Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life Part 4

Naturally, the Abolitionists, the Jacobins, the Democratic machine, conscientious believers in the congressional theory of the government, every one who for any reason, wanted to hit the Administration, united in a chorus of wrath over arbitrary arrests. The greatest orator of the time, Wendell Phillips, the final voice of Abolition, flayed the government in public speeches for reducing America to an absolute despotism. Trumbull introduced into the Senate a resolution calling upon the President for a statement of the facts as to what he had actually done.(1) But the subject of arrests was but the prelude to the play. The real issue was the theory of the government. Where in last a.n.a.lysis does the Const.i.tution place the ultimate powers of sovereignty, the war powers? In Congress or in the President? Therefore, in concrete terms, is Congress the President's master, or is it only one branch of the government with a definite but united activity of its own, without that sweeping sovereign authority which in course of time has been acquired by its parent body, the Parliament of Great Britain?

On this point Lincoln never wavered. From first to last, he was determined not to admit that Congress had the powers of Parliament. No sooner had the politicians made out this att.i.tude than their attack on it began. It did not cease until Lincoln's death. It added a second const.i.tutional question to the issues of the war. Not only the issue whether a State had a right to secede, but also the issue of the President's possession of the war powers of the Const.i.tution. Time and again the leaders of disaffection in his own party, to say nothing of the violent Democrats, exhausted their rhetoric denouncing Lincoln's position. They did not deny themselves the delights of the sneer. Senator Grimes spoke of a call on the President as an attempt "to approach the footstool of power enthroned at the other end of the Avenue."(2) Wade expanded the idea: "We ought to have a committee to wait on him whenever we send him a bill, to know what his royal pleasure is with regard to it... . We are told that some gentlemen ... have been to see the President. Some gentlemen are very fortunate in that respect. n.o.body can see him, it seems, except some privileged gentlemen who are charged with his const.i.tutional conscience."(3) As Lincoln kept his doors open to all the world, as no one came and went with greater freedom than the Chairman of the Committee, the sneer was-what one might expect of the Committee. Sumner said: "I claim for Congress all that belongs to any government in the exercise of the rights of war." Disagreement with him, he treated with unspeakable disdain: "Born in ignorance and pernicious in consequence, it ought to be received with hissings of contempt, and just in proportion as it obtains acceptance, with execration."(4) Henry Wilson declared that, come what might, the policy of the Administration would be shaped by the two Houses. "I had rather give a policy to the President of the United States than take a policy from the President of the United States."(5) Trumbull thundered against the President's theory as the last word in despotism.(6) Such is the mental perspective in which to regard the speech of Stevens of January 22, 1862. With masterly clearness, he put his finger on the heart of the matter: the exceptional problems of a time of war, problems that can not be foreseen and prepared for by antic.i.p.atory legislation, may be solved in but one way, by the temporary creation of the dictator; this is as true of modern America as of ancient Rome; so far, most people are agreed; but this extraordinary function must not be vested in the Executive; on the contrary, it must be, it is, vested in the Legislature. Stevens did not hesitate to push his theory to its limit. He was not afraid of making the Legislature in time of war the irresponsible judge of its own acts. Congress, said he, has all possible powers of government, even the dictator's power; it could declare itself a dictator; under certain circ.u.mstances he was willing that it should do so.(7) The intellectual boldness of Lincoln was matched by an equal boldness. Between them, he and Stevens had perfectly defined their issue. Granted that a dictator was needed, which should it be-the President or Congress?

In the hesitancy at the White House during the last eclipse, in the public distress and the personal grief, Lincoln withheld himself from this debate. No great utterances break the gloom of this period. Nevertheless, what may be considered his reply to Stevens is to be found. Buried in the forgotten portions of the Congressional Globe is a speech that surely was inspired-or, if not directly inspired, so close a reflection of the President's thinking that it comes to the same thing at the end.

Its author, or apparent author, was one of the few serene figures in that Thirty-Seventh Congress which was swept so pitilessly by epidemics of pa.s.sion. When Douglas, after coming out valiantly for the Union and holding up Lincoln's hands at the hour of crisis, suddenly died, the Illinois Legislature named as his successor in the Senate, Orville Henry Browning. The new Senator was Lincoln's intimate friend. Their points of view, their temperaments were similar. Browning shared Lincoln's magnanimity, his hatred of extremes, his eagerness not to allow the war to degenerate into revolution. In the early part of 1862 he was Lincoln's spokesman in the Senate. Now that the temper of Wade and Chandler, the ruthlessness that dominated the Committee, had drawn unto itself such a cohort of allies; now that all their thinking had been organized by a fearless mind; there was urgent need for a masterly reply. Did Lincoln feel unequal, at the moment, to this great task? Very probably he did. Anyhow, it was Browning who made the reply,(8) a reply so exactly in his friend's vein, that-there you are!

His aim was to explain the nature of those war powers of the government "which lie dormant during time of peace," and therefore he frankly put the question, "Is Congress the government?" Senator Fessenden, echoing Stevens had said, "There is no limit on the powers of Congress; everything must yield to the force of martial law as resolved by Congress." "There, sir," said Browning, "is as broad and deep a foundation for absolute despotism as was ever laid." He rang the changes on the need to "protect minorities from the oppression and tyranny of excited majorities."

He went on to lay the basis of all Lincoln's subsequent defense of the presidential theory as opposed to the congressional theory, by formulating two propositions which reappear in some of Lincoln's most famous papers. Congress is not a safe vessel for extraordinary powers, because in our system we have difficulty in bringing it definitely to an account under any sort of plebiscite. On the other hand the President, if he abuses the war powers "when peace returns, is answerable to the civil power for that abuse."

But Browning was not content to reason on generalities. a.s.serting that Congress could no more command the army than it could adjudicate a case, he further a.s.serted that the Supreme Court had settled the matter and had lodged the war powers in the President. He cited a decision called forth by the legal question, "Can a Circuit Court of the United States inquire whether a President had acted rightly in calling out the militia of a State to suppress an insurrection?" "The elevated office of the President," said the Court, "chosen as he is by the People of the United States, and the high responsibility he could not fail to feel when acting in a case of such moment, appear to furnish as strong safeguards against the wilful abuse of power as human prudence and foresight could well devise. At all events, it is conferred upon him by the Const.i.tution and the laws of the United States, and therefore, must be respected and enforced in its judicial tribunals."(9) Whether or not const.i.tutional lawyers would agree with Browning in the conclusion he drew from this decision, it was plainly the bed rock of his thought. He believed that the President-whatever your mere historian might have to say-was in point of fact the exponent of the people as a whole, and therefore the proper vessel for the ultimate rights of a sovereign, rights that only the people possess, that only the people can delegate. And this was Lincoln's theory. Roughly speaking, he-conceived of the presidential office about as if it were the office of Tribune of the People.

There was still another reason why both Lincoln and Browning feared to yield anything to the theory of congressional supremacy. It was, in their minds, not only the general question of all Congresses but immediately of this particular Congress. An a.s.sembly in which the temper of Wade and Chandler, of Stevens and Sumner, was entering the ascendent, was an a.s.sembly to be feared; its supremacy was to be denied, its power was to be fought.

Browning did not close without a startling pa.s.sage flung square in the teeth of the apostles of fury. He summed up the opposite temper, Lincoln's temper, in his description of "Our brethren of the South-for I am willing to call them brethren; my heart yet yearns toward them with a fervency of love which even their treason has not all extinguished, which tempts me constantly to say in their behalf, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'" He pleaded with the Senate not to consider them "as public enemies but as insurgent citizens only," and advocated an Act of Amnesty restoring all political and property rights "instantly upon their return to allegiance and submission to the authority of the government."

Had this narrowly const.i.tutional issue arisen in quiet times, who can say how slight might have been its significance? But Fate had decreed that it should arise in the stormiest moment of our history. Millions of men and women who cared nothing for const.i.tutional theories, who were governed by that pa.s.sion to see immediate results which the thoughtless ever confuse with achievement, these were becoming hysterical over delay. Why did not the government do something? Everywhere voices were raised accusing the President of cowardice. The mania of suspicion was not confined to the Committee. The thoughts of a mult.i.tude were expressed by Congressman Hickman in his foolish words, "These are days of irresponsibility and imbecility, and we are required to perform two offices-the office of legislator and the office of President." The better part of a year had pa.s.sed since the day of Sumter, and still the government had no military success to its credit. An impetuous people that lacked experience of war, that had been accustomed in unusual measure to have its wishes speedily gratified, must somehow be marshalled behind the government, unless the alternative was the capture of power by the Congressional Cabal that was forming against the President.

Entering upon the dark days of the first half of 1862, Lincoln had no delusions about the task immediately before him. He must win battles; otherwise, he saw no way of building up that popular support which alone would enable him to keep the direction of policy in the hands of the Executive, to keep it out of the hands of Congress. In a word, the standing or falling of his power appeared to have been committed to the keeping of the army. What the army would do with it, save his policy or wreck his policy, was to no small degree a question of the character and the abilities of the Commanding General.

XXI. THE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL THE ARMY

George Brinton McClellan, when at the age of thirty-four he was raised suddenly to a dizzying height of fame and power, was generally looked upon as a prodigy. Though he was not that, he had a real claim to distinction. Had destiny been considerate, permitting him to rise gradually and to mature as he rose, he might have earned a stable reputation high among those who are not quite great. He had done well at West Point, and as a very young officer in the Mexican War; he had represented his country as a military observer with the allies in the Crimea; he was a good engineer, and a capable man of business. His winning personality, until he went wrong in the terrible days of 1862, inspired "a remarkable affection and regard in every one from the President to the humblest orderly that waited at his door."(1) He was at home among books; he could write to his wife that Prince Napoleon "speaks English very much as the Frenchmen do in the old English comedies";(2) he was able to converse in "French, Spanish, Italian, German, in two Indian dialects and he knew a little Russian and Turkish." Men like Wade and Chandler probably thought of him as a "highbrow," and doubtless he irritated them by invariably addressing the President as "Your Excellency." He had the impulses as well as the traditions of an elder day. But he had three insidious defects. At the back of his mind there was a vein of theatricality, hitherto unrevealed, that might, under sufficient stimulus, transform him into a poseur. Though physically brave, he had in his heart, unsuspected by himself or others, the dread of responsibility. He was void of humor. These damaging qualities, brought out and exaggerated by too swift a rise to apparent greatness, eventually worked his ruin. As an organizer he was unquestionably efficient. His great achievement which secures him a creditable place in American history was the conversion in the autumn of 1861 of a defeated rabble and a mult.i.tude of raw militia into a splendid fighting machine. The very excellence of this achievement was part of his undoing. It was so near to magical that it imposed on himself, gave him a false estimate of himself, hid from him his own limitation. It imposed also on his enemies. Crude, fierce men like the Vindictive leaders of Congress, seeing this miracle take place so astoundingly soon, leaped at once to the conclusion that he could, if he would, follow it by another miracle. Having forged the thunderbolt, why could he not, if he chose, instantly smite and destroy? All these hasty inexperienced zealots labored that winter under the delusion that one great battle might end the war. When McClellan, instead of rus.h.i.+ng to the front, entered his second phase-the one which he did not understand himself, which his enemies never understood-when he entered upon his long course of procrastination, the Jacobins, startled, dumfounded, casting about for reasons, could find in their una.n.a.lytical vision, but one. When Jove did not strike, it must be because Jove did not wish to strike. McClellan was delaying for a purpose. Almost instantaneous was the whisper, followed quickly by the outcry among the Jacobins, "Treachery! We are betrayed. He is in league with the enemy."

Their distrust was not allayed by the manner in which he conducted himself. His views of life and of the office of commanding general were not those of frontier America. He believed in pomp, in display, in an ordered routine. The fine weather of the autumn of 1861 was utilized at Was.h.i.+ngton for frequent reviews. The flutter of flags, the glint of marching bayonets, the perfectly ordered rhythm of marching feet, the blare of trumpets, the silvery notes of the bugles, the stormily rolling drums, all these filled with martial splendor the golden autumn air when the woods were falling brown. And everywhere, it seemed, look where one might, a sumptuously uniformed Commanding General, and a numerous and sumptuous staff, were galloping past, mounted on beautiful horses. Plain, blunt men like the Jacobins, caring nothing for this ritual of command, sneered. They exchanged stories of the elaborate dinners he was said to give daily, the several courses, the abundance of wine, the numerous guests; and after these dinners, he and his gorgeous staff, "clattering up and down the public streets" merely to show themselves off. All this sneering was wildly exaggerated. The mania of exaggeration, the mania of suspicion, saturated the mental air breathed by every politician at Was.h.i.+ngton, that desperate winter, except the great and lonely President and the cynical Secretary of State.

McClellan made no concessions to the temper of the hour. With Lincoln, his relations at first were cordial. Always he was punctiliously respectful to "His Excellency." It is plain that at first Lincoln liked him and that his liking was worn away slowly. It is equally plain that Lincoln did not know how to deal with him. The tendency to pose was so far from anything in Lincoln's make-up that it remained for him, whether in McClellan or another, unintelligible. That humility which was so conspicuous in this first period of his rule, led him to a.s.sume with his General a modest, even an appealing tone. The younger man began to ring false by failing to appreciate it. He even complained of it in a letter to his wife. The military ritualist would have liked a more Olympian superior. And there is no denying that his head was getting turned. Perhaps he had excuse. The newspapers printed nonsensical editorials praising "the young Napoleon." His mail was filled with letters urging him to carry things with a high hand; disregard, if necessary, the pusillanimous civil government, and boldly "save the country." He had so little humor that he could take this stuff seriously. Among all the foolish letters which the executors of famous men have permitted to see the light of publicity, few outdo a letter of McClellan's in which he confided to his wife that he was willing to become dictator, should that be the only way out, and then, after saving his country, to perish.(3) In this lordly mood of the melodramatic, he gradually-probably without knowing it-became inattentive to the President. Lincoln used to go to his house to consult him, generally on foot, clad in very ordinary clothes. He was known to sit in McClellan's library "rather unnoticed" awaiting the General's pleasure.(4) At last the growing coolness of McClellan went so far that an event occurred which Hay indignantly set down in his diary: "I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come. The President, Governor Seward and I went over to McClellan's house tonight. The servant at the door said the General was at the wedding of Colonel Wheaton at General Buell's and would soon return. We went in and after we had waited about an hour, McClellan came in, and without paying particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up-stairs, pa.s.sing the door of the room where the President and the Secretary of State were seated. They waited about half an hour, and sent once more a servant to tell the General they were there; and the answer came that the General had gone to bed.

"I merely record this unparalleled insolence of epaulettes without comment It is the first indication I have yet seen of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities. Coming home, I spoke to the President about the matter, but he seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it were better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity."(5) Did ever a subordinate, even a general, administer to a superior a more astounding snub? To Lincoln in his selfless temper, it was Only a detail in his problem of getting the army into action. What room for personal affronts however gross in a mood like his? To be sure he ceased going to McClellan's house, and thereafter summoned McClellan to come to him, but no change appeared in the tone of his intercourse with the General. "I will hold McClellan's horse," said he, "if he will win me victories."(6) All this while, the two were debating plans of campaign and McClellan was revealing-as we now see, though no one saw it at the time-the deep dread of responsibility that was destined to paralyze him as an active general. He was never ready. Always, there must be more preparation, more men, more this, more that.

In January, 1862, Lincoln, grown desperate because of hope deferred, made the first move of a sort that was to be lamentably frequent the next six months. He went over the head of the Commanding General, and, in order to force a result, evoked a power not recognized in the military scheme of things. By this time the popular adulation of McClellan was giving place to a general imitation of the growling of the Jacobins, now well organized in the terrible Committee and growing each day more and more hostile to the Administration. Lincoln had besought McClellan to take into account the seriousness of this rising tide of opposition.(7) His arguments made no impression. McClellan would not recognize the political side of war. At last, partly to allay the popular clamor, partly to force McClellan into a corner, Lincoln published to the country a military program. He publicly instructed the Commanding General to put all his forces in movement on all fronts, on Was.h.i.+ngton's birthday.(8) From this moment the debate between the President and the General with regard to plans of campaign approached the nature of a dispute. McClellan repeated his demand for more time in which to prepare. He objected to the course of advance which the President wished him to pursue. Lincoln, seeing the situation first of all as a political problem, grounded his thought upon two ideas neither of which was shared by McClellan: the idea that the supreme consideration was the safety of Was.h.i.+ngton; the resultant idea that McClellan should move directly south, keeping his whole army constantly between Was.h.i.+ngton and the enemy. McClellan wished to treat Was.h.i.+ngton as but one important detail in his strategy; he had a grandiose scheme for a wide flanking movement, for taking the bulk of his army by sea to the coast of Virginia, and thus to draw the Confederate army homeward for a duel to the death under the walls of Richmond. Lincoln, neither then nor afterward more than an amateur in strategy, was deeply alarmed by this bold mode of procedure. His political instinct told him that if there was any slip and Was.h.i.+ngton was taken, even briefly, by the Confederates, the game was up. He was still further alarmed when he found that some of the eider generals held views resembling his own.(9) To his modest, still groping mind, this was a trying situation. In the President lay the ultimate responsibility for every move the army should make. And whose advice should he accept as authoritative? The first time he asked himself that question, such peace of mind as had survived the hara.s.sing year 1861 left him, not to return for many a day.

At this moment of crises, occurred one of his keenest personal afflictions. His little son Willie sickened and died. Lincoln's relation to his children was very close, very tender. Many anecdotes show this boy frolicking about the White House, a licensed intruder everywhere. Another flood of anecdotes preserve the stupefying grief of his father after the child's death. Of these latter, the most extreme which portray Lincoln toward the close of February so unnerved as to be incapable of public duty, may be dismissed as apocryphal. But there can be no doubt that his unhappiness was too great for the vain measurement of descriptive words; that it intensified the nervous mood which had already possessed him; that anxiety, deepening at times into terrible alarm, became his constant companion.

In his dread and sorrow, his dilemma grew daily more intolerable. McClellan had opposed so stoutly the Was.h.i.+ngton birthday order that Lincoln had permitted him to ignore it. He was still wavering which advice to take, McClellan's or the elder generals'. To remove McClellan, to try at this critical moment some other general, did not occur to him as a rational possibility. But somehow he felt he must justify himself to himself for yielding to McClellan' s views. In his zeal to secure some judgment more authoritative than his own, he took a further step along the dangerous road of going over the Commander's head, of bringing to bear upon him influences not strictly included in the military system. He required McClellan to submit his plan to a council of his general officers. Lincoln attended this council and told the generals "he was not a military man and therefore would be governed by the opinion of a majority."(10) The council decided in McClellan's favor by a vote of eight to four. This was a disappointment to Lincoln. So firm was his addiction to the overland route that he could not rest content with the council's decision. Stanton urged him to disregard it, sneering that the eight who voted against him were McClellan's creatures, his "pets." But Lincoln would not risk going against the majority of the council. "We are civilians," said he, "we should justly be held responsible for any disaster if we set up our opinions against those of experienced military men in the practical management of a campaign."(11) Nevertheless, from this quandary, in which his reason forced him to do one thing while all his sensibilities protested, he extricated himself in a curious way. Throughout the late winter he had been the object of a concerted attack from Stanton and the Committee. The Committee had tacitly annexed Stanton. He conferred with them confidentially. At each important turn of events, he and they always got together in a secret powwow. As early as February twentieth, when Lincoln seemed to be breaking down with grief and anxiety, one of those secret conferences of the high conspirators ended in a determination to employ all their forces, direct and indirect, to bring about McClellan's retirement. They were all victims of that mania of suspicion which was the order of the day. "A majority of the Committee," wrote its best member, long afterward when he had come to see things in a different light, "strongly suspected that General McClellan was a traitor." Wade vented his spleen in furious words about "King McClellan." Unrestrained by Lincoln's anguish, the Committee demanded a conference a few days after his son's death and threatened an appeal from President to Congress if he did not quickly force McClellan to advance.(12) All this while the Committee was airing another grievance. They clamored to have the twelve divisions of the army of the Potomac grouped into corps. They gave as their motive, military efficiency. And perhaps they thought they meant it. But there was a cat in the bag which they carefully tried to conceal. The generals of divisions formed two distinct groups, the elder ones who did not owe their elevation to McClellan and the younger ones who did. The elder generals, it happened, sympathized generally with the Committee in politics, or at least did not sympathize with McClellan. The younger generals reflected the politics of their patron. And McClellan was a Democrat, a hater of the Vindictives, unsympathetic with Abolition. Therefore, the mania of suspicion being in full flood, the Committee would believe no good of McClellan when he opposed advancing the elder generals to the rank of corps commanders. His explanation that he "wished to test them in the field," was poohpoohed. Could not any good Jacobin see through that! Of course, it was but an excuse to hold back the plums until he could drop them into the itching palms of those wicked Democrats, his "pets." Why should not the good men and true, elder and therefore better soldiers, whose righteousness was so well attested by their political leanings, why should not they have the places of power to which their rank ent.i.tled them?

Hitherto, however, Lincoln had held out against the Committee's demand and bad refused to compel McClellan to reorganize his army against his will. He now observed that in the council which cast the die against the overland route, the division between the two groups of generals, what we may call the Lincoln generals and the McClellan generals, was sharply evident. The next day he issued a general order which organized the army of the Potomac into corps, and promoted to the rank of corps commanders, those elder generals whose point of view was similar to his own.(13) Thereafter, any reference of crucial matters to a council of general officers, would mean submitting it, not to a dozen commanders of divisions with McClellan men in the majority, but to four or five commanders of corps none of whom was definitely of the McClellan faction. Thus McClellan was virtually put under surveillance of an informal war council scrutinizing his course from the President's point of view. It was this reduced council of the subordinates, as will presently appear, that made the crucial decision of the campaign.

On the same day Lincoln issued another general order accepting McClellan's plan for a flanking movement to the Virginia coast.(14) The Confederate lines at this time ran through Mana.s.sas-the point Lincoln wished McClellan to strike. It was to be known later that the Confederate General gave to Lincoln's views the high endors.e.m.e.nt of a.s.suming that they were the inevitable views that the Northern Commander, if he knew his business, would act upon. Therefore, he had been quietly preparing to withdraw his army to more defensible positions farther South. By a curious coincidence, his "strategic retreat" occurred immediately after McClellan had been given authority to do what he liked. On the ninth of March it was known at Was.h.i.+ngton that Mana.s.sas had been evacuated. Whereupon, McClellan's fatal lack of humor permitted him to make a great blunder. The man who had refused to go to Mana.s.sas while the Confederates were there, marched an army to Mana.s.sas the moment he heard that they were gone-and then marched back again. This performance was instantly fixed upon for ridicule as McClellan's "promenade to Mana.s.sas."

To Lincoln the news of the promenade seemed both a vindication of his own plan and crus.h.i.+ng evidence that if he had insisted on his plan, the Confederate army would have been annihilated, the war in one cataclysm brought to an end. He was ridden, as most men were, by the delusion of one terrific battle that was to end all. In a bitterness of disappointment, his slowly tortured spirit burst into rage. The Committee was delighted. For once, they approved of him. The next act of this man, ordinarily so gentle, seems hardly credible. By a stroke of his pen, he stripped McClellan of the office of Commanding General, reduced him to the rank of mere head of a local army, the army of the Potomac; furthermore, he permitted him to hear of his degradation through the heartless medium of the daily papers.(15) The functions of Commanding General were added to the duties of the Secretary of War. Stanton, now utterly merciless toward McClellan, instantly took possession of his office and seized his papers, for all the world as if he were pouncing upon the effects of a malefactor. That McClellan was not yet wholly spoiled was shown by the way he received this blow. It was the McClellan of the old days, the gallant gentleman of the year 1860, not the poseur of 1861, who wrote at once to Lincoln making no complaint, saying that his services belonged to his country in whatever capacity they might be required.

Again a council of subordinates was invoked to determine the next move. McClellan called together the newly made corps commanders and obtained their approval of a variation of his former plan. He now proposed to use Fortress Monroe as a base, and thence conduct an attack upon Richmond. Again, though with a touch of sullenness very rare in Lincoln, the President acquiesced. But he added a condition to McClellan's plan by issuing positive orders, March thirteenth, that it should not be carried out unless sufficient force was left at Was.h.i.+ngton to render the city impregnable.

During the next few days the Committee must have been quite satisfied with the President. For him, he was savage. The normal Lincoln, the man of immeasurable mercy, had temporarily vanished. McClellan's blunder had touched the one spring that roused the tiger in Lincoln. By letting slip a chance to terminate the war-as it seemed to that deluded Was.h.i.+ngton of March, 1862-McClellan had converted Lincoln from a brooding gentleness to an incarnation of the last judgment. He told Hay he thought that in permitting McClellan to retain any command, he had shown him "very great kindness."(16) Apparently, he had no consciousness that he had been harsh in the mode of McClellan's abatement, no thought of the fine manliness of McClellan's reply.

During this period of Lincoln's brief vengefulness, Stanton thought that his time for clearing scores with McClellan had come. He even picked out the man who was to be rushed over other men's heads to the command of the army of the Potomac. General Hitchc.o.c.k, an accomplished soldier of the regular army, a grandson of Ethan Allen, who had grown old in honorable service, was summoned to Was.h.i.+ngton, and was "amazed" by having plumped at him the question, would he consent to succeed McClellan? Though General Hitchc.o.c.k was not without faults-and there is an episode in his later relations with McClellan which his biographer discreetly omits-he was a modest man. He refused to consider Stanton's offer. But he consented to become the confidential adviser of the War Office. This was done after an interview with Lincoln who impressed on Hitchc.o.c.k his sense of a great responsibility and of the fact that he "had no military knowledge" and that he must have advice.(17) Out of this congested sense of helplessness in Lincoln, joined with the new labors of the Secretary of War as executive head of all the armies, grew quickly another of those ill-omened, extra-const.i.tutional war councils, one more wheel within the wheels, that were all doing their part to make the whole machine unworkable; distributing instead of concentrating power. This new council which came to be known as the Army Board, was made up of the heads of the Bureaus of the War Department with the addition of Hitchc.o.c.k as "Advising General." Of the temper of the Army Board, composed as it was entirely of the satellites of Stanton, a confession in Hitchc.o.c.k's diary speaks volumes. On the evening of the first day of their new relation, Stanton poured out to him such a quant.i.ty of oral evidence of McClellan's "incompetency" as to make this new recruit for anti-McClellanism "feel positively sick."(18) By permitting this added source of confusion among his advisers, Lincoln treated himself much as he had already treated McClellan. By going over McClellan's head to take advice from his subordinates he had put the General on a leash; now, by setting Hitchc.o.c.k and the experts in the seat of judgment, he virtually, for a short while, put himself on a leash. Thus had come into tacit but real power three military councils none of which was recognized as such by law-the Council of the Subordinates behind McClellan; the Council of the Experts behind Lincoln; the Council of the Jacobins, called The Committee, behind them all.

The political pressure on Lincoln now changed its tack. Its unfailing zeal to discredit McClellan a.s.sumed the form of insisting that he had a secret purpose in waiting to get his army away from Was.h.i.+ngton, that he was scheming to leave the city open to the Confederates, to "uncover" it, as the soldiers said. By way of focussing the matter on a definite issue, his enemies demanded that he detach from his army and a.s.sign to the defense of Was.h.i.+ngton, a division which was supposed to be peculiarly efficient General Blenker had recruited a sort of "foreign legion," in which were many daring adventurers who had seen service in European armies. Blenker's was the division demanded. So determined was the pressure that Lincoln yielded. However, his brief anger had blown itself out. To continue vengeful any length of time was for Lincoln impossible. He was again the normal Lincoln, pa.s.sionless, tender, fearful of doing an injustice, weighed down by the sense of responsibility. He broke the news about Blenker in a personal note to McClellan that was almost apologetic. "I write this to a.s.sure you that I did so with great pain, understanding that you would wish it otherwise. If you could know the full pressure of the case, I am confident you would justify it."(19) In conversation, he a.s.sured McClellan that no other portion of his army should be taken from him.(20) The change in Lincoln's mood exasperated Stanton. He called on his pals in the Committee for another of those secret confabulations in which both he and they delighted. Speaking with scorn of Lincoln's return to magnanimity, he told them that the President had "gone back to his first love," the traitor McClellan. Probably all those men who wagged their chins in that conference really believed that McClellan was aiming to betray them. One indeed, Julian, long afterward had the largeness of mind to confess his fault and recant. The rest died in their absurd delusion, maniacs of suspicion to the very end. At the time all of them laid their heads together-for what purpose? Was it to catch McClellan in a trap?

Meanwhile, in obedience to Lincoln's orders of March thirteenth, McClellan drew up a plan for the defense of Was.h.i.+ngton. As. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k was now in such high feather, McClellan sent his plan to the new favorite of the War Office, for criticism. Hitchc.o.c.k refused to criticize, and when McClellan's chief of staff pressed for "his opinion, as an old and experienced officer," Hitchc.o.c.k replied that McClellan had had ample opportunity to know what was needed, and persisted in his refusal.(21) McClellan asked no further advice and made his arrangements to suit himself. On April first he took boat at Alexandria for the front. Part of his army had preceded him. The remainder-except the force he had a.s.signed to the defense of Was.h.i.+ngton-was speedily to follow.

With McClellan's departure still another devotee of suspicion moves to the front of the stage. This was General Wadsworth. Early in March, Stanton had told McClellan that he wanted Wadsworth as commander of the defenses of Was.h.i.+ngton. McClellan had protested. Wadsworth was not a military man. He was a politician turned soldier who had tried to be senator from New York and failed; tried to be governor and failed; and was destined to try again to be governor, and again to fail. Why should such a person be singled out to become responsible for the safety of the capital? Stanton's only argument was that the appointment of Wadsworth was desirable for political reasons. He added that it would be made whether McClellan liked it or not. And made it was.(22) Furthermore, Wadsworth, who had previously professed friends.h.i.+p for McClellan, promptly joined the ranks of his enemies. Can any one doubt, Stanton being Stanton, mad with distrust of McClellan, that Wadsworth was fully informed of McClellan's opposition to his advancement?

On the second of April Wadsworth threw a bomb after the vanis.h.i.+ng McClellan, then aboard his steamer somewhere between Was.h.i.+ngton and Fortress Monroe. Wadsworth informed Stanton that McClellan had not carried out the orders of March thirteenth, that the force he had left at Was.h.i.+ngton was inadequate to its safety, that the capital was "uncovered." Here was a chance for Stanton to bring to bear on Lincoln both those unofficial councils that were meddling so deeply in the control of the army. He threw this firebrand of a report among his satellites of the Army Board and into the midst of the Committee.2(3) It is needless here to go into the furious disputes that ensued-the accusations, the recriminations, the innuendoes! McClellan stoutly insisted that he had obeyed both the spirit and the letter of March thirteenth; that Was.h.i.+ngton was amply protected. His enemies shrieked that his statements were based on juggled figures; that even if the number of soldiers was adequate, the quality and equipment were wretched; in a word that he lied. It is a shame-less controversy inconceivable were there not many men in whom politics and prejudice far outweighed patriotism. In all this, Hitchc.o.c.k was Stanton's trump card. He who had refused to advise McClellan, did not hesitate to denounce him. In response to a request from Stanton, he made a report sustaining Wadsworth. The Committee summoned Wadsworth before it; he read them his report to Stanton; reiterated its charges, and treated them to some innuendoes after their own hearts, plainly hinting that McClellan could have crushed the Confederates at Mana.s.sas if he had wished to.(24) A wave of hysteria swept the Committee and the War Office and beat fiercely upon Lincoln. The Board charged him to save the day by mulcting the army of the Potomac of an entire corps, retaining it at Was.h.i.+ngton. Lincoln met the Board in a long and troubled conference. His anxious desire to do all he could for McClellan was palpable.(25) But what, under the circ.u.mstances, could he do? Here was this new device for the steadying of his judgment, this Council of Experts, singing the same old tune, a.s.suring him that McClellan was not to be trusted. Although in the reaction from his momentary vengefulness he had undoubtedly swung far back toward recovering confidence in McClellan, did he dare-painfully conscious as he was that he "had no military knowledge"-did he dare go against the Board, disregard its warning that McClellan's arrangements made of Was.h.i.+ngton a dangling plum for Confederate raiders to s.n.a.t.c.h whenever they pleased. His bewilderment as to what McClellan was really driving at came back upon him in full force. He reached at last the dreary conclusion that there was nothing for it but to let the new wheel within the wheels take its turn at running the machine. Accepting the view that McClellan had not kept faith on the basis of the orders of March thirteenth, Lincoln "after much consideration" set aside his own promise to McClellan and authorized the Secretary of War to detain a full corps.(26) McClellan never forgave this mutilation of his army and in time fixed upon it as the prime cause of his eventual failure on the Peninsula. It is doubtful whether relations between him and Lincoln were ever again really cordial.

In their rather full correspondence during the tense days of April, May and June, the steady deterioration of McClellan's judgment bore him down into amazing depths of fatuousness. In his own way he was as much appalled by the growth of his responsibility as ever Lincoln had been. He moved with incredible caution.*

*Commenting on one of his moments of hesitation, J.S.

Johnston wrote to Lee: "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack." 14 O. R., 416.

His despatches were a continual wailing for more men. Whatever went wrong was at once blamed on Was.h.i.+ngton. His ill-usage had made him bitter. And he could not escape the fact that his actual performance did not come up to expectation; that he was constantly out-generaled. His prevailing temper during these days is shown in a letter to his wife. "I have raised an awful row about McDowell's corps. The President very coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I ought to break the enemy's lines at once. I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself." A despatch to Stanton, in a moment of disaster, has become notorious: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Was.h.i.+ngton. You have done your best to sacrifice this army."(27) Throughout this preposterous correspondence, Lincoln maintained the even tenor of his usual patient stoicism, "his sad lucidity of soul." He explained; he reasoned; he promised, over and over, a.s.sistance to the limit of his power; he never scolded; when complaint became too absurd to be reasoned with, he pa.s.sed it over in silence. Again, he was the selfless man, his sensibilities lost in the purpose he sought to establish.

Once during this period, he acted suddenly, on the spur of the moment, in a swift upflaring of his unconquerable fear for the safety of Was.h.i.+ngton. Previously, he had consented to push the detained corps, McDowell's, southward by land to cooperate with McClellan, who adapted his plans to this arrangement. Scarcely had he done so, than Lincoln threw his plans into confusion by ordering McDowell back to Was.h.i.+ngton.(28) Jackson, who had begun his famous campaign of menace, was sweeping like a whirlwind down the Shenandoah Valley, and in the eyes of panic-struck Was.h.i.+ngton appeared to be a reincarnation of Southey's Napoleon,- "And the great Few-Faw-Fum, would presently come, With a hop, skip and jump"

into Pennsylvania Avenue. As Jackson's object was to bring McDowell back to Was.h.i.+ngton and enable Johnston to deal with McClellan unreinforced, Lincoln had fallen into a trap. But he had much company. Stanton was well-nigh out of his head. Though Jackson's army was less than fifteen thousand and the Union forces in front of him upward of sixty thousand, Stanton telegraphed to Northern governors imploring them to hasten forward militia because "the enemy in great force are marching on Was.h.i.+ngton."(29) The moment Jackson had accomplished his purpose, having drawn a great army northwestward away from McClellan, most of which should have been marching southeastward to join McClellan, he slipped away, rushed his own army across the whole width of Virginia, and joined Lee in the terrible fighting of the Seven Days before Richmond.

In the midst of this furious confusion, the men surrounding Lincoln may be excused for not observing a change in him. They have recorded his appearance of indecision, his solicitude over McClellan, his worn and haggard look. The changing light in those smoldering fires of his deeply sunken eyes escaped their notice. Gradually, through profound unhappiness, and as always in silence, Lincoln was working out of his last eclipse. No certain record of his inner life during this transition, the most important of his life, has survived. We can judge of it only by the results. The outstanding fact with regard to it is a certain change of att.i.tude, an access of determination, late in June. What desperate wrestling with the angel had taken place in the months of agony since his son's death, even his private secretaries have not felt able to say. Neither, apparently, did they perceive, until it flashed upon them full-blown, the change that was coming over his resolution. Nor did the Cabinet have any warning that the President was turning a corner, developing a new phase of himself, something sterner, more powerful than anything they had suspected. This was ever his way. His instinctive reticence stood firm until the moment of the new birth. Not only the Cabinet but the country was amazed and startled, when, late in June, the President suddenly left Was.h.i.+ngton. He made a flying trip to West Point where Scott was living in virtual retirement.(30) What pa.s.sed between the two, those few hours they spent together, that twenty-fourth of June, 1862, has never been divulged. Did they have any eyes, that day, for the wonderful prospect from the high terrace of the parade ground; for the river so far below, flooring the valley with silver; for the mountains pearl and blue? Did they talk of Stanton, of his waywardness, his furies? Of the terrible Committee? Of the way Lincoln had tied his own hands, brought his will to stalemate, through his recognition of the unofficial councils? Who knows?

Lincoln was back in Was.h.i.+ngton the next day. Another day, and by a sweeping order he created a new army for the protection of Was.h.i.+ngton, and placed in command of it, a western general who was credited with a brilliant stroke on the Mississippi.(31) No one will now defend the military genius of John Pope. But when Lincoln sent for him, all the evidence to date appeared to be in his favor. His follies were yet to appear. And it is more than likely that in the development of Lincoln's character, his appointment has a deep significance. It appears to mark the moment when Lincoln broke out of the coc.o.o.n of advis.e.m.e.nt he had spun unintentionally around his will. In the sorrows of the grim year, new forces had been generated. New spiritual powers were coming to his a.s.sistance. At last, relatively, he had found peace. Worn and torn as he was, after his long inward struggle, few bore so calmly as he did the distracting news from the front in the closing days of June and the opening days of July, when Lee was driving his whole strength like a superhuman battering-ram, straight at the heart of the wavering McClellan. A visitor at the White House, in the midst of the terrible strain of the Seven Days, found Lincoln "thin and haggard, but cheerful ... quite as placid as usual ... his manner was so kindly and so free from the ordinary c.o.c.ksureness of the politician, and the vanity and self-importance of official position that nothing but good will was inspired by his presence."(32) His serenity was all the more remarkable as his relations with Congress and the Committee were fast approaching a crisis. If McClellan failed-and by the showing of his own despatches, there was every reason to expect him to fail, so besotted was he upon the idea that no one could prevail with the force allowed him-the Committee who were leaders of the congressional party against the presidential party might be expected promptly to measure strength with the Administration. And McClellan failed. At that moment Chandler, with the consent of the Committee, was making use of its records preparing a Philippic against the government. Lincoln, acting on his own initiative, without asking the Secretary of War to accompany him, went immediately to the front. He pa.s.sed two days questioning McClellan and his generals.(33) But there was no council of war. It was a different Lincoln from that other who, just four months previous, had called together the general officers and promised them to abide by their decisions. He returned to Was.h.i.+ngton without telling them what he meant to do.

The next day closed a chapter and opened a chapter in the history of the Federal army. Stanton's brief and inglorious career as head of the national forces came to an end. He fell back into his rightful position, the President's executive officer in military affairs. Lincoln telegraphed another Western general, Halleck, ordering him to Was.h.i.+ngton as General-in-Chief.(34) He then, for a season, turned his whole attention from the army to politics. Five days after the telegram to Halleck, Chandler in the Senate, loosed his insatiable temper in what ostensibly was a denunciation of McClellan, what in point of fact was a sweeping arraignment of the military efficiency of the government.(35)

XXII. LINCOLN EMERGES

While Lincoln was slowly struggling out of his last eclipse, giving most of his attention to the army, the Congressional Cabal was laboring a.s.siduously to force the issue upon slavery. The keen politicians who composed it saw with unerring vision where, for the moment, lay their opportunity. They could not beat the President on any one issue then before the country. No one faction was strong enough to be their stand-by. Only by a combination of issues and a coalition of factions could they build up an anti-Lincoln party, check-mate the Administration, and get control of the government. They were greatly a.s.sisted by the fatuousness of the Democrats. That party was in a peculiar situation. Its most positive characters, naturally, had taken sides for or against the government. The powerful Southerners who had been its chief leaders were mainly in the Confederacy. Such Northerners as Douglas and Stanton, and many more, had gone over to the Republicans. Suddenly the control of the party organization had fallen into the hands of second-rate men. As by the stroke of an enchanter's wand, men of small caliber who, had the old conditions remained, would have lived and died of little consequence saw opening before them the role of leaders.h.i.+p. It was too much for their mental poise. Again the subjective element in politics! The Democratic party for the duration of the war became the organization of Little Men. Had they possessed any great leaders, could they have refused to play politics and responded to Lincoln's all-parties policy, history might have been different. But they were not that sort. Neither did they have the courage to go to the other extreme and become a resolute opposition party, wholeheartedly and intelligently against the war. They equivocated, they obstructed, they professed loyalty and they practised-it would be hard to say what! So short-sighted was their political game that its effect continually was to play into the hands of their most relentless enemies, the grim Jacobins.

Though, for a brief time while the enthusiasm after Sumter was still at its height they appeared to go along with the all-parties program, they soon revealed their true course. In the autumn of 1861, Lincoln still had sufficient hold upon all factions to make it seem likely that his all-parties program would be given a chance. The Republicans generally made overtures to the Democratic managers, offering to combine in a coalition party with no platform but the support of the war and the restoration of the Union. Here was the test of the organization of the Little Men. The insignificant new managers, intoxicated by the suddenness of their opportunity, rang false. They rejected the all-parties program and insisted on maintaining their separate party formation.(1) This was a turning point in Lincoln's career. Though nearly two years were to pa.s.s before he admitted his defeat, the all-parties program was doomed from that hour. Throughout the winter, the Democrats in Congress, though steadily ambiguous in their statements of principle, were as steadily hostile to Lincoln. If they had any settled policy, it was no more than an attempt to hold the balance of power among the warring factions of the Republicans. By springtime the game they were playing was obvious; also its results. They had prevented the President from building up a strong Administration group wherewith he might have counterbalanced the Jacobins. Thus they had released the Jacobins from the one possible restraint that might have kept them from pursuing their own devices.

The spring of 1862 saw a general realignment of factions. It was then that the Congressional Cabal won its first significant triumph. Hitherto, all the Republican platforms had been programs of denial. A brilliant new member of the Senate, john Sherman, bluntly told his colleagues that the Republican party had always stood on the defensive. That was its weakness. "I do not know any measure on which it has taken an aggressive position."(2) The clue to the psychology of the moment was in the raging demand of the ma.s.ses for a program of a.s.sertion, for aggressive measures. The President was trying to meet this demand with his all-parties program, with his policy of nationalism, exclusive of everything else. And recently he had added that other a.s.sertion, his insistence that the executive in certain respects was independent of the legislative. Of his three a.s.sertions, one, the all-parties program, was already on the way to defeat Another, nationalism, as the President interpreted it, had alienated the Abolitionists. The third, his argument for himself as tribune, was just what your crafty politician might twist, pervert, load with false meanings to his heart's content. Men less astute than Chandler and Wade could not have failed to see where fortune pointed. Their opportunity lay in a combination of the two issues. Abolition and the resistance to executive "usurpation." Their problem was to create an anti-Lincoln party that should also be a war party. Their coalition of aggressive forces must accept the Abolitionists as its backbone, but it must also include all violent elements of whatever persuasion, and especially all those that could be wrought into fury on the theme of the President as a despot. Above all, their coalition must absorb and then express the furious temper so dear to their own hearts which they fondly believed-mistakenly, they were destined to discover-was the temper of the country.

It can not be said that this was the Republican program. The President's program, fully as positive as that of the Cabal, had as good a right to appropriate the party label-as events were to show, a better right. But the power of the Cabal was very great, and the following it was able to command in the country reached almost the proportions of the terrible. A factional name is needed. For the Jacobins, their allies in Congress, their followers in the country, from the time they acquired a positive program, an accurate label is the Vindictives.

During the remainder of the session, Congress may be thought of as having-what Congress seldom has-three definite groups, Right, Left and Center. The Right was the Vindictives; the Left, the irreconcilable Democrats; the Center was composed chiefly of liberal Republicans but included a few Democrats, those who rebelled against the political chicanery of the Little Men.

The policy of the Vindictives was to force upon the Administration the double issue of emanc.i.p.ation and the supremacy of Congress. Therefore, their aim was to pa.s.s a bill freeing the slaves on the sole authority of a congressional act. Many resolutions, many bills, all having this end in view, were introduced. Some were buried in committees; some were remade in committees and subjected to long debate by the Houses; now and then one was pa.s.sed upon. But the spring wore through and the summer came, and still the Vindictives were not certainly in control of Congress. No bill to free slaves by congressional action secured a majority vote. At the same time it was plain that the strength of the Vindictives was slowly, steadily, growing.

Outside Congress, the Abolitionists took new hope. They had organized a systematic propaganda. At Was.h.i.+ngton, weekly meetings were held in the Smithsonian Inst.i.tute, where all their most conspicuous leaders, Phillips, Emerson, Brownson, Garret Smith, made addresses. Every Sunday a service was held in the chamber of the House of Representatives and the sermon was almost always a "terrific arrangement of slavery." Their watch-word was "A Free Union or Disintegration." The treatment of fugitive slaves by commanders in the field produced a clamor. Lincoln insisted on strict obedience to the two laws, the Fugitive Slave Act and the First Confiscation Act. Abolitionists sneered at "all this gabble about the sacredness of the Const.i.tution."(3) But Lincoln was not to be moved. When General Hunter, taking a leaf from the book of Fremont, tried to force his hand, he did not hesitate. Hunter had issued a proclamation by which the slaves in the region where he commanded were "declared forever free."

This was in May when Lincoln's difficulties with McClellan were at their height; when the Committee was zealously watching to catch him in any sort of mistake; when the House was within four votes of a majority for emanc.i.p.ation by act of Congress;(4) when there was no certainty whether the country was with him or with the Vindictives. Perhaps that new courage which definitely revealed itself the next month, may be first glimpsed in the proclamation overruling Hunter: "I further make known that whether it be competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any State or States free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government to exercise such supposed power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I can not feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field."(5) The revocation of Hunter's order infuriated the Abolitionists. It deeply disappointed the growing number who, careless about slavery, wanted emanc.i.p.ation as a war measure, as a blow at the South. Few of either of these groups noticed the implied hint that emanc.i.p.ation might come by executive action. Here was the matter of the war powers in a surprising form. However, it was not unknown to Congress. Attempts had been made to induce Congress to concede the war powers to the President and to ask, not command, him to use them for the liberation of slaves in the Seceded States. Long before, in a strangely different connection, such vehement Abolitionists as Giddings and J. Q. Adams had pictured the freeing of slaves as a natural incident of military occupation.

What induced Lincoln to throw out this hint of a possible surrender on the subject of emanc.i.p.ation? Again, as so often, the silence as to his motives is unbroken. However, there can be no doubt that his thinking on the subject pa.s.sed through several successive stages. But all his thinking was ruled by one idea. Any policy he might accept, or any refusal of policy, would be judged in his own mind by the degree to which it helped, or hindered, the national cause. Nothing was more absurd than the sneer of the Abolitionists that he was "tender" of slavery. Browning spoke for him faithfully, "If slavery can survive the shock of war and secession, be it so. If in the conflict for liberty, the Const.i.tution and the Union, it must necessarily perish, then let it perish." Browning refused to predict which alternative would develop. His point was that slaves must be treated like other property. But, if need be, he would sacrifice slavery as he would sacrifice anything else, to save the Union. He had no intention to "protect" slavery.(6) In the first stage of Lincoln's thinking on this th.o.r.n.y subject, his chief anxiety was to avoid scaring off from the national cause those Southern Unionists who were not prepared to abandon slavery. This was the motive behind his prompt suppression of Fremont. It was this that inspired the Abolitionist sneer about his relative att.i.tude toward G.o.d and Kentucky. As a compromise, to cut the ground from under the Vindictives, he had urged the loyal Slave States to endorse a program of compensated emanc.i.p.ation. But these States were as unable to see the handwriting on the wall as were the Little Men. In the same proclamation that overruled Hunter, while hinting at what the Administration might feel driven to do, Lincoln appealed again to the loyal Slave States to accept compensated emanc.i.p.ation. "I do not argue," said he, "I beseech you to make the argument for yourselves. You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times... . 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."(7) Though Lincoln, at this moment, was anxiously watching the movement in Congress to force his hand, he was not apparently cast down. He was emerging from his eclipse. June was approaching and with it the final dawn. Furthermore, when he issued this proclamation on May nineteenth, he had not lost faith in McClellan. He was still hoping for news of a crus.h.i.+ng victory; of McClellan's triumphal entry into Richmond. The next two months embraced both those transformations which together revolutionized his position. He emerged from his last eclipse; and McClellan failed him.

When Lincoln returned to Was.h.i.+ngton after his two days at the front, he knew that the fortunes of his Administration were at a low ebb. Never had he been derided in Congress with more brazen injustice. The Committee, waiting only for McClellan's failure, would now unmask their guns-as Chandler did, seven days later. The line of Vindictive criticism could easily be foreshadowed: the government had failed; it was responsible for a colossal military catastrophe; but what could you expect of an Administration that would not strike its enemies through emanc.i.p.ation; what a shattering demonstration that the Executive was not a safe repository of the war powers.

Was there any way to forestall or disarm the Vindictives? His silence gives us no clue when or how the answer occurred to him-by separating the two issues; by carrying out the hint in the May proclamation; by yielding on emanc.i.p.ation while, in the very act, pus.h.i.+ng the war powers of the President to their limit, declaring slaves free by an executive order.

The importance of preserving the war power of the President had become a fixed condition of Lincoln's thought. Already, he was looking forward not only to victory but to the great task that should come after victory. He was determined, if it were humanly possible, to keep that task in the hands of the President, and out of the hands of Congress. A first step had already been taken. In portions of occupied territory, military governors had been appointed. Simple