon's puppet Maxi- 
 milian refused to receive an envoy from the Con- 
 federacy. 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 peo- 
 ple 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 
 gee 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 
 m the spring of 1864 and which has come to be 
 known, from its place of meeting, as the Cleve- 
 land Convention. Its coming together was the re- 
 sult 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 pro- 
 
 233 
 
234 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 portion of agnostics among its members. A mo- 
 tion 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 disor- 
 dered genius, Wendell Phillips. He sent a letter 
 denouncing Lincoln and pledging his support of 
 Fremont because of the latter 's "clear-sighted 
 statesmanship and rare military ability." The 
 convention declared itself a political party, under 
 the style of the Radical Democracy, and nomin- 
 ated Fremont for President. 
 
 There was another body of dreamers, still more 
 singular, who were also bitter opponents of Lin- 
 coln. They were, however, not in favor of war. 
 Their political machinery consisted of secret soci- 
 eties. 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 PLEBISCITE OF 1864 235 
 
 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 investiga- 
 tion 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. 
 
236 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 se- 
 crecy 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 conse- 
 crate 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 
 
THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 237 
 
 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 myste- 
 riously 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 socie- 
 ties 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 
 
 
238 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 Vallandig- 
 ham. That redoubtable person had fixed his head- 
 quarters in Canada, whence he directed his parti- 
 sans 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 ad- 
 vertising 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 up- 
 rising, 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 
 
THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 239 
 
 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 estab- 
 lishment 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 
 
240 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 de- 
 scribed 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 Demo- 
 crats were to participate. Their plan was success- 
 ful. 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 
 

 THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 241 
 
 of the National Union League, "to suppose thai 
 either the Convention or the League have con- 
 cluded to decide that I am either the greatest or the 
 best man in America, but rather they have con- 
 cluded 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 between the 
 President and Congress with regard to reconstruc- 
 tion in Louisiana, over a large part of which Fed- 
 eral troops had established a civil government 
 on the President's authority. As an incident in 
 the history of reconstruction, this whole matter 
 lias 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 ob- 
 noxious 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. 
 
 1 Walter L. Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox. (In The Chroni- 
 cles of America.) 
 
LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 Congress passed a bill taking reconstruction out 
 of the President's hands and definitely requiring 
 the reconstructed States to abolish slavery. Lin- 
 coln took the position that Congress had no power 
 over slavery in the States. When his Proclama- 
 tion was thrown in his teeth, he replied, "I con- 
 ceive that I may in an emergency do things on 
 military grounds which cannot be done consti- 
 tutionally 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 de- 
 nunciation of Lincoln which has been known ever 
 since as the Wade- Davis Manifesto. 
 
 There was a faction in the Union Party which 
 we may justly name the Vindictives. The Mani- 
 festo gave them a rallying cry. At a conference 
 in New York they decided to compel the retire- 
 ment of Lincoln and the nomination of some other 
 candidate. For this purpose a new convention 
 was to be called at Cincinnati in September. ID 
 

 THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 243 
 
 the ranks of the Vindictives at this time was the 
 impetuous editor of the New York Tribune, Hor- 
 ace 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. Fur- 
 thermore, 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 
 
244 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 dis- 
 content throughout the country. The horrible 
 slaughter of the Wilderness, still fresh in every- 
 body'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 ne- 
 gotiations because "our bleeding, bankrupt, al- 
 most 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 con- 
 ference do not concern us. The Confederate 
 
THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 245 
 
 agents were not empowered to treat for peace 
 at least not on any terms that would be con- 
 sidered 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. Lincoh ,, who 
 foresaw this possible turn of events, had expressly 
 limited Greeley to negotiations for "the integrity 
 of the whole Union and the abandonment of slav- 
 ery." Greeley chose to believe that these instruc- 
 tions, 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. 
 
246 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 . . . We must have another *icket 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 Lin- 
 coln man, wrote to the President that the situa- 
 tion 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 reflected. " On 
 the 1st of September, 1864, with three presi- 
 dential 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 pop- 
 ular mind achieved results. Sherman, in Geor- 
 gia, 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 Mo- 
 bile 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 
 
THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 247 
 
 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 Septembei 
 Lincoln issued a proclamation appointing a day 
 of thanksgiving for these great victories of Sher- 
 man 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 fol- 
 lowed; but there are three separate events of im- 
 portance 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 re- 
 maining two surprising events. Fremont with- 
 drew from his candidacy in order to do his "part 
 toward preventing the election of the Democratic 
 candidate." And Lincoln asked for the resigna- 
 tion of a member of his Cabinet, Postmaster- 
 General Montgomery Blair, who was the especial 
 enemy of the Vindictives. 
 
248 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 The official biographers of Lincoln 1 keep these 
 three events separate. They hold that Blair's re- 
 moval 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 ill-balanced Fremont. It had been stimu- 
 lated 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 
 
 1 His private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay 
 
THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864 249 
 
 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. 
 
 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 re- 
 ceived an electoral vote of 212 against 21, and 
 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 nu- 
 merous 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 
 
250 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 
 
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 for- 
 eign 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 main- 
 taining 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 specu- 
 lating in contraband trade, he made no demand 
 upon the British Government to relieve him of the 
 
252 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 sup- 
 plies 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 
 
LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS 253 
 
 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 inter- 
 national 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 re- 
 cognized 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 contra- 
 band 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 correspond- 
 ence during the war. The United States stood 
 firm for the idea that when goods were ultimately 
 
254 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 intended for the Confederacy, no matter how 
 roundabout the journey, they could be consid- 
 ered 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 prin- 
 ciple of continuous voyage in four celebrated 
 cases that are now among the landmarks of in- 
 ternational law. 1 
 
 This was the last step in making the block- 
 ade effective. Thereafter, it slowly strangled the 
 South. The Federal armies enormously over- 
 matched 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 compara- 
 tive ease, the aged Chief Justice Taney died, and 
 Lincoln appointed to that high position his un- 
 generous rival, Chase. 
 
 Even now Lincoln had not established himself as 
 a leader superior to party, but he had the satis- 
 faction, early in 1865, of seeing the ranks of the 
 opposition begin to break. Naturally, the Thir- 
 teenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing 
 
 1 The Great War has once again led to controversy over this 
 *ubject, so vital to neutral states. 
 
LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS 255 
 
 slavery throughout the United States, appeared 
 to Lincoln as in a way the consummation of his 
 labors. When the House voted on the resolu- 
 tion 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 Con- 
 federate 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, ac- 
 cording to which Lincoln wrote on a sheet of 
 paper the word "Union, " pushed it across to Alex- 
 ander H. Stephens and said, "Write under that 
 anything you please/'* 
 
356 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 states- 
 manlike 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 op- 
 posed 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 to- 
 wards 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." 
 
 
LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS 257 
 
 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 follow- 
 ing words, in his last public address, made on the 
 night of the llth of April: "In the present situa- 
 tion, 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 treat- 
 ment 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 
 
258 LINCOLN AND THE UNION 
 
 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 boarding-house in Washington were plan- 
 ning his assassination. Their leader was John 
 W 7 ilkes 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 unbal- 
 anced condition. Only a morbid interest can at- 
 tach 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 
 
 
LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS 259 
 
 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 per- 
 spective. 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 suspen- 
 sion 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 com- 
 parative 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 Cen- 
 tury, 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., 
 
 261 
 
262 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Abraham Lincoln (American Statesmen Series, % 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 Recollec- 
 tions of Abraham Lincoln, 3 vols. (1889; unexpurgated 
 edition). It contains about all we know of his early 
 life and paints a picture of sordid ugliness. Its re- 
 liability 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 W T ard 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 biblio- 
 graphy 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 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 263 
 
 such treatment, in Allen Johnson's Stephen A. Doug- 
 las (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 ex- 
 cellences 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 r . H. Russell',* 
 
264 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 My Diary North and South (1863). 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 dis- 
 tinguished 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 eco- 
 nomic 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 Cooke, 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 Interna- 
 tional Law, 8 vols. (1906) 
 
 The documents of the period ranging from news- 
 papers 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. 
 

 INDEX 
 
 Abolitionists, warned to leave 
 
 South, 66; desire peace, 90; 
 
 displeased with Lincoln, 187 
 Adams, C. F., Ambassador to 
 
 London, 129, 169, 170, 228 
 Alabama, The, ship, 179 
 Alabama delegation withdraws 
 
 from Democratic Convention, 
 
 72 
 Alexander, Emperor of Russia, 
 
 hatred of slavery, 180 
 American Knights, Order of, 
 
 235-37 
 
 American party, 25 
 Anderson, Robert, Major, 83, 87, 
 
 88, 89 
 Annapolis, Northern troops 
 
 reach, 124 
 Anti-Nebraska party, 23, 27, 
 
 28,29 
 
 Antietana, Battle of, 153 
 Appeal of the Independent Demo- 
 crats, 22-23 
 Atchinson, D. R., of Missouri, 18 
 
 (note) 
 
 Baltimore, Sixth Massachusetts 
 Regiment attacked in, 121 
 
 Banks, N. P., 29 
 
 Baring Brothers, banking house, 
 169 
 
 Bates, Edward, Attorney-Gen- 
 eral, 104 
 
 Beauregard, G. T., General, 
 scheme for Northwestern Con- 
 federacy, 237 
 
 Bell, John, of Tennessee, 73, 
 74-75, 80 
 
 Belmont, August, 78, 9, 
 240 
 
 Benjamin, J. P., of Louisiana, 
 68,69 
 
 Black, J. S., Attorney-General, 
 advanced to post of Secretary 
 of State, 86, 88-89 
 
 Blair, Montgomery, Postmaster- 
 General, 104, 108, 134, 247 
 
 Blockade of Southern ports, 173 
 et seq., 251-54 
 
 Booth, J. W., 258-59 
 
 Border states, affairs in, 145-46; 
 Lincoln's plan of freeing slaves 
 in, 185-86 
 
 Boston, attempt to rescue fugi- 
 tive slave at, 27; applauds 
 John Brown, 64 
 
 Breckinridge, J. C., 79, 80 
 
 Bright, John, 177, 228 
 
 Brooks, Preston, attacks Sumner, 
 32 
 
 Brown, John, raid at Harper's 
 Ferry, 63-65 
 
 Brown, John, murders at Pott- 
 awatomie, 36 
 
 Buchanan, James, nominated by 
 Democratic Convention, 33; 
 elected President, 37; changes 
 attitude toward Southern ex- 
 tremists, 47-48; crisis in career 
 of, 84; message to Congress, 
 Dec. 4, 1860, 85; agitation 
 over South Carolina Commis- 
 sion, 87-88 
 
 Bull Run, defeat at, 146 
 
 Burns, Anthony, fugitive slave, 
 27 
 
 265 
 
266 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Butler, B. F., General, refuses 
 to surrender fugitive slaves, 
 184-85; mentioned by Greeley 
 as presidential candidate, 246 
 
 Cabinet, Lincoln's, 104-05, 116- 
 117, 132-33 
 
 Calhoun, J. C., 3 
 
 Cameron, Simon, Secretary of 
 War, 104; political rival of 
 Seward, 105; national figure, 
 132; grafter, 135; as a politi- 
 cian, 142; popular rage against, 
 147-48; nominated minister 
 to Russia, 149; appointment 
 confirmed, 150 
 
 Capital, Northern, economic vas- 
 sal of South, 7; joins interest 
 to Republican party, 43; 
 interest in South, 77-78; stand 
 in party reorganization, 77-79 ; 
 urges against war and confisca- 
 tion of debts, 91 
 
 Cass, Lewis, Secretary of State, 
 44; resigns, 86 
 
 Charleston, relief expedition to, 
 109-10, 112 
 
 Charleston Mercury, 70 
 
 Charnwood, Lord, quoted, 183 
 
 Chase, S. P., sent to Senate by 
 Free-Soilers and Democrats, 
 23; Secretary of Treasury, 104; 
 political rival of Seward, 105; 
 national figure, 132; enemy of 
 Seward, 133; estimates of, 
 192-93; asks for bond issue, 
 193; issues Treasury notes, 
 194-95; issues paper money, 
 195-96; leads faction in Cabi- 
 net, 197-98; resigns, 198; 
 resignation not accepted, 198; 
 returns with reluctance, 199; 
 calls Cooke to aid, 200; advises 
 establishment of national 
 banks, 200; conceit of, 201; 
 considered for presidency, 201- 
 202; resignation accepted, 203; 
 possible connection with Blair's 
 
 removal, 248; appointed Chiet 
 Justice, 254 
 
 Cheves, Langdon, quoted, 4 
 
 Choate, Rufus, quoted, 36-37 
 
 Cincinnati in war-time, 204-05 
 
 Clay, Henry, 24 
 
 Cleveland Convention, 233-34 
 
 Cobb, Howell, a Southern leader 
 of Democratic party, 40; 
 attitude toward Kansas ques- 
 tion, 42; quoted, 42; opinion 
 on Kansas question, 46; ap- 
 proves curtailing of slave-trade, 
 62-63; bitter against Douglas, 
 63; resigns from Cabinet, 85 
 
 Cobden, Richard, 177, 190 
 
 Compromise of 1850, failure to 
 solve problem, 15 
 
 Confederate States of America, 
 Davis made provisional Presi- 
 dent, 96; delegates refused 
 recognition at Washington, 
 102 
 
 Confiscation Act, Fremont asked 
 to conform order to, 184; 
 Butler sustained by Congress's 
 passing, 185; second, 187 
 
 Congress of U. S., legislative 
 battle over Lecompton Con- 
 stitution, 49; in 1859-60, 67; 
 debates as to responsibility for 
 delays, 149 
 
 Conscription Act, 154-56, 158- 
 159, 160 
 
 Constitutional Union party, 73, 
 74 
 
 Continuous voyage, principle of, 
 253-54 
 
 Cooke, Jay, 200 
 
 Copperheads, 156-57 
 
 Crittenden, J. B., of Kentucky, 
 92 
 
 Crittenden Compromise, 92, 93- 
 94 
 
 Davis, H. W., of Maryland, 135, 
 230, 231, 242 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, Southern politi- 
 cal leader, 40: ooinion as to 
 
INDEX 
 
 267 
 
 Davis, Jefferson Continued 
 creation of Kansas constitu- 
 tion, 48; gains prominence in 
 Congress, 68; attitude on 
 political issues, 68-69; ac- 
 counts for sectional hostility, 
 81; willing to accept Critten- 
 <ien Compromise, 93; resigns 
 from Senate, 95-96; provisional 
 President of Confederacy, 96; 
 tribute to Lincoln, 259 
 
 Dayton, W. L., 169 
 
 Debt, Southern, to Northerners, 
 6,91 
 
 Democratic party, in 1854, 19 
 et seq.; endorses Walker, 32; 
 convention at Cincinnati, 33; 
 support of, 33-34; conserva- 
 tism of, 34 et seq.; attitude 
 toward Kansas, 34-35; be- 
 comes refuge of original Whigs, 
 37; discord in, 58; machine 
 holding together in 1859, 63; 
 convention of 1860, 70-72; 
 break-up of, 72-73; Unionists 
 of North belong to, 74; divi- 
 sion of, 83-84, 85; War Demo- 
 crats, 89; desire for peace, 
 90-91; anti-Southern in North, 
 118; convention at Chicago, 
 239-40 
 
 Donelson, Fort, 152 
 
 Douglas, S. A., motives in cham- 
 pioning Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 
 16-17; Democratic leader, 19; 
 typical Democrat, 22; de- 
 nounced by Appeal of the 
 Independent Democrats, 23; 
 burned in effigy, 27; a master 
 politician, 33; upholds popular 
 sovereignty, 49; problems of 
 reelection (1858), 50; attempts 
 reconciling Dred Scott deci- 
 sion with popular sovereignty, 
 52; Lincoln debates, 54-57; 
 reelected to Senate, 57; incurs 
 anger of Southern Democrats, 
 63; as a Unionist, 74; presi- 
 dential vote for, 80; joins 
 
 Union party, 89; at Lincoln's 
 inauguration, 100; confers with 
 Lincoln, 120; announces sup- 
 port of President, 120; speeches 
 in West, 121 
 
 Draft, see Conscription Act 
 
 Dred Scott case, 50-51 
 
 Dupont, S. F., Rear-Admiral, 
 174 
 
 Emancipation Proclamation, 183, 
 188 
 
 England, relations with U. S., 
 176-82; sympathy with South, 
 177; rejects France's proposal 
 of mediation, 180; attitude 
 toward America, 180-83; cot* 
 ton famine in, 189-91 
 
 Everett, Edward, of Massa- 
 chusetts, 73, 92 
 
 Farragut, D. G., Admiral, 246 
 
 Fessenden, W. P., Secretary of 
 Treasury, 203 
 
 Finance, National, Treasury un- 
 prepared for war, 193; income 
 tax, 194; financial crisis, 194 
 et seq.; issuance of paper money, 
 195-97; financial legislation, 
 197; deficit of Government, 
 199; bond sales, 199-200; Act 
 of 1863, 200; direct and in- 
 direct payment by the people, 
 214; no "economic conscrip- 
 tion, " 215; financial policy, 217 
 
 Fleming, W. L., The Sequel of 
 Appamattox, cited, 241 (note) 
 
 Forster, W. E., 177 
 
 France, considers mediation, 180; 
 attempt in Mexico, 224 et seq. 
 
 Fredericksburg, Battle of, 153 
 
 Free-Soil party, 22, 24 
 
 "Freeport Doctrine," 58 
 
 Fremont, J. C., nominated for 
 President, 31; Lincoln's treat- 
 ment of, 145-47; chief in 
 command in Missouri, 146; 
 removal, 147; issues order 
 creating "bureau of aboli- 
 
268 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fremont, J. C. Continued 
 tion," 184; nominated for 
 President by Cleveland Con- 
 vention, 234; withdraws from 
 candidacy, 247; connection 
 with Blair's removal, 248 
 
 Fulton, The, steamship, 172 
 
 Garrison, W. L., 90 
 Giddings, J. R., of Ohio, 23 
 Gladstone, W. E., speaks of 
 South as nation, 178, 182; 
 opposes Roebuck's motion, 228 
 Grant, U. S., General, 152, 246 
 Greeley, Horace, desires peace, 
 90; an emotional rhetorician, 
 135; denounces Lincoln's treat- 
 ment of Fremont and Hunter, 
 187; requests mediation of 
 French ambassador, 225; in 
 ranks of Vindictives, 243-45; 
 suggests another Presidential 
 ticket, 245-46 
 
 Hampton Roads, meeting at, 255 
 
 Harper's Ferry, John Brown's 
 
 raid, 63-65; arsenal burned, 
 
 122 
 
 Helper, H. R., The Impending 
 
 Crisis of the South, 66, 67 
 Higginson, T. W., 27 
 Hodder, F. H., Genesis of the 
 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 18 
 (note) 
 
 Holt, Joseph, Postmaster- Gener- 
 al, 88 
 
 Homestead Act, 210 
 Hood, J. B., General, 247 
 Hunter, David, General, 186 
 
 Johnson, Allen, Stephen A. Doug- 
 las, 18 (note), 57 
 Johnson, Andrew, 240 
 
 Kansas, rush to, 26; government 
 of, 34; influence of Dred Scott 
 decision on, 51; admitted as 
 state, 96 
 
 Kansas-Nebraska Bill, cham- 
 
 pioned by Douglas, 17-18; 
 
 origin, 18 (note); an effect of, 
 
 23; opposed by Free-Soilers, 24 
 Kearsarge, The, jj. S. S., 179 
 Kentucky remains in Union, 145 
 Knights of the Golden Circle, 
 
 234-35 
 Know-Nothing party, 19, 24, 
 
 25-26, 29, 30 
 
 Land, Struggle to gain posses- 
 sion of public, 7-8 
 
 Lecompton Convention, Northern 
 settlers refuse to participate 
 in, 46; Buchanan endorses 
 constitution of, 48 
 
 Lee, R. E., in command of Vir- 
 ginia troops, 123; appears in- 
 vincible, 227; surrenders, 257 
 
 L'huys, Drouyn de, French 
 Foreign Secretary, 181, 231 
 
 Liberator, The, 90 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, in 1854, 28; 
 toasted at convention in Illi- 
 nois, 30; quoted, 52-53; 
 personal characteristics, 53- 
 54; Douglas debates, 54-57; 
 censures John Brown's raid, 
 64-65; nominated for Presi- 
 dent, 76-77; wins election of 
 1860, 80; supported by Union 
 party, 89; refuses to accept 
 Crittenden Compromise, 93- 
 94; journeys to Washington, 
 96-97, 98-99; state of mind 
 between election and inaugu- 
 ration, 97-99; inauguration, 
 99-101; period of probation, 
 102-03; attitude toward Se- 
 ward's actions, 114-15; gains 
 control of his Cabinet. 117; 
 calls for volunteers, 120, 121; 
 anxiety in awaiting relief, 123; 
 history of North merged in, 
 126; estimates of, 127-28; 
 appearance, 128-29; Adams's 
 estimate of, 129; as a public 
 man, 129 et seq.; as an oppor- 
 tunist, 133-34; genius, 136; 
 
INDEX 
 
 269 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham Continued 
 statecraft, 136-37; statesman 
 of democracy, 137-41; Letter 
 to the Workingmen of London, 
 139-40; Gettysburg Address 
 (text), 140-41; reaction of 
 North against, 143, 144-45, 
 147; calls for further volun- 
 teers, 152-53; makes use of 
 war powers, 160-67; blockades 
 Southern ports, 173; slavery 
 policy, 183 et seq.; reply to 
 workingmen of Manchester 
 (text), 191; letter to Chase, 
 202; renominated, 202; op- 
 posed by Cleveland Conven- 
 tion, 233; opposed by secret 
 orders, 237; accused by Demo- 
 cratic Convention, 240; re- 
 nominated, 240-41; dispute 
 with Congress over recon- 
 struction in Louisiana, 241; 
 disagreement over negro suf- 
 frage, 242; appoints day of 
 thanksgiving for victories, 247; 
 reflected, 249; opinion upon 
 sending Amendment to States, 
 255 ; legend of Hampton Roads 
 meeting, 255; Cabinet dis- 
 approves draft of message, 
 256; second inauguration, 256; 
 last public address, 257; as- 
 sassination, 258; placed in 
 historic perspective, 259; bib- 
 liography, 261-62 
 
 Lyon, Nathaniel, General, 146 
 
 McClellan, G. B., General, a 
 military egoist, 135; appointed 
 to command of Ohio militia, 
 145; delay of, 148; friend of 
 Stanton, 150, 151; failures of 
 1862, 152; nominated for 
 President, 240 
 
 Macy, Jesse, The Anti-Slavery 
 Crusade, cited, 23 (note); 46 
 (note) 
 
 Man without a Country. Hale, 
 164 (note) 
 
 Manassas, Second, defeat at, 153 
 
 Maryland, Government main- 
 tains hold in, 145 
 
 Mason, J. M., capture of, 175-76 
 
 Massachusetts Emigrant Aid 
 Society, 26 
 
 Maximilian, Archduke, of Aus- 
 tria, 229 
 
 Mexico, French army marches 
 upon Mexico City, 224, 226- 
 227; crown offered to Maxi- 
 milian, 229; condemnation ol' 
 expedition, 230; Maximilian 
 enters Mexico City, 231; 
 Washington refuses to recog- 
 nize government, 232 
 
 Monitor and Virginia (Merri- 
 mac), Battle of, 152 
 
 Morgan, John, General, 237 
 
 Morrill Tariff Bill, 79, 96 
 
 Morton, O. P., Governor of 
 Indiana, 235 
 
 Moultrie, Fort, 87 
 
 Munitions procured from abroad* 
 143, 168-73, 175 
 
 Murfreesboro, Battle of, 153 
 
 Napoleon III, gives audience to 
 Confederate envoy, 180; dis- 
 trusted by English, 182; inter- 
 vention in Mexico, 224 et seq.; 
 offers mediation between 
 North and South, 226; fails to 
 obtain aid from abroad, 229; 
 changes attitude in 1864, 232 
 
 New York City, draft riots in, 
 158-60 
 
 New York Times, quoted, 175 
 
 New York Tribune, 90, 94, 159, 
 187 
 
 Nicaragua, filibustering attempt 
 in, 32; expedition thwarted, 
 62 
 
 Norfolk Navy Yard destroyed. 
 122 
 
 North, attitude toward South, 
 1-2; labor, 2; capital opposed 
 to sectionalism, 5-6; demo- 
 cracy in, 6-7; struggle fof 
 
270 
 
 INDEX 
 
 North Continued 
 possession of land, 7-8; com- 
 plex social structure, 13-14; 
 rushes to volunteer, 123-24; 
 military unpreparedness in, 
 142-44; population, 168; life 
 during war, 204 et seq.; busi- 
 ness, 206-09; labor situation, 
 '-08; charities, 209; Western 
 settlement, 210; shifting of 
 population, 210-11; factors in 
 efficiency, 211; immigration, 
 211; work of women, 211-12; 
 labor-saving machines, 212- 
 213; agriculture, 213; subscrip- 
 tions for relief, 214; sacrifice 
 of luxuries, 214-16; war pro- 
 fiteering, 217-19, 221-23; buys 
 supplies from Europe, 219-20; 
 prices, 223; gloom of Septem- 
 ber, 1864, 246 
 
 Palmerston, Lord, British Prime 
 
 Minister, 178, 180, 181, 182 
 Pennington,of New Jersey, 67-68 
 Pensacola, Florida, relief expedi- 
 tion to, 109-11 
 
 Phillips, Wendell, 90. 127. 187 
 Pickens, Fort, 108 
 Politics, in the South, 3, 38-39, 
 40 et seq.; during the war, 
 156-58; see also names of 
 political parties 
 Pope, John, General, 135 
 "Popular Sovereignty," 35, 48- 
 
 50,51 
 Port Royal, seized by Dupont, 
 
 174; base at, 186 
 Powhatan, warship, 109, 110, 112 
 President, War powers of, 160 
 Pugh, G. E., of Ohio, 70, 71 
 
 Ray, P. O., repeal of the Missouri 
 Compromise, 18 (note) 
 
 Republican party, formed of 
 Anti-Nebraska men, 27, 28; 
 merged with Whigs in New 
 York, 29; part of Know-Noth- 
 *,ngs join, 30; first national con- 
 
 vention, 30; campaign of 1856 
 31-32; Kansas question, 35 
 36; joins iron interest of North, 
 43; still sectional in 1860, 74; 
 merges with Union party of 
 1864, 74; undivided, 75; plat- 
 form (1860), 77; wins capital 
 interests, 78; campaign of [ 
 1860, 79-80; against war, ; 
 91; for sectional compromise, 
 91; alignment against Critten- 
 den Compromise, 94; gains con- 
 trol of House, 96; convention 
 at Baltimore, 240 
 Rhett, R. B., 3-4, 40, 82 
 Rhodes, J. F., quoted, 164 
 Richmond, McClellan checked 
 
 before, 152 
 
 Roebuck, Edward, 227-28 
 Russell, Lord John, British For- 
 eign Secretary, 178, 181 
 Russell, W. H., quoted, 204-05 
 Russia, rejects France's proposal 
 of mediation, 180; liberates 
 serfs, 180 
 
 San Jacinto, warship, 175 
 Sanford, H. S., 169 
 Schuyler, G. L., Colonel, 169, 171 
 Secession movement, begins in 
 South Carolina, 82; five South- 
 ern states follow, 95 
 "Seven Days' Battles," 152 
 Seward, W. H., joins Republican 
 party, 29; eminent member of 
 new party, 30; quoted, 52; 
 Republican man of the hour, 
 75; criticism of, 76; defeated 
 in nomination, 76; debates 
 accepting appointment as 
 Secretary of State, 93; accepts 
 Secretaryship and opposes 
 Crittenden Compromise, 94 ; 
 refuses recognition to envoys 
 of Confederacy, 102; enters 
 into private negotiation with 
 them, 102; character of, 103; 
 attempts control of adminis- 
 tration, 104; disapproves Lin- 
 
INDEX 
 
 271 
 
 Seward, W. H. Continued 
 coin's Cabinet, 105; assumes 
 role of prime minister, 105-06; 
 policy of non-resistance, 106- 
 107; part in Powhatan affair, 
 108-12; Thoughts for the Presi- 
 dent's Consideration, 113; ad- 
 vocates foreign war, 113-14; 
 quoted, 115; meets master in 
 Lincoln, 117; a national figure, 
 132; enemy of Chase, 133; 
 futile attempt upon life of, 
 258 
 
 Seymour, Horatio, Governor of 
 New York, 158, 160, 239- 
 240 
 
 Sharpsburg, Battle of, 153 
 Sherman, John, of Ohio, 67 
 Sherman, W. T., General sug- 
 gested as presidential candi- 
 date, 246; campaign in Georgia, 
 246-47; factor in political 
 campaign, 249 
 
 Slave-trade, British interference, 
 with, 44; prohibited in con- 
 stitution of Confederacy, 45; 
 Southern contention over, 61- 
 62; stand of South on, 66 
 Slavery, factor in evolution of 
 nation, 2; forced issue, 13; 
 in Kansas, 34; no binding 
 prohibition in Northwest, 51; 
 Russian serfs liberated, 180; 
 Lincoln's policy, 183 et seq.; 
 reconstructed States to abolish, 
 242; Thirteenth Amendment 
 to the Constitution, 254-55 
 Slidell, John, capture of, 175-76; 
 
 at Paris, 181 
 
 Smith, C. B., of Indiana, 105 
 Sons of Liberty, 235, 238, 239 
 South, attitude toward North, 
 1-2; labor in, 2; begins to 
 regard itself as social and 
 political unit, 2-3; conflicting 
 political policies, 3-4; indebt- 
 edness to Northerners, 6; 
 struggle for public land, 7-8; 
 territorial aristocracy in, 10- 
 
 11; attitude toward blacks, 
 11-12; supports Democratic 
 party, 33; conflicting political 
 factions in, 40 et seq.; stand on 
 disunion and slave- trade, 66; 
 sentiment of locality in, 74- 
 75; population, 168; problem 
 of treatment for, 257 
 
 South Carolina, secedes, 82-83; 
 delegations interview Bucha- 
 nan, 85-86, 87-88 
 
 Southern Confederacy, 66 
 
 Speed, James, 104 
 
 Stanton, E. M., Attorney-Gener- 
 al, 86, 88; Lincoln's Secretary 
 of War, 89; succeeds Cameron, 
 105; quoted, 115; relations 
 with Lincoln, 150-51; personal 
 characteristics, 150; appointed 
 Secretary of War (1862), 150; 
 stops recruiting, 152; respon- 
 sibility for check of Northern 
 enthusiasm, 154 
 
 Stan wood, A History of the 
 Presidency, 80_(note) 
 
 Star of the West", The, merchant 
 vessel, 95 
 
 Stephens, A. H., a Southern 
 Democratic leader, 40; defends 
 negative Democratic position, 
 42; opinion as to slave-trade, 
 45; hopeful of Democratic 
 party (1858), 58; leaves Wash- 
 ington. 60; quoted, 66; at 
 Hampton Roads, 255 
 
 Stevens, Thad, 148 
 
 Sumner, Charles, of Massachu- 
 setts, 23, 32, 91, 230 
 
 Sumter, Fort, subject of inter- 
 view, 86; garrison removed to, 
 87; effort to divert President's 
 attention from, 108; surrender 
 demanded, 112; fired on, 118; 
 surrenders, 119 
 
 Taney, R. B., Chief Justice, 50, 
 
 161, 254 
 Territories, regulation of slavery 
 
 in, 69-"] 
 
272 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Thomas, of Maryland, Secretary 
 of Treasury, 95 
 
 Thompson, Jacob, Secretary of 
 Interior, 95 
 
 Ticknor, George, quoted, 123-24 
 
 Toombs, Robert, quoted, 12; a 
 master politician, 33; intro- 
 duces bill securing freedom of 
 choice to Kansas, 34-35; eager 
 to keep Democratic party in 
 foreground, 38; a Southern 
 Democratic leader, 40; policy 
 of evasion, 41-42; hopeful of 
 Democratic party (1858), 58; 
 willing to accept Crittenden 
 Compromise, 93 
 
 Trent affair, 175-76 
 
 Turner, Nat, Rebellion, 64 
 
 $90, ship, 1781 
 
 Uncle Ton's Cabin, Stowe, 32 
 ?Jnion party, formed by War 
 Democrats and Republicans, 
 89; composite party, 240; re- 
 united, 249; victory of 1864, 
 251 
 
 Vallandigham, C. L., case of, 
 162-67; plans dramatic mar- 
 tyrdom, 238 
 
 Vicksburg, Southern Commer- 
 cial Congress at, 61-62 
 
 Vindictives, faction of Union 
 party, 242, 247 
 
 Virginia secedes, 122 
 
 Wade. Benjamin, of Ohio, 1, 135, 
 
 242 
 
 Wade-Davis Manifesto, 242, 245 
 Walker, R. J., 45-47 
 Walker, William, 32 
 Washington, office-seekers in 
 
 115; described by Welles, 
 
 115-16; isolation of, 123-24; 
 
 Northern troops reach, 125 
 Webster, Daniel, 24 
 Weed, Thurlow, 91, 93, 248 
 Welles, Gideon, Secretary of 
 
 Navy, 89, 104-05, 106, 109-10, 
 
 115-16 
 West Virginia becomes separate 
 
 state, 146 
 Whig party, rival of Democratic 
 
 party, 19; prestige of, 24; 
 
 political positivism of, 26; 
 
 renominates Lincoln for U. S. 
 
 Senate (1854), 28; dissolves. 
 
 29; members hesitate to join 
 
 existing parties, 31 
 White, S. E., The Forty Niners, 
 
 cited, 31 (note) 
 Whitman, Walt, 127-28 
 Wilderness campaign, 246 
 Wilkes, Charles, Captain, 175- 
 
 176 
 Wilson, Woodrow, in 1916, 133- 
 
 134 
 Wilson's Creek, battle at, 146 
 
 Yancey, W. L., leader of South* 
 era political faction, 38, 40; 
 for separate Southern com- 
 munity, 41; commercial con- 
 ventions an aid to, 43-45, 
 speech in Democratic Conven* 
 tion (1860). 71 
 
; 
 
 E456.S832 
 
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