4. The Second Election of Lincoln: 1864.

Having the general for whom he had long sought, Lincoln could now be in military matters little more than the most intelligent onlooker; he could maintain the attitude, congenial to him where he dealt with skilled men, that when he differed from them they probably knew better than he. This was well, for in 1864 his political anxieties became greater than they had been since war declared itself at Fort Sumter. Whole States which had belonged to the Confederacy were now securely held by the Union armies, and the difficult problem of their government was approaching its final settlement. It seemed that the war should soon end; so the question of peace was pressed urgently. Moreover, the election of a President was due in the autumn, and, strange as it is, the issue was to be whether, with victory in their grasp, the victors should themselves surrender.

It was not given to Lincoln after all to play a great part in the reconstruction of the South; that was reserved for much rougher and much weaker hands. But the lines on which he had moved from the first are of interest. West Virginia, with its solid Unionist population, was simply allowed to form itself into an ordinary new State. But matters were not so simple where the Northern occupation was insecure, or where a tiny fraction of a State was held, or where a large part of the people leaned to the Confederacy. Military governors were of course appointed; in Tennessee this position was given to a strong Unionist, Andrew Johnson, who was already Senator for that State. In Louisiana and elsewhere Lincoln encouraged the citizens who would unreservedly accept the Union to organise State Governments for themselves. Where they did so there was friction between them and the Northern military governor who was still indispensable. There was also to the end triangular trouble between the factions in Missouri and the general commanding there. To these little difficulties, which were of course unceasing, Lincoln applied the firmness and tact which were no longer surprising in him, with a pleasing mixture of good temper and healthy irritation. But further difficulties lay in the attitude of Congress, which was concerned in the matter because each House could admit or reject the Senators or Representatives claiming to sit for a Southern State. There were questions about slavery in such States. Lincoln, as we have seen, had desired, if he could, to bring about the abolition of slavery through gradual and through local action, and he had wished to see the franchise given only to the few educated negroes. Nothing came of this, but it kept up the suspicion of Radicals in Congress that he was not sound on slavery; and, apart from slavery, the whole question of the terms on which people lately in arms against the country could be admitted as participators in the government of the country was one on which statesmen in Congress had their own very important point of view. Lincoln's main wish was that, with the greatest speed and the least heat spent on avoidable controversy, State government of spontaneous local growth should spring up in the reconquered South. "In all available ways," he had written to one of his military governors, "give the people a chance to express their wishes at these elections. Follow forms of law as far as convenient, but at all events get the expression of the largest number of people possible." Above all he was afraid lest in the Southern elections to Congress that very thing should happen which after his death did happen. "To send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives, elected, as would be understood (and perhaps really so), at the point of the bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous." For a time he and Congress worked together well enough, but sharp disagreement arose in 1864. He had propounded a particular plan for the reconstruction of Southern States. Senator Wade, the formidable Chairman of the Joint Committee on the War, and Henry Winter Davis, a keen, acrid, and fluent man who was powerful with the House, carried a Bill under which a State could only be reconstructed on their own plan, which differed from Lincoln's. The Bill came to Lincoln for signature in the last hours of the session, and, amidst frightened protests from friendly legislators then in his room, he let it lie there unsigned, till it expired with the session, and went on with his work. This was in July, 1864; his re-election was at stake. The Democrats were gaining ground; he might be giving extreme offence to the strongest Republican. "If they choose," he said, "to make a point of this I do not doubt that they can do harm" (indeed, those powerful men Wade and Davis now declared against his re-election with ability and extraordinary bitterness); but he continued: "At all events I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right. I must keep some standard or principle fixed within myself." The Bill would have repressed loyal efforts already made to establish State Governments in the South. It contained also a provision imposing the abolition of slavery on every such reconstructed State. This was an attempt to remedy any flaw in the constitutional effect of the Proclamation of Emancipation. But it was certainly in itself flagrantly unconstitutional; and the only conclusive way of abolishing slavery was the Constitutional Amendment, for which Lincoln was now anxious. This was not a pedantic point, for there might have been great trouble if the courts had later found a constitutional flaw in some negro's title to freedom. But the correctness of Lincoln's view hardly matters. In lots of little things, like a tired man who was careless by nature, Lincoln may perhaps have yielded to influence or acted for his political convenience in ways which may justly be censured, but it would be merely immoral to care whether he did so or did not, since at the crisis of his fate he could risk all for one scruple. In an earlier stage of his controversies with the parties he had written: "From time to time I have done and said what appeared to me proper to do and say. The public knows it all. It obliges nobody to follow me, and I trust it obliges me to follow nobody. The Radicals and Conservatives each agree with me in some things and disagree in others. I could wish both to agree with me in all things; for then they would agree with each other, and be too strong for any foe from any quarter. They, however, choose to do otherwise, and I do not question their right. I, too, shall do what seems to be my duty. I hold whoever commands in Missouri or elsewhere responsible to me and not to either Radicals or Conservatives. It is my duty to hear all; but at last I must, within my sphere, judge what to do and what to forbear."

In this same month of July, after the Confederate General Early's appearance before Washington had given Lincoln a pause from political cares, another trouble reached a point at which it is known to have tried his patience more than any other trouble of his Presidency. Peace after war is not always a matter of substituting the diplomatist for the soldier. When two sides were fighting, one for Union and the other for Independence, one or the other had to surrender the whole point at issue. In this case there might appear to have been a third possibility. The Southern States might have been invited to return to the Union on terms which admitted their right to secede again if they felt aggrieved. The invitation would in fact have been refused. But, if it had been made and accepted, this would have been a worse surrender for the North than any mere acknowledgment that the South could not be reconquered; for national unity from that day to this would have existed on the sufferance of a factious or a foreign majority in any single State. Lincoln had faced this. He was there to restore the Union on a firm foundation. He meant to insist to the point of pedantry that, by not so much as a word or line from the President or any one seeming to act for him, should the lawful right of secession even appear to be acknowledged. Some men would have been glad to hang Jefferson Davis as a traitor, yet would have been ready to negotiate with him as with a foreign king. Lincoln, who would not have hurt one hair of his head, and would have talked things over with Mr. Davis quite pleasantly, would have died rather than treat with him on the footing that he was head of an independent Confederacy. The blood shed might have been shed for nothing if he had done so. But to many men, in the long agony of the war and its disappointments, the plain position became much obscured. The idea in various forms that by some sort of negotiation the issue could be evaded began to assert itself again and again. The delusion was freely propagated that the South was ready to give in if only Lincoln would encourage its approaches. It was sheer delusion. Jefferson Davis said frankly to the last that the Confederacy would have "independence or extermination," and though Stephens and many others spoke of peace to the electors in their own States, Jefferson Davis had his army with him, and the only result which agitation against him ever produced was that two months before the irreparable collapse the chief command under him was given to his most faithful servant Lee. But it was useless for Lincoln to expose the delusion in the plainest terms; it survived exposure and became a danger to Northern unity.

Lincoln therefore took a strange course, which generally succeeded. When honest men came to him and said that the South could be induced to yield, he proposed to them that they should go to Jefferson Davis and see for themselves. The Chairman of the Republican organisation ultimately approached Lincoln on this matter at the request of a strong committee; but he was a sensible man whom Lincoln at once converted by drafting the precise message that would have to be sent to the Confederate President. On two earlier occasions such labourers for peace were allowed to go across the lines and talk with Davis; it could be trusted to their honour to pretend to no authority; they had interesting talks with the great enemy, and made religious appeals to him or entertained him with wild proposals for a joint war on France over Mexico. They returned, converted also. But in July Horace Greeley, the great editor, who was too opinionated to be quite honest, was somehow convinced that Southern agents at Niagara, who had really come to hold intercourse with the disloyal group among the Democrats, were "two ambassadors" from the Confederacy seeking an audience of Lincoln. He wrote to Lincoln, begging him to receive them. Lincoln caused Greeley to go to Niagara and see the supposed ambassadors himself. He gave him written authority to bring to him any person with proper credentials, provided, as he made plain in terms that perhaps were blunt, that the basis of any negotiation should include the recognition of the Union and the abolition of slavery. The persons whom Greeley saw had no authority to treat about anything. Greeley in his irritation now urged Lincoln to convey to Jefferson Davis through these mysterious men his readiness to receive them if they were accredited. In other words, the North was to begin suing for peace—a thing clearly unwise, which Lincoln refused. Greeley now involved Lincoln in a tangled controversy to which he gave such a turn that, unless Lincoln would publish the most passionately pacific of Greeley's letters, to the great discouragement of the public with whom Greeley counted, he must himself keep silent on what had passed. He elected to keep silent while Greeley in his paper criticised him as the person responsible for the continuance of senseless bloodshed. This was publicly harmful; and, as for its private bearing, the reputation of obstinate blood-thirstiness was certain to be painful to Lincoln.

The history of Lincoln's Cabinet has a bearing upon what is to follow. He ruled his Ministers with undisputed authority, talked with them collectively upon the easiest terms, spoke to them as a headmaster to his school when they caballed against one another, kept them in some sort of unison in a manner which astonished all who knew them. Cameron had had to retire early; so did the little-known Caleb Smith, who was succeeded in his unimportant office as Secretary of the Interior by a Mr. Usher, who seems to have been well chosen. Bates, the Attorney-General, retired, weary of his work, towards the end of 1864, and Lincoln had the keen pleasure of appointing James Speed, the brother of that unforgotten and greatly honoured friend whom he honoured the more for his contentedness with private station. James Speed himself was in Lincoln's opinion "an honest man and a gentleman, and one of those well-poised men, not too common here, who are not spoiled by a big office."

Blair might be regarded as a delightful, or equally as an intolerable man. He attacked all manner of people causelessly and violently, and earned implacable dislike from the Radicals In his party. Then he frankly asked Lincoln to dismiss him whenever it was convenient. There came a time when Lincoln's re-election was in great peril, and he might, it was urged, have made it sure by dismissing Blair. It is significant that Lincoln then refused to promote his own cause by seeming to sacrifice Blair, but later on, when his own election was fairly certain, but a greater degree of unity in the Republican party was to be gained, did ask Blair to go; (Blair's quarrels, it should be added, had become more and more outrageous). So he went and immediately flung himself with enthusiasm into the advocacy of Lincoln's cause. All the men who left Lincoln remained his friends, except one who will shortly concern us. Of Lincoln's more important ministers Welles did his work for the Navy industriously but unnoted. Stanton, on the other hand, and Lincoln's relations with Stanton are the subjects of many pages of literature. These two curious and seemingly incompatible men hit upon extraordinary methods of working together. It can be seen that Lincoln's chief care in dealing with his subordinates was to give support and to give free play to any man whose heart was in his work. In countless small matters he would let Stanton disobey him and flout him openly. ("Did Stanton tell you I was a damned fool? Then I expect I must be one, for he is almost always right and generally says what he means.") But every now and then, when he cared much about his own wish, he would step in and crush Stanton flat. Crowds of applicants to Lincoln with requests of a kind that must be granted sparingly were passed on to Stanton, pleased with the President, or mystified by his sadly observing that he had not much influence with this Administration but hoped to have more with the next. Stanton always refused them. He enjoyed doing it. Yet it seems a low trick to have thus indulged his taste for unpopularity, till one discovers that, when Stanton might have been blamed seriously and unfairly, Lincoln was very careful to shoulder the blame himself. The gist of their mutual dealings was that the hated Stanton received a thinly disguised, but quite unfailing support, and that hated or applauded, ill or well, wrong in this detail and right in that, he abode in his department and drove, and drove, and drove, and worshipped Lincoln. To Seward, who played first and last a notable part in history, and who all this time conducted foreign affairs under Lincoln without any mishap in the end, one tribute is due. When he had not a master it is said that his abilities were made useless by his egotism; yet it can be seen that, with his especial cause to be jealous of Lincoln, he could not even conceive how men let private jealousy divide them in the performance of duty.

It was otherwise with the ablest man in the Cabinet. Salmon P. Chase must really have been a good man in the days before he fell in love with his own goodness. Lincoln and the country had confidence in his management of the Treasury, and Lincoln thought more highly of his general ability than of that of any other man about him. He, for his part, distrusted and despised Lincoln. Those who read Lincoln's important letters and speeches see in him at once a great gentleman; there were but few among the really well-educated men of America who made much of his lacking some of the minor points of gentility to which most of them were born; but of these few Chase betrayed himself as one. At the beginning of 1864 Chase was putting it about that he had himself no wish to be President, but—; that of course he was loyal to Mr. Lincoln, but—; and so forth. He had, as indeed he deserved, admirers who wished he should be President, and early in the year some of them expressed this wish in a manifesto. Chase wrote to Lincoln that this was not his own doing; Lincoln replied that he himself knew as little of these things "as my friends will allow me to know." To those who spoke to him of Chase's intrigues he only said that Chase would in some ways make a very good President, and he hoped they would never have a worse President than he. The movement in favour of Chase collapsed very soon, and it evidently had no effect on Lincoln. Chase, however, was beginning to foster grievances of his own against Lincoln. These related always to appointments in the service of the Treasury. He professed a horror of party influences in appointments, and imputed corrupt motives to Lincoln in such matters. He shared the sound ideas of the later civil service reformers, though he was far too easily managed by a low class of flatterers to have been of the least use in carrying them out. Lincoln would certainly not at that crisis have permitted strife over civil service reform, but some of his admirers have probably gone too far in claiming him as a sturdy supporter of the old school who would despise the reforming idea. Letters of his much earlier betray his doubts as to the old system, and he was exactly the man who in quieter times could have improved matters with the least possible fuss. However that may be, all the tiresome circumstances of Chase's differences with him are well known, and in these instances Lincoln was clearly in the right, and Chase quarrelled only because he could not force upon him appointments that would have created fury. Once Chase was overruled and wrote his resignation. Lincoln went to him with the resignation in his hand, treated him with simple affection for a man whom he still liked, and made him take it back. Later on Chase got his own way on the whole, but was angry and sent another resignation. Some one heard of it and came to Lincoln to say that the loss of Chase would cause a financial panic. Lincoln's answer was to this effect: "Chase thinks he has become indispensable to the country; that his intimate friends know it, and he cannot comprehend why the country does not understand it. He also thinks he ought to be President; has no doubt whatever about that. It is inconceivable to him why people do not rise as one man and say so. He is a great statesman, and at the bottom a patriot. Ordinarily he discharges the duties of a public office with greater ability than any man I know. Mind, I say 'ordinarily,' but he has become irritable, uncomfortable, so that he is never perfectly happy unless he is thoroughly miserable and able to make everybody else just as uncomfortable as he is himself. He is either determined to annoy me, or that I shall pat him on the shoulder and coax him to stay. I don't think I ought to do it. I will not do it. I will take him at his word." So he did. This was at the end of June, 1864, when Lincoln's apprehensions about his own re-election were keen, and the resignation of Chase, along with the retention of Blair, seemed likely to provoke anger which was very dangerous to himself. An excellent successor to the indispensable man was soon found. Chase found more satisfaction than ever in insidious opposition to Lincoln. Lincoln's opportunity of requiting him was not yet.

The question of the Presidency loomed large from the beginning of the year to the election in November. At first, while the affairs of war seemed to be in good train, the chief question was who should be the Republican candidate. It was obviously not a time when a President of even moderate ability and character, with all the threads in his hands, could wisely have been replaced except for overwhelming reasons. But since 1832, when Jackson had been re-elected, the practice of giving a President a second term had lapsed. It has been seen that there was friction, not wholly unnatural, between Lincoln and many of his party. The inner circles of politicians were considering what candidate could carry the country. They were doing so with great anxiety, for disaffection was growing serious in the North and the Democrats would make a good fight. They honestly doubted whether Lincoln was the best candidate, and attributed their own excited mood of criticism to the public at large. They forgot the leaning of ordinary men towards one who is already serving them honestly. Of the other possible candidates, including Chase, Fremont had the most energetic backers. Enough has been said already of his delusive attractiveness. General Butler had also some support. He was an impostor of a coarser but more useful stamp. A successful advocate in Massachusetts, he had commanded the militia of the State when they first appeared on the scene at Baltimore in 1861, and he had been in evidence ever since without sufficient opportunity till May, 1864, of proving that real military incapacity of which some of Lincoln's friends suspected him. He had a kind of resourceful impudence, coupled with executive vigour and a good deal of wit, which had made him useful in the less martial duties of his command. Generals in a war of this character were often so placed that they had little fighting to do and much civil government, and Butler, who had first treated slaves as "contraband" and had dealt with his difficulties about negroes with more heart and more sense than many generals, had to some extent earned his reputation among the Republicans. Thus of those volunteer generals who never became good soldiers he is said to have been the only one that escaped the constant process of weeding out. To the end he kept confidently claiming higher rank in the Army, and when he had signally failed under Grant at Petersburg he succeeded somehow in imposing himself upon that, at first indignant, general. Nothing actually came of the danger that the public might find a hero in this man, who was neither scrupulous nor able, but he had so captivated experienced politicians that some continued even after Lincoln's re-election to think Butler the man whom the people would have preferred. Last but not least many were anxious to nominate Grant. It was an innocent thought, but Grant's merits were themselves the conclusive reason why he should not be taken from the work he had already in hand.

Through the early months of the year the active politicians earnestly collogued among themselves about possible candidates, and it seems there was little sign among them of that general confidence in Lincoln which a little while before had been recognised as prevailing in the country. In May the small and light-headed section of the so-called Radicals who favoured Fremont organised for themselves a "national meeting" of some few people at which they nominated him for the Presidency. They had no chance of success, but they might have helped the Democrats by carrying off some Republican votes. Besides, there are of course men who, having started as extremists in one direction and failed, will go over to the opposite extreme rather than moderate their aims. Months later, when a Republican victory of some sort became certain, unanimity among Republicans was secured; for some passions were appeased by the resignation of Blair, and Fremont was prevailed upon to withdraw. But in the meantime the Republican party had sent its delegates to a Convention at Baltimore early in June. This Convention met in a comparatively fortunate hour. In spite of the open disaffection of small sections, the Northern people had been in good spirits about the war when Grant set out to overcome Lee. At first he was felt to be progressing pretty well, and, though the reverse at Cold Harbour had happened a few days before, the size of that mishap was not yet appreciated. Ordinary citizens, called upon now and then to decide a broad and grave issue, often judge with greater calm than is possible to any but the best of the politicians and the journalists. Indeed, some serious politicians had been anxious to postpone the Convention, justly fearing that these ignorant delegates were not yet imbued with that contempt for Lincoln which they had worked up among themselves. At the Baltimore Convention the delegates of one State wanted Grant, but the nomination of Lincoln was immediate and almost unanimous. This same Convention declared for a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery. Lincoln would say nothing as to the choice of a candidate for the Vice-Presidency. He was right, but the result was most unhappy in the end. The Convention chose Andrew Johnson. Johnson, whom Lincoln could hardly endure, began life as a journeyman tailor. He had raised himself like Lincoln, and had performed a great part in rallying the Unionists of Tennessee. But—not to dwell upon the fact that he was drunk when he was sworn in as Vice-President—his political creed was that of bitter class-hatred, and his character degenerated into a weak and brutal obstinacy. This man was to succeed Lincoln. Lincoln, in his letter to accept the nomination, wrote modestly, refusing to take the decision of the Convention as a tribute to his peculiar fitness for his post, but was "reminded in this connection of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion that it was not best to swap horses when crossing a stream."

It remained possible that the dissatisfied Republicans would revolt later and put another champion in the field. But now attention turned to the Democrats. Their Convention was to meet at Chicago at the end of August, and in the interval the North entered upon the period of deepest mental depression that came to it during the war. It is startling to learn now that in the course of that year, when the Confederacy lay like a nut in the nutcrackers, when the crushing of its resistance might indeed require a little stronger pressure than was expected, and the first splitting in its hard substance might not come on the side on which it was looked for, but when no wise man could have a doubt as to the end, the victorious people were inclined to think that the moment had come for giving in. "In this purpose to save the country and its liberties," said Lincoln, "no class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it? Who should quail while they do not?" Yet there is conclusive authority for saying that there was now more quailing in the North than there had ever been before. When the war had gone on long, checks to the course of victory shook the nerves of people at home more than crushing defeats had shaken them in the first two years of the struggle, and men who would have wrapped the word "surrender" in periphrasis went about with surrender in their hearts. Thus the two months that went before the great rally of the Democrats at Chicago were months of good omen for a party which, however little the many honourable men in its ranks were willing to face the fact, must base its only hope upon the weakening of the national will. For public attention was turned away from other fields of war and fixed upon the Army of the Potomac. Sherman drove back Johnston, and routed Hood; Farragut at Mobile enriched the annals of the sea; but what told upon the imagination of the North was that Grant's earlier progress was followed by the definite failure of his original enterprise against Lee's army, by Northern defeats on the Shenandoah and an actual dash by the South against Washington, by the further failure of Grant's first assault upon Petersburg, and by hideous losses and some demoralisation in his army. The candidate that the Democrats would put forward and the general principle of their political strategy were well known many weeks before their Convention met; and the Republicans already despaired of defeating them. In the Chicago Convention there were men, apparently less reputable in character than their frank attitude suggests, who were outspoken against the war; their leader was Vallandigham. There were men who spoke boldly for the war, but more boldly against emancipation and the faults of the Government; their leader was Seymour, talking with the accent of dignity and of patriotism. Seymour, for the war, presided over the Convention; Vallandigham, against the war, was the master spirit in its debates. It was hard for such men, with any saving of conscience, to combine. The mode of combination which they discovered is memorable in the history of faction. First they adopted a platform which meant peace; then they adopted a candidate intended to symbolise successful war. They resolved "that this Convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war . . . justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States." The fallacy which named the Union as the end while demanding as a means the immediate cessation of hostilities needs no demonstration. The resolution was thus translated: "Resolved that the war is a failure"; and the translation had that trenchant accuracy which is often found in American popular epigram. The candidate chosen was McClellan; McClellan in set terms repudiated the resolution that the war was a failure, and then accepted the candidature. He meant no harm to the cause of the Union, but he meant no definite and clearly conceived good. Electors might now vote Democratic because the party was peaceful or because the candidate was a warrior. The turn of fortune was about to arrest this combination in the really formidable progress of its crawling approach to power. Perhaps it was not only, as contemporary observers thought, events in the field that began within a few days to make havoc with the schemes of McClellan and his managers. Perhaps if the patience of the North had been tried a little longer the sense of the people would still have recoiled from the policy of the Democrats, which had now been defined in hard outline. As a matter of fact it was only in the months while the Chicago Convention was still impending and for a few days or weeks after it had actually taken place that the panic of the Republicans lasted. But during that time the alarm among them was very great, whether it was wholly due to the discouragement of the people about the war or originated among the leaders and was communicated to their flock. Sagacious party men reported from their own neighbourhoods that there was no chance of winning the election. In one quarter or another there was talk of setting aside Lincoln and compelling Grant to be a candidate. About August 12 Lincoln was told by Thurlow Weed, the greatest of party managers, that his election was hopeless. Ten days later he received the same assurance from the central Republican Committee through their chairman, Raymond, together with the advice that he should make overtures for peace.

Supposing that in the following November McClellan should have been elected, and that in the following March he should have come into office with the war unfinished, it seems now hardly credible that he would have returned to slavery, or at least disbanded without protection the 150,000 negroes who were now serving the North. Lincoln, however, seriously believed that this was the course to which McClellan's principles and those of his party committed him, and that (policy and honour apart) this would have been for military reasons fatal. McClellan had repudiated the Peace Resolution, but his followers and his character were to be reckoned with rather than his words, and indeed his honest principles committed him deeply to some attempt to reverse Lincoln's policy as to slavery, and he clearly must have been driven into negotiations with the South. The confusion which must inevitably be created by attempts to satisfy the South, when it was in no humour of moderation, and by the fury which yielding would have provoked in half the people of the North, was well and tersely described by Grant in a letter to a friend, which that friend published in support of Lincoln. At a fair at Philadelphia for the help of the wounded Lincoln said: "We accepted this war; we did not begin it. We accepted it for an object, and when that object is accomplished the war will end, and I hope to God that it will never end until that object is accomplished." Whatever the real mind of McClellan and of the average Democrat may have been, it was not this; and the posterity of Mr. Facing-both-ways may succeed in an election, but never in war or the making of lasting peace.

Lincoln looked forward with happiness, after he was actually re-elected, to the quieter pursuits of private life which might await him in four years' time. He looked forward not less happily to a period of peace administration first, and there can be no doubt that he would have prized as much as any man the highest honour that his countrymen could bestow, a second election to the Presidency. But, even in a smaller man who had passed through such an experience as he had and was not warped by power, these personal wishes might well have been merged in concern for the cause in hand. There is everything to indicate that they were completely so in his case. A President cannot wisely do much directly to promote his own re-election, but he appears to have done singularly little. At the beginning of 1864, when the end of the war seemed near, and the election of a Republican probable, he may well have thought that he would be the Republican candidate, but he had faced the possible choice of Chase very placidly, and of Grant he said, "If he takes Richmond let him have the Presidency." It was another matter when the war again seemed likely to drag on and a Democratic President might come in before the end of it. An editor who visited the over-burdened President in August told him that he needed some weeks of rest and seclusion. But he said, "I cannot fly from my thoughts. I do not think it is personal vanity or ambition, though I am not free from those infirmities, but I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of the nation will be decided in November. There is no proposal offered by any wing of the Democratic party but that must result in the permanent destruction of the Union." He would have been well content to make place for Grant if Grant had finished his work. But that work was delayed, and then Lincoln became greatly troubled by the movement to force Grant, the general whom he had at last found, into politics with his work undone; for all would have been lost if McClellan had come in with the war still progressing badly. Lincoln had been invited in June to a gathering in honour of Grant, got up with the thinly disguised object of putting the general forward as his rival. He wrote, with true diplomacy: "It is impossible for me to attend. I approve nevertheless of whatever may tend to strengthen and sustain General Grant and the noble armies now under his command. He and his brave soldiers are now in the midst of their great trial, and I trust that at your meeting you will so shape your good words that they may turn to men and guns, moving to his and their support." In August he told his mind plainly to Grant's friend Eaton. He never dreamed for a moment that Grant would willingly go off into politics with the military situation still insecure, and he believed that no possible pressure could force Grant to do so; but on this latter question he wished to make himself sure; with a view to future military measures he really needed to be sure of it. Eaton saw Grant, and in the course of conversation very tactfully brought to Grant's notice the designs of his would-be friends. "We had," writes Eaton, "been talking very quietly, but Grant's reply came in an instant and with a violence for which I was not prepared. He brought his clenched fists down hard on the strap arms of his camp chair, 'They can't do it. They can't compel me to do it.' Emphatic gesture was not a strong point with Grant. 'Have you said this to the President?' I asked. 'No,' said Grant. 'I have not thought it worth while to assure the President of my opinion. I consider it as important for the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.'" "I told you," said Lincoln afterwards, "they could not get him to run till he had closed out the rebellion." Since the great danger was now only that McClellan would become President in March, there was but one thing to do—to try and finish the war before then. Raymond's advice in favour of negotiations with the South now came, and Lincoln's mode of replying to this has been noticed. Rumours were afloat that if McClellan won in November there would be an attempt to bring him irregularly into power at once. Lincoln let it be known that he should stay at his post at all costs till the last lawful day. On August 23, in that curious way in which deep emotion showed itself with him, he wrote a resolution upon a paper, which he folded and asked his ministers to endorse with their signatures without reading it. They all wrote their names on the back of it, ready, if that were possible, to commit themselves blindly to support of him in whatever he had resolved; a great tribute to him and to themselves. He sealed it up and put it away.

How far in this dark time the confidence of the people had departed from Lincoln no one can tell. It might be too sanguine a view of the world to suppose that they would have been proof against what may be called a conspiracy to run him down. There were certainly quarters in which the perception of his worth came soon and remained. Not all those who are poor or roughly brought up were among those plain men whose approval Lincoln desired and often expected; but at least the plain man does exist and the plain people did read Lincoln's words. The soldiers of the armies in the East by this time knew Lincoln well, and there were by now, as we shall see, in every part of the North, honest parents who had gone to Washington, and entered the White House very sad, and came out very happy, and taken their report of him home. No less could there be found, among those to whom America had given the greatest advantages that birth and upbringing can offer, families in which, when Lincoln died, a daughter could write to her father as Lady Harcourt (then Miss Lily Motley) wrote: "I echo your 'thank God' that we always appreciated him before he was taken from us." But if we look at the political world, we find indeed noble exceptions such as that of Charles Sumner among those who had been honestly perplexed by Lincoln's attitude on slavery; we have to allow for the feelings of some good State Governor who had come to him with a tiresome but serious proposition and been adroitly parried with an untactful and coarse apologue; yet it remains to be said that a thick veil, woven of self-conceit and half-education, blinded most politicians to any rare quality in Lincoln, and blinded them to what was due in decency to any man discharging his task. The evidence collected by Mr. Rhodes as to the tone prevailing in 1864 at Washington and among those in touch with Washington suggests that strictly political society was on the average as poor in brain and heart as the court of the most decadent European monarchy. It presents a stern picture of the isolation, on one side at least, in which Lincoln had to live and work.

A little before this crowning period of Lincoln's career Walt Whitman described him as a man in the streets of Washington could see him, if he chose. He has been speaking of the cavalry escort which the President's advisers insisted should go clanking about with him. "The party," he continues, "makes no great show in uniform or horses. Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy-going grey horse, is dressed in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, and looks about as ordinary in attire, etc., as the commonest man. The entirely unornamental cortege arouses no sensation; only some curious stranger stops and gazes. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche" (not, the poet intimates, a very smart turn-out). "Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony. They passed me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily in my eye. He bowed and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed."

The little boy on the pony was Thomas, called "Tad," a constant companion of his father's little leisure, now dead. An elder boy, Robert, has lived to be welcomed as Ambassador in this country, and was at this time a student at Harvard. Willie, a clever and lovably mischievous child, "the chartered libertine of the White House" for a little while, had died at the age of twelve in the early days of 1862, when his father was getting so impatient to stir McClellan into action. These and a son who had long before died in infancy were the only children of Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln. Little has been made public concerning them, but enough to convey the impression of a wise and tender father, trusted by his children and delighting in them. John Nicolay, his loyal and capable secretary, and the delightful John Hay must be reckoned on the cheerful side—for there was one—of Lincoln's daily life. The life of the home at the White House, and sometimes in summer at the "Soldiers' Home" near Washington, was simple, and in his own case (not in that of his guests) regardless of the time, sufficiency, or quality of meals. He cannot have given people much trouble, but he gave some to the guard who watched him, themselves keenly watched by Stanton; for he loved, if he could, to walk alone from his midnight conferences at the War Department to the White House or the Soldiers' Home. The barest history of the events with which he dealt is proof enough of long and hard and anxious working days, which continued with hardly a break through four years. In that history many a complication has here been barely glanced at or clean left out; in this year, for example, the difficulty about France and Mexico and the failure of the very estimable Banks in Texas have been but briefly noted. And there must be remembered, in addition, the duty of a President to be accessible to all people, a duty which Lincoln especially strove to fulfil.

Apart from formal receptions, the stream of callers on him must have given Lincoln many compensations for its huge monotony. Very odd, and sometimes attractive, samples of human nature would come under his keen eye. Now and then a visitor came neither with a troublesome request, nor for form's sake or for curiosity, but in simple honesty to pay a tribute of loyalty or speak a word of good cheer which Lincoln received with unfeigned gratitude. Farmers and back-country folk, of the type he could best talk with, came and had more time than he ought to have spared bestowed on them. At long intervals there came a friend of very different days. Some ingenious men, for instance, fitted out Dennis Hanks in a new suit of clothes and sent him as their ambassador to plead for certain political offenders. It is much to be feared that they were more successful than they deserved, though Stanton intervened and Dennis, when he had seen him, favoured his old companion, the President, with advice to dismiss that minister. But the immense variety of puzzling requests to be dealt with in such interviews must have made heavy demands upon a conscientious and a kind man, especially if his conscience and his kindness were, in small matters, sometimes at variance. Lincoln sent a multitude away with that feeling, so grateful to poor people, that at least they had received such hearing as it was possible to give them; and in dealing with the applications which imposed the greatest strain on himself he made an ineffaceable impression upon the memory of his countrymen.

The American soldier did not take naturally to discipline. Death sentences, chiefly for desertion or for sleeping or other negligence on the part of sentries, were continually being passed by courts-martial. In some cases or at some period these used to come before the President on a stated day of the week, of which Lincoln would often speak with horror. He was continually being appealed to in relation to such sentences by the father or mother of the culprit, or some friend. At one time, it may be, he was too ready with pardon; "You do not know," he said, "how hard it is to let a human being die, when you feel that a stroke of your pen will save him." Butler used to write to him that he was destroying the discipline of the army. A letter of his to Meade shows clearly that, later at least, he did not wish to exercise a merely cheap and inconsiderate mercy. The import of the numberless pardon stories really is that he would spare himself no trouble to enquire, and to intervene wherever he could rightly give scope to his longing for clemency. A Congressman might force his way into his bedroom in the middle of the night, rouse him from his sleep to bring to his notice extenuating facts that had been overlooked, and receive the decision, "Well, I don't see that it will do him any good to be shot." It is related that William Scott, a lad from a farm in Vermont, after a tremendous march in the Peninsula campaign, volunteered to do double guard duty to spare a sick comrade, slept at his post, was caught, and was under sentence of death, when the President came to the army and heard of him. The President visited him, chatted about his home, looked at his mother's photograph, and so forth. Then he laid his hands on the boy's shoulders and said with a trembling voice, "My boy, you are not going to be shot. I believe you when you tell me that you could not keep awake. I am going to trust you and send you back to the regiment. But I have been put to a great deal of trouble on your account. . . . Now what I want to know is, how are you going to pay my bill?" Scott told afterwards how difficult it was to think, when his fixed expectation of death was suddenly changed; but how he managed to master himself, thank Mr. Lincoln and reckon up how, with his pay and what his parents could raise by mortgage on their farm and some help from his comrades, he might pay the bill if it were not more than five or six hundred dollars. "But it is a great deal more than that," said the President. "My bill is a very large one. Your friends cannot pay it, nor your bounty, nor the farm, nor all your comrades. There is only one man in the world who can pay it, and his name is William Scott. If from this day William Scott does his duty, so that, when he comes to die, he can look me in the face as he does now and say, 'I have kept my promise and I have done my duty as a soldier,' then my debt will be paid. Will you make the promise and try to keep it?" And William Scott did promise; and, not very long after, he was desperately wounded, and he died, but not before he could send a message to the President that he had tried to be a good soldier, and would have paid his debt in full if he had lived, and that he died thinking of Lincoln's kind face and thanking him for the chance he gave him to fall like a soldier in battle. If the story is not true—and there is no reason whatever to doubt it—still it is a remarkable man of whom people spin yarns of that kind.

When Lincoln's strength became visibly tried friends often sought to persuade him to spare himself the needless, and to him very often harrowing, labour of incessant interviews. They never succeeded. Lincoln told them he could not forget what he himself would feel in the place of the many poor souls who came to him desiring so little and with so little to get. But he owned to the severity of the strain. He was not too sensitive to the ridicule and reproach that surrounded him. "Give yourself no uneasiness," he had once said to some one who had sympathised with him over some such annoyance, "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice, and have received a great deal of kindness not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it." But the gentle nature that such words express, and that made itself deeply felt by those that were nearest him, cannot but have suffered from want of appreciation. With all this added to the larger cares, which before the closing phases of the war opened had become so intense, Lincoln must have been taxed near to the limit of what men have endured without loss of judgment, or loss of courage or loss of ordinary human feeling. There is no sign that any of these things happened to him; the study of his record rather shows a steady ripening of mind and character to the end. It has been seen how throughout his previous life the melancholy of his temperament impressed those who had the opportunity of observing it. A colleague of his at the Illinois bar has told how on circuit he sometimes came down in the morning and found Lincoln sitting alone over the embers of the fire, where he had sat all night in sad meditation, after an evening of jest apparently none the less hilarious for his total abstinence. There was no scope for this brooding now, and in a sense the time of his severest trial cannot have been the saddest time of Lincoln's life. It must have been a cause not of added depression but of added strength that he had long been accustomed to face the sternest aspect of the world. He had within his own mind two resources, often, perhaps normally, associated together, but seldom so fully combined as with him. In his most intimate circle he would draw upon his stores of poetry, particularly of tragedy; often, for instance, he would recite such speeches as Richard II.'s:

"For God's sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings. . . . . . All murdered."

Slighter acquaintances saw, day by day, another element in his thoughts, the companion to this; for the hardly interrupted play of humour in which he found relief continued to help him to the end. Whatever there was in it either of mannerism or of coarseness, no one can grudge it him; it is an oddity which endears. The humour of real life fades in reproduction, but Lincoln's, there is no doubt was a vein of genuine comedy, deep, rich, and unsoured, of a larger human quality than marks the brilliant works of literary American humorists. It was, like the comedy of Shakespeare, plainly if unaccountably akin with the graver and grander strain of thought and feeling that inspired the greatest of his speeches. Physically his splendid health does not seem to have been impaired beyond recovery. But it was manifestly near to breaking; and the "deep-cut lines" were cut still deeper, and the long legs were always cold.

The cloud over the North passed very suddenly. The North indeed paid the penalty of a nation which is spared the full strain of a war at the first, and begins to discover its seriousness when the hope of easy victory has been many times dashed down. It has been necessary to dwell upon the despondency which at one time prevailed; but it would be hard to rate too highly the military difficulty of the conquest undertaken by the North, or the trial involved to human nature by perseverance in such a task. If the depression during the summer was excessive, as it clearly was, at least the recovery which followed was fully adequate to the occasion which produced it. On September 2 Sherman telegraphed, "Atlanta is ours and fairly won." The strategic importance of earlier successes may have been greater, but the most ignorant man who looked at a map could see what it signified that the North could occupy an important city in the heart of Georgia. Then they recalled Farragut's victory of a month before. Then there followed, close to Washington, putting an end to a continual menace, stirring and picturesquely brilliant beyond other incidents of the war, Sheridan's repeated victories in the Shenandoah Valley. The war which had been "voted a failure" was evidently not a failure. At the same time men of high character conducted a vigorous campaign of speeches for Lincoln. General Schurz, the German revolutionary Liberal, who lived to tell Bismarck at his table that he still preferred democracy to his amused host's method of government, sacrificed his command in the Army—for Lincoln told him it could not be restored—to speak for Lincoln. Even Chase was carried away, and after months of insidious detraction, went for Lincoln on the stump. In the elections in November Lincoln was elected by an enormous popular majority, giving him 212 out of the 233 votes in the electoral college, where in form the election is made. Three Northern States only, one of them his native State, had gone against him. He made some little speeches to parties which came to "serenade" him; some were not very formal speeches, for, as he said, he was now too old to "care much about the mode of doing things." But one was this: "It has long been a grave question whether any Government not too strong for the liberties of its people can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies. On this point the present rebellion brought our Government to a severe test, and a Presidential election occurring in regular course during the rebellion added not a little to the strain. But we cannot have a free Government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us. But the election along with its incidental and undesirable strife has done good too. It has demonstrated that a people's Government can sustain a national election in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility. But the rebellion continues, and now that the election is over may not all have a common interest to reunite in a common effort to save our common country? For my own part I have striven and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man's bosom. While I am duly sensible to the high compliment of a re-election, and duly grateful as I trust to Almighty God for having directed my countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think, for their good, it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any man may be disappointed by the result. May I ask those who have not differed from me to join with me in this same spirit towards those who have? And now let me close by asking three hearty cheers for our brave soldiers and seamen, and their gallant and skilful commanders."

In the Cabinet he brought out the paper that he had sealed up in the dark days of August; he reminded his ministers of how they had endorsed it unread, and he read it them. Its contents ran thus: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards." Lincoln explained what he had intended to do if McClellan had won. He would have gone to him and said, "General, this election shows that you are stronger, have more influence with the people of this country than I"; and he would have invited him to co-operate in saving the Union now, by using that great influence to secure from the people the willing enlistment of enough recruits. "And the general," said Seward, "would have said, 'Yes, yes'; and again the next day, when you spoke to him about it, 'Yes, yes'; and so on indefinitely, and he would have done nothing."

"Seldom in history," wrote Emerson in a letter after the election, "was so much staked upon a popular vote. I suppose never in history."

And to those Americans of all classes and in all districts of the North, who had set their hearts and were giving all they had to give to preserve the life of the nation, the political crisis of 1864 would seem to have been the most anxious moment of the war. It is impossible—it must be repeated—to guess how great the danger really was that their popular government might in the result betray the true and underlying will of the people; for in any country (and in America perhaps more than most) the average of politicians, whose voices are most loudly heard, can only in a rough and approximate fashion be representative. But there is in any case no cause for surprise that the North should at one time have trembled. Historic imagination is easily, though not one whit too deeply, moved by the heroic stand of the South. It is only after the effort to understand the light in which the task of the North has presented itself to capable soldiers, that a civilian can perceive what sustained resolution was required if, though far the stronger, it was to make its strength tell. Notwithstanding the somewhat painful impression which the political chronicle of this time at some points gives, it is the fact that the wisest Englishmen who were in those days in America and had means of observing what passed have retained a lasting sense of the constancy, under trial, of the North.



CHAPTER XII

THE END

On December 6, 1864, Lincoln sent the last of his Annual Messages to Congress. He treated as matter for oblivion the "impugning of motives and heated controversy as to the proper means of advancing the Union cause," which had played so large a part in the Presidential election and the other elections of the autumn. For, as he said, "on the distinct issue of Union or no Union the politicians have shown their instinctive knowledge that there is no diversity among the people." This was accurate as well as generous, for though many Democrats had opposed the war, none had avowed that for the sake of peace he would give up the Union. Passing then to the means by which the Union could be made to prevail he wrote: "On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to me that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and cannot give. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war and decided by victory. The abandonment of armed resistance to the national authority on the part of the insurgents is the only indispensable condition to ending the war on the part of the Government." To avoid a possible misunderstanding he added that not a single person who was free by the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation or of any Act of Congress would be returned to slavery while he held the executive authority. "If the people should by whatever mode or means make it an executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it." This last sentence was no meaningless flourish; the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery could not be passed for some time, and might conceivably be defeated; in the meantime the Courts might possibly have declared any negro in the Southern States a slave; Lincoln's words let it be seen that they would have found themselves without an arm to enforce their decision. But in fact there was no longer an issue with the South as to abolition. Jefferson Davis had himself declared that slavery was gone, for most slaves had now freed themselves, and that he for his part troubled very little over that. There remained, then, no issue between North and South except that between Independence and Union.

On the same day that he sent his annual message Lincoln gave himself a characteristic pleasure by another communication which he sent to the Senate. Old Roger Taney of the Dred Scott case had died in October; the Senate was now requested to confirm the President's nomination of a new Chief Justice to succeed him; and the President had nominated Chase. Chase's reputation as a lawyer had seemed to fit him for the position, but the well informed declared that, in spite of some appearances on the platform for Lincoln he still kept "going around peddling his griefs in private ears and sowing dissatisfaction against Lincoln." So in spite of Lincoln's pregnant remark on this subject that he "did not believe in keeping any man under," nobody supposed that Lincoln would appoint him. Sumner and Congressman Alley of Massachusetts had indeed gone to Lincoln to urge the appointment. "We found, to our dismay," Alley relates, "that the President had heard of the bitter criticisms of Mr. Chase upon himself and his Administration. Mr. Lincoln urged many of Chase's defects, to discover, as we afterwards learned, how his objection could be answered. We were both discouraged and made up our minds that the President did not mean to appoint Mr. Chase. It really seemed too much to expect of poor human nature." One morning Alley again saw the President. "I have something to tell you that will make you happy," said Lincoln. "I have just sent Mr. Chase word that he is to be appointed Chief Justice, and you are the first man I have told of it." Alley said something natural about Lincoln's magnanimity, but was told in reply what the only real difficulty had been. Lincoln from his "convictions of duty to the Republican party and the country" had always meant to appoint Chase, subject to one doubt which he had revolved in his mind till he had settled it. This doubt was simply whether Chase, beset as he was by a craving for the Presidency which he could never obtain, would ever really turn his attention with a will to becoming the great Chief Justice that Lincoln thought he could be. Lincoln's occasional failures of tact had sometimes a noble side to them; he even thought now of writing to Chase and telling him with simple seriousness where he felt his temptation lay, and he with difficulty came to see that this attempt at brotherly frankness would be misconstrued by a suspicious and jealous man. Charles Sumner, Chase's advocate on this occasion, was all this time the most weighty and the most pronounced of those Radicals who were beginning to press for unrestricted negro suffrage in the South and in general for a hard and inelastic scheme of "reconstruction," which they would have imposed on the conquered South without an attempt to conciliate the feeling of the vanquished or to invite their co-operation in building up the new order. He was thus the chief opponent of that more tentative, but as is now seen, more liberal and more practical policy which lay very close to Lincoln's heart; enough has been said of him to suggest too that this grave person, bereft of any glimmering of fun, was in one sense no congenial companion for Lincoln. But he was stainlessly unselfish and sincere, and he was the politician above all others in Washington with whom Lincoln most gladly and most successfully maintained easy social intercourse. And, to please him in little ways, Lincoln would disentangle his long frame from the "grotesque position of comfort" into which he had twisted it in talk with some other friend, and would assume in an instant a courtly demeanour when Sumner was about to enter his room.

On January 31, 1865, the resolution earlier passed by the Senate for a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit slavery was passed by the House of Representatives, as Lincoln had eagerly desired, so that the requisite voting of three quarters of the States in its favour could now begin. Before that time the Confederate Congress had, on March 13, 1865, closed its last, most anxious and distracted session by passing an Act for the enlistment of negro volunteers, who were to become free on enlistment. As a military measure it was belated and inoperative, but nothing could more eloquently have marked the practical extinction of slavery which the war had wrought than the consent of Southern legislators to convert the remaining slaves into soldiers.

The military operations of 1865 had proceeded but a very little way when the sense of what they portended was felt among the Southern leaders in Richmond. The fall of that capital itself might be hastened or be delayed; Lee's army if it escaped from Richmond might prolong resistance for a shorter or for a longer time, but Sherman's march to the sea, and the far harder achievements of the same kind which he was now beginning, made the South feel, as he knew it would feel, that not a port, not an arsenal, not a railway, not a corn district of the South lay any longer beyond the striking range of the North. Congressmen and public officials in Richmond knew that the people of the South now longed for peace and that the authority of the Confederacy was gone. They beset Jefferson Davis with demands that he should start negotiations. But none of them had determined what price they would pay for peace; and there was not among them any will that could really withstand their President. In one point indeed Jefferson Davis did wisely yield. On February 9, 1865, he consented to make Lee General-in-Chief of all the Southern armies. This belated delegation of larger authority to Lee had certain military results, but no political result whatever. Lee could have been the dictator of the Confederacy if he had chosen, and no one then or since would have blamed him; but it was not in his mind to do anything but his duty as a soldier. The best beloved and most memorable by far of all the men who served that lost cause, he had done nothing to bring about secession at the beginning, nor now did he do anything but conform to the wishes of his political chief. As for that chief, Lincoln had interpreted Davis' simple position quite rightly. Having once embraced the cause of Southern independence and taken the oath as chief magistrate of an independent Confederacy, he would not yield up that cause while there was a man to obey his orders. Whether this attitude should be set down, as it usually has been set down, to a diseased pride or to a very real heroism on his part, he never faced the truth that the situation was desperate and the spirit of his people daunted at last. But it is probable that just like Lincoln he was ready that those who were in haste to make peace should see what peace involved; and it is probable too that, in his terrible position, he deluded himself with some vague and vain hopes as to the attitude of the North. Lincoln on the other hand would not enter into any proceedings in which the secession of the South was treated otherwise than as a rebellion which must cease; but this did not absolutely compel him to refuse every sort of informal communication with influential men in the South, which might help them to see where they stood and from which he too might learn something.

Old Mr. Francis Blair, the father of Lincoln's late Postmaster-General, was the last of the honest peace-makers whom Lincoln had allowed to see things for themselves by meeting Jefferson Davis. His visit took place in January, 1865, and from his determination to be a go-between and the curious and difficult position in which Lincoln and Davis both stood in this respect an odd result arose. The Confederate Vice-President Stephens, who had preached peace in the autumn without a quarrel with Davis, and two other Southern leaders presented themselves at Grant's headquarters with the pathetic misrepresentation that they were sent by Davis on a mission which Lincoln had undertaken to receive. What they could show was authority from Davis to negotiate with Lincoln on the footing of the independence of the Confederacy, and a politely turned intimation from Lincoln that he would at any time receive persons informally sent to talk with a view to the surrender of the rebel armies. Grant, however, was deeply impressed with the sincerity of their desire for peace, and he entreated Lincoln to receive them. Lincoln therefore decided to overlook the false pretence under which they came. He gave Grant strict orders not to delay his operations on this account, but he came himself with Seward and met Davis' three commissioners on a ship at Hampton Roads on February 3. He and Stephens had in old days been Whig Congressmen together, and Lincoln had once been moved to tears by a speech of Stephens. They met now as friends. Lincoln lost no time in making his position clear. The unhappy commissioners made every effort to lead him away from the plain ground he had chosen. It is evident that they and possible that Jefferson Davis had hoped that when face to face with them he would change his mind, and possibly Blair's talk had served to encourage this hope. They failed, but the conversation continued in a frank and friendly manner. Lincoln told them very freely his personal opinions as to how the North ought to treat the South when it did surrender, but was careful to point out that he could make no promise or bargain, except indeed this promise that so far as penalties for rebellion were concerned the executive power, which lay in his sole hands, would be liberally used. Slavery was discussed, and Seward told them of the Constitutional Amendment which Congress had now submitted to the people. One of the commissioners returning again to Lincoln's refusal to negotiate with armed rebels, as he considered them, cited the precedent of Charles I.'s conduct in this respect. "I do not profess," said Lincoln, "to be posted in history. On all such matters I turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about Charles I. is that he lost his head in the end." Then he broke out into simple advice to Stephens as to the action he could now pursue. He had to report to Congress afterwards that the conference had had no result. He brought home, however, a personal compliment which he valued. "I understand, then," Stephens had said, "that you regard us as rebels, who are liable to be hanged for treason." "That is so," said Lincoln. "Well," said Stephens, "we supposed that would have to be your view. But, to tell you the truth, we have none of us been much afraid of being hanged with you as President." He brought home, besides the compliment, an idea of a kind which, if he could have had his way with his friends, might have been rich in good. He had discovered how hopeless the people of the South were, and he considered whether a friendly pronouncement might not lead them more readily to surrender. He deplored the suffering in which the South might now lie plunged, and it was a fixed part of his creed that slavery was the sin not of the South but of the nation. So he spent the day after his return in drafting a joint resolution which he hoped the two Houses of Congress might pass, and a Proclamation which he would in that case issue. In these he proposed to offer to the Southern States four hundred million dollars in United States bonds, being, as he calculated the cost to the North of two hundred days of war, to be allotted among those States in proportion to the property in slaves which each had lost. One half of this sum was to be paid at once if the war ended by April 1, and the other half upon the final adoption of the Constitutional Amendment. It would have been a happy thing if the work of restoring peace could have lain with a statesman whose rare aberrations from the path of practical politics were of this kind. Yet, considering the natural passions which even in this least revengeful of civil wars could not quite be repressed, we should be judging the Congress of that day by a higher standard than we should apply in other countries if we regarded this proposal as one that could have been hopefully submitted to them. Lincoln's illusions were dispelled on the following day when he read what he had written to his Cabinet, and found that even among his own ministers not one man supported him. It would have been worse than useless to put forward his proposals and to fail. "You are all opposed to me," he said sadly; and he put his papers away. But the war had now so far progressed that it is necessary to turn back to the point at which we left it at the end of 1864.

Winter weather brought a brief pause to the operations of the armies. Sherman at Savannah was preparing to begin his northward march, a harder matter, owing to the rivers and marshes that lay in his way, than his triumphal progress from Atlanta. Efforts were made to concentrate all available forces against him at Augusta to his north-west. Making feints against Augusta on the one side, and against the city and port of Charleston on the other, he displayed the marvellous engineering capacity of his army by an advance of unlooked-for speed across the marshes to Columbia, due north of him, which is the State capital of South Carolina. He reached it on February 17, 1865. The intended concentration of the South at Augusta was broken up. The retreating Confederates set fire to great stores of cotton and the unfortunate city was burnt, a calamity for which the South, by a natural but most unjust mistake, blamed Sherman. The railway communications of Charleston were now certain to be severed; so the Confederates were forced to evacuate it, and on February 18, 1865, the North occupied the chief home of the misbegotten political ideals of the South and of its real culture and chivalry.

Admiral Porter (for age and ill-health had come upon Farragut) was ready at sea to co-operate with Sherman. Thomas' army in Tennessee had not been allowed by Grant to go into winter quarters. A part of it under Schofield was brought to Washington and there shipped for North Carolina, where, ever since Burnside's successful expedition in 1862, the Union Government had held the ports north of Wilmington. Wilmington itself was the only port left to the South, and Richmond had now come to depend largely on the precarious and costly supplies which could still, notwithstanding the blockade, be run into that harbour. At the end of December, Butler, acting in flagrant disobedience to Grant, had achieved his crowning failure in a joint expedition with Porter against Wilmington. But Porter was not discouraged, nor was Grant, who from beginning to end of his career had worked well together with the Navy. On February 8, Porter, this time supported by an energetic general, Terry, effected a brilliant capture of Fort Fisher at the mouth of Wilmington harbour. The port was closed to the South. On the 22nd, the city itself fell to Schofield, and Sherman had now this sea base at hand if he needed it.

Meanwhile Grant's entrenchments on the east of Richmond and Petersburg were still extending southward, and Lee's defences had been stretched till they covered nearly forty miles. Grant's lines now cut the principal railway southward from the huge fortress, and he was able effectually to interrupt communication by road to the southwest. There could be little doubt that Richmond would fall soon, and the real question was coming to be whether Lee and his army could escape from Richmond and still carry on the war.

The appointment of Lee as General-in-Chief was not too late to bear one consequence which may have prolonged the war a little. Joseph Johnston, whose ability in a campaign of constant retirement before overwhelming force had been respected and redoubted by Sherman, had been discarded by Davis in the previous July. He was now put in command of the forces which it was hoped to concentrate against Sherman, with a view to holding up his northward advance and preventing him from joining hands with Grant before Richmond. There were altogether about 89,000 Confederate troops scattered in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, and there would be about the same number under Sherman when Schofield in North Carolina could join him, but the number which Johnston could now collect together seems never to have exceeded 33,000. It was Sherman's task by the rapidity of his movements to prevent a very formidable concentration against him. Johnston on the other hand must hinder if he could Sherman's junction with Schofield. Just before that junction took place he narrowly missed dealing a considerable blow to Sherman's army at the battle of Bentonville in the heart of North Carolina, but had in the end to withdraw within an entrenched position where Sherman would not attack him, but which upon the arrival of Schofield he was forced to abandon. On March 23, 1865, Sherman took possession of the town and railway junction of Goldsborough between Raleigh and New Berne. From Savannah to Goldsborough he had led his army 425 miles in fifty days, amid disadvantages of ground and of weather which had called forth both extraordinary endurance and mechanical skill on the part of his men. He lay now 140 miles south of Petersburg by the railway. The port of New Berne to the east of him on the estuary of the Neuse gave him a sure base of supplies, and would enable him quickly to move his army by sea to Petersburg and Richmond if Grant should so decide. The direction in which Johnston would now fall back lay inland up the Neuse Valley, also along a railway, towards Greensborough, some 150 miles south-west of Petersburg; Greensborough was connected by another railway with Petersburg and Richmond, and along this line Lee might attempt to retire and join him.

All this time whatever designs Lee had of leaving Richmond were suspended because the roads in that weather were too bad for his transport; and, while of necessity he waited, his possible openings narrowed. Philip Sheridan had now received the coveted rank of Major-General, which McClellan had resigned on the day on which he was defeated for the Presidency. The North delighted to find in his achievements the dashing quality which appeals to civilian imagination, and Grant now had in him, as well as in Sherman, a lieutenant who would faithfully make his chief's purposes his own, and who would execute them with independent decision. The cold, in which his horses suffered, had driven Sheridan into winter quarters, but on February 27 he was able to start up the Shenandoah Valley again with 10,000 cavalry. Most of the Confederate cavalry under Early had now been dispersed, mainly for want of forage in the desolated valley; the rest were now dispersed by Sheridan, and the greater part of Early's small force of infantry with all his artillery were captured. There was a garrison in Lynchburg, 80 or 90 miles west of Richmond, which though strong enough to prevent Sheridan's cavalry from capturing that place was not otherwise of account; but there was no Confederate force in the field except Johnston's men near enough to co-operate with Lee; only some small and distant armies, hundreds of miles away with the railway communication between them and the East destroyed. Sheridan now broke up the railway and canal communication on the north-west side of Richmond. He was to have gone on south and eventually joined Sherman if he could; but, finding himself stopped for the time by floods in the upper valley of the James, he rode past the north of Richmond, and on March 19 joined Grant, to put his cavalry and brains at his service when Grant judged that the moment for his final effort had come.

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took office for the second time as President of the United. States. There was one new and striking feature in the simple ceremonial, the presence of a battalion of negro troops in his escort. This time, though he would say no sanguine word, it cannot have been a long continuance of war that filled his thoughts, but the scarcely less difficult though far happier task of restoring the fabric of peaceful society in the conquered South. His difficulties were now likely to come from the North no less than the South. Tentative proposals which he had once or twice made suggest the spirit in which he would have felt his way along this new path. In the Inaugural address which he now delivered that spirit is none the less perceptible because he spoke of the past. The little speech at Gettysburg, with its singular perfection of form, and the "Second Inaugural" are the chief outstanding examples of his peculiar oratorical power. The comparative rank of his oratory need not be discussed, for at any rate it was individual and unlike that of most other great speakers in history, though perhaps more like that of some great speeches in drama.

But there is a point of some moment in which the Second Inaugural does invite a comment, and a comment which should be quite explicit. Probably no other speech of