"He talks to me like a father," exclaimed Hooker, enchanted with a rebuke such as this. He was a fine, frank, soldierly fellow, with a noble figure, with "a grand fighting head," fresh complexion and bright blue eyes. He was a good organiser; he put a stop to the constant desertions; he felt the need of improving the Northern cavalry; and he groaned at the spirit with which McClellan had infected his army, a curious collective inertness among men who individually were daring. He seems to have been highly strung; the very little wine that he drank perceptibly affected him; he gave it up altogether in his campaigns. And he cannot have been very clever, for the handsomest beating that Lee could give him left him unaware that Lee was a general. In the end of April he crossed the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, which still divided the two armies, and in the first week of May, 1863, a brief campaign, full of stirring incident, came to a close with the three days' battle of Chancellorsville, in which Hooker, hurt and dazed with pain, lost control and presence of mind, and, with heavy loss, drew back across the Rappahannock. The South had won another amazing victory; but "Stonewall" Jackson, at the age of thirty-nine, had fallen in the battle.

Abroad, this crowning disaster to the North seemed to presage the full triumph of the Confederacy; and it was a gloomy time enough for Lincoln and his Ministers. A second and more serious invasion by Lee was impending, and the lingering progress of events in the West, of which the story must soon be resumed, caused protracted and deepening anxiety. But the tide turned soon. Moreover, Lincoln's military perplexities, which have demanded our detailed attention during these particular campaigns, were very nearly at an end. We have here to turn back to the political problem of his Presidency, for the bloody and inconclusive battle upon the Antietam, more than seven months before, had led strangely to political consequences which were great and memorable.



CHAPTER X

EMANCIPATION

When the news of a second battle of Bull Run reached England it seemed at first to Lord John Russell that the failure of the North was certain, and he asked Palmerston and his colleagues to consider whether they must not soon recognise the Confederacy, and whether mediation in the interest of peace and humanity might not perhaps follow. But within two months all thoughts of recognising the Confederacy had been so completely put aside that even Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville caused no renewal of the suggestion, and an invitation from Louis Napoleon to joint action of this kind between England and France had once for all been rejected. The battle of Antietam had been fought in the meantime. This made men think that the South could no more win a speedy and decisive success than the North, and that victory must rest in the end with the side that could last. But that was not all; the battle of Antietam was followed within five days by an event which made it impossible for any Government of this country to take action unfriendly to the North.

On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln set his hand to a Proclamation of which the principal words were these: "That, on the first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward and forever free."

The policy and the true effect of this act cannot be understood without some examination. Still less so can the course of the man who will always be remembered as its author. First, in regard to the legal effect of the Proclamation; in normal times the President would of course not have had the power, which even the Legislature did not possess, to set free a single slave; the Proclamation was an act of war on his part, as Commander-in-Chief of the forces, by which slaves were to be taken from people at war with the United States, just as horses or carts might be taken, to subtract from their resources and add to those of the United States. In a curiously prophetic manner, ex-President John Quincy Adams had argued in Congress many years before that, if rebellion ever arose, this very thing might be done. Adams would probably have claimed that the command of the President became law in the States which took part in the rebellion. Lincoln only claimed legal force for his Proclamation in so far as it was an act of war based on sufficient necessity and plainly tending to help the Northern arms. If the legal question had ever been tried out, the Courts would no doubt have had to hold that at least those slaves who obtained actual freedom under the Proclamation became free in law; for it was certainly in good faith an act of war, and the military result justified it. A large amount of labour was withdrawn from the industry necessary to the South, and by the end of the war 180,000 coloured troops were in arms for the North, rendering services, especially in occupying conquered territory that was unhealthy for white troops, without which, in Lincoln's opinion, the war could never have been finished. The Proclamation had indeed an indirect effect more far-reaching than this; it committed the North to a course from which there could be no turning back, except by surrender; it made it a political certainty that by one means or another slavery would be ended if the North won. But in Lincoln's view of his duty as President, this ulterior consequence was not to determine his action. The fateful step by which the end of slavery was precipitated would not have taken the form it did take if it had not come to commend itself to him as a military measure conducing to the suppression of rebellion.

On the broader grounds on which we naturally look at this measure, many people in the North had, as we have seen, been anxious from the beginning that he should adopt an active policy of freeing Southern slaves. It was intolerable to think that the war might end and leave slavery where it was. To convert the war into a crusade against slavery seemed to many the best way of arousing and uniting the North. This argument was reinforced by some of the American Ministers abroad. They were aware that people in Europe misunderstood and disliked the Constitutional propriety with which the Union government insisted that it was not attacking the domestic institutions of Southern States. English people did not know the American Constitution, and when told that the North did not threaten to abolish slavery would answer "Why not?" Many Englishmen, who might dislike the North and might have their doubts as to whether slavery was as bad as it was said to be, would none the less have respected men who would fight against it. They had no interest in the attempt of some of their own seceded Colonists to coerce, upon some metaphysical ground of law, others who in their turn wished to secede from them. Seward, with wonderful misjudgment, had instructed Ministers abroad to explain that no attack was threatened on slavery, for he was afraid that the purchasers of cotton in Europe would feel threatened in their selfish interests; the agents of the South were astute enough to take the same line and insist like him that the North was no more hostile to slavery than the South. If this misunderstanding were removed English hostility to the North would never again take a dangerous form. Lincoln, who knew less of affairs but more of men than Seward, was easily made to see this. Yet, with full knowledge of the reasons for adopting a decided policy against slavery, Lincoln waited through seventeen months of the war till the moment had come for him to strike his blow.

Some of his reasons for waiting were very plain. He was not going to take action on the alleged ground of military necessity till he was sure that the necessity existed. Nor was he going to take it till it would actually lead to the emancipation of a great number of slaves. Above all, he would not act till he felt that the North generally would sustain his action, for he knew, better than Congressmen who judged from their own friends in their own constituencies, how doubtful a large part of Northern opinion really was. We have seen how in the summer of 1861 he felt bound to disappoint the advanced opinion which supported Fremont. He continued for more than a year after in a course which alienated from himself the confidence of the men with whom he had most sympathy. He did this deliberately rather than imperil the unanimity with which the North supported the war. There was indeed grave danger of splitting the North in two if he appeared unnecessarily to change the issue from Union to Liberation. We have to remember that in all the Northern States the right of the Southern States to choose for themselves about slavery had been fully admitted, and that four of the Northern States were themselves slave States all this while.

But this is not the whole explanation of his delay. It is certain that apart from this danger he would at first rather not have played the historic part which he did play as the liberator of the slaves, if he could have succeeded in the more modest part of encouraging a process of gradual emancipation. In his Annual Message to Congress in December, 1861, he laid down the general principles of his policy in this matter. He gave warning in advance to the Democrats of the North, who were against all interference with Southern institutions, that "radical and extreme measures" might become indispensable to military success, and if indispensable would be taken; but he declared his anxiety that if possible the conflict with the South should not "degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle," for he looked forward with fear to a complete overturning of the social system of the South. He feared it not only for the white people but also for the black. "Gradual and not sudden emancipation," he said, in a later Message, "is better for all." It is now probable that he was right, and yet it is difficult not to sympathise with the earnest Republicans who were impatient at his delay, who were puzzled and pained by the free and easy way in which in grave conversation he would allude to "the nigger question," and who concluded that "the President is not with us; has no sound Anti-slavery sentiment." Indeed, his sentiment did differ from theirs. Certainly, he hated slavery, for he had contended more stubbornly than any other man against any concession which seemed to him to perpetuate slavery by stamping it with approval; but his hatred of it left him quite without the passion of moral indignation against the slave owners, in whose guilt the whole country, North and South, seemed to him an accomplice. He would have classed that very natural indignation under the head of "malice"—"I shall do nothing in malice," he wrote to a citizen of Louisiana; "what I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing." But it was not, as we shall see before long, too vast for an interest, as sympathetic as it was matter of fact, in the welfare of the negroes. They were actual human beings to him, and he knew that the mere abrogation of the law of slavery was not the only thing necessary to their advancement. Looking back, with knowledge of what happened later, we cannot fail to be glad that they were emancipated somehow, but we are forced to regret that they could not have been emancipated by some more considerate process. Lincoln, perhaps alone among the Americans who were in earnest in this matter, looked at it very much in the light in which all men look at it to-day.

In the early part of 1862 the United States Government concluded a treaty with Great Britain for the more effectual suppression of the African slave trade, and it happened about the same time that the first white man ever executed as a pirate under the American law against the slave trade was hanged in New York. In those months Lincoln was privately trying to bring about the passing by the Legislature of Delaware of an Act for emancipating, with fit provisions for their welfare, the few slaves in that State, conditionally upon compensation to be paid to the owners by the United States. He hoped that if this example were set by Delaware, it would be followed in Maryland, and would spread later. The Delaware House were favourable to the scheme, but the Senate of the State rejected it. Lincoln now made a more public appeal in favour of his policy. In March, 1862, he sent a Message to Congress, which has already been quoted, and in which he urged the two Houses to pass Resolutions pledging the United States to give pecuniary help to any State which adopted gradual emancipation. It must be obvious that if the slave States of the North could have been led to adopt this policy it would have been a fitting preliminary to any action which might be taken against slavery in the South; and the policy might have been extended to those Southern States which were first recovered for the Union. The point, however, upon which Lincoln dwelt in his Message was that, if slavery were once given up by the border States, the South would abandon all hope that they would ever join the Confederacy. In private letters to an editor of a newspaper and others he pressed the consideration that the cost of compensated abolition was small in proportion to what might be gained by a quicker ending of the war. During the discussion of his proposal in Congress and again after the end of the Session he invited the Senators and Representatives of the border States to private conference with him in which he besought of them "a calm and enlarged consideration, ranging, if it may be, far above, personal and partisan politics," of the opportunity of good now open to them. The hope of the Confederacy was, as he then conceived, fixed upon the sympathy which it might arouse in the border States, two of which, Kentucky and Maryland, were in fact invaded that year with some hope of a rising among the inhabitants. The "lever" which the Confederates hoped to use in these States was the interest of the slave owners there; "Break that lever before their eyes," he urged. But the hundred and one reasons which can always be found against action presented themselves at once to the Representatives of the border States. Congress itself so far accepted the President's view that both Houses passed the Resolution which he had suggested. Indeed it gladly did something more; a Bill, such as Lincoln himself had prepared as a Congressman fourteen years before, was passed for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia; compensation was paid to the owners; a sum was set apart to help the settlement in Liberia of any of the slaves who were willing to go; and at Lincoln's suggestion provision was added for the education of the negro children. Nothing more was done at this time.

Throughout this matter Lincoln took counsel chiefly with himself. He could not speak his full thought to the public, and apparently he did not do so to any of his Cabinet. Supposing that the border States had yielded to his persuasion, it may still strike us as a very sanguine calculation that their action would have had much effect upon the resolution of the Confederates. But it must be noted that when Lincoln first approached the Representatives of the border States, the highest expectations were entertained of the victory that McClellan would win in Virginia, and when he made his last, rather despairing, appeal to them, the decision to withdraw the army from the Peninsula had not yet been taken. If a really heavy blow had been struck at the Confederates in Virginia, their chief hope of retrieving their military fortunes would certainly have lain in that invasion of Kentucky, which did shortly afterwards occur and which was greatly encouraged by the hope of a rising of Kentucky men who wished to join the Confederacy. This part of Lincoln's calculations was therefore quite reasonable. And it was further reasonable to suppose that, if the South had then given in and Congress had acted in the spirit of the Resolution which it had passed, the policy, of gradual emancipation, starting in the border States, would have spread steadily. The States which were disposed to hold out against the inducement that the cost of compensated emancipation, if they adopted it, would be borne by the whole Union, would have done so at a great risk; for each new free State would have been disposed before long to support a Constitutional Amendment to impose enfranchisement, possibly with no compensation, upon the States that still delayed. The force of example and the presence of this fear could not have been resisted long. Lincoln was not a man who could be accused of taking any course without a reason well thought out; we can safely conclude that in the summer of 1862 he nursed a hope, by no means visionary, of initiating a process of liberation free from certain evils in that upon which he was driven back.

Before, however, he had quite abandoned this hope he had already begun to see his way in case it failed. His last appeal to the border States was made on July 12, 1862, while McClellan's army still lay at Harrison's Landing. On the following day he privately told Seward and Bates that he had "about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity, absolutely essential to the salvation of the nation, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued." On July 22 he read to his Cabinet the first draft of his Proclamation of Emancipation; telling them before he consulted them that substantially his mind was made up. Various members of the Cabinet raised points on which he had already thought and had come to a conclusion, but, as he afterwards told a friend, Seward raised a point which had never struck him before. He said that, if issued at that time of depression, just after the failure in the Peninsula, the Proclamation would seem like "a cry of distress"; and that it would have a much better effect if it were issued after some military success.

Seward was certainly right. The danger of division in the North would have been increased and the prospect of a good effect abroad would have been diminished if the Proclamation had been issued at a time of depression and manifest failure. Lincoln, who had been set on issuing it, instantly felt the force of this objection. He put aside his draft, and resolved not to issue the Proclamation till the right moment, and apparently resolved to keep the whole question open in his own mind till the time for action came.

Accordingly the two months which followed were not only full of anxiety about the war; they were full for him of a suspense painfully maintained. It troubled him perhaps comparatively little that he was driven into a position of greater aloofness from the support and sympathy of any party or school. He must now expect an opposition from the Democrats of the North, for they had declared themselves strongly against the Resolution which he had induced Congress to pass. And the strong Republicans for their part had acquiesced in it coldly, some of them contemptuously. In May of this year he had been forced for a second time publicly to repress a keen Republican general who tried to take this question of great policy into his own hands. General Hunter, commanding a small expedition which had seized Port Royal in South Carolina and some adjacent islands rich in cotton, had in a grand manner assumed to declare free all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. This, of course, could not be let pass. Congress, too, had been occupied in the summer with a new measure for confiscating rebel property; some Republicans in the West set great store on such confiscation; other Republicans saw in it the incidental advantage that more slaves might be liberated under it. It was learnt that the President might put his veto upon it. It seemed to purport, contrary to the Constitution, to attaint the property of rebels after their death, and Lincoln was unwilling that the Constitution should be stretched in the direction of revengeful harshness. The objectionable feature in the Bill was removed, and Lincoln accepted it. But the suspicion with which many Republicans were beginning to regard him was now reinforced by a certain jealousy of Congressmen against the Executive power; they grumbled and sneered about having to "ascertain the Royal pleasure" before they could legislate. This was an able, energetic, and truly patriotic Congress, and must not be despised for its reluctance to be guided by Lincoln. But it was reluctant.

Throughout August and September he had to deal in the country with dread on the one side of any revolutionary action, and belief on the other side that he was timid and half-hearted. The precise state of his intentions could not with advantage be made public. To up-holders of slavery he wrote plainly, "It may as well be understood once for all that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed"; to its most zealous opponents he had to speak in an entirely different strain. While the second battle of Bull Run was impending, Horace Greeley published in the New York Tribune an "open letter" of angry complaint about Lincoln's supposed bias for slavery. Lincoln at once published a reply to his letter. "If there be in it," he said, "any statements or assumptions of fact which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views."

It was probably easy to him now to write these masterful generalities, but a week or two later, after Pope's defeat, he had to engage in a controversy which tried his feelings much more sorely. It had really grieved him that clergymen in Illinois had opposed him as unorthodox, when he was fighting against the extension of slavery. Now, a week or two after his correspondence with Greeley, a deputation from a number of Churches in Chicago waited upon him, and some of their members spoke to him with assumed authority from on high, commanding him in God's name to emancipate the slaves. He said, "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that, if it is probable that God would reveal His will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to me. What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative like the Pope's Bull against the comet. Do not misunderstand me, because I have mentioned these objections. They indicate the difficulties that have thus far prevented my acting in some such way as you desire. I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement. And I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God's will, I will do." The language of this speech, especially when the touch is humorous, seems that of a strained and slightly irritated man, but the solemnity blended in it showed Lincoln's true mind.

In this month, September, 1862, he composed for his own reading alone a sad and inconclusive fragment of meditation which was found after his death. "The will of God prevails," he wrote. "In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party, and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true, that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the minds of the contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began, and, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds." For Lincoln's own part it seemed his plain duty to do what in the circumstances he thought safest for the Union, and yet he was almost of a mind with the deputation which had preached to him, that he must be doing God's will in taking a great step towards emancipation. The solution, that the great step must be taken at the first opportune moment, was doubtless clear enough in principle, but it must always remain arguable whether any particular moment was opportune. He told soon afterwards how his mind was finally made up.

On the day that he received the news of the battle of Antietam, the draft Proclamation was taken from its drawer and studied afresh; his visit to McClellan on the battlefield intervened; but on the fifth day after the battle the Cabinet was suddenly called together. When the Ministers had assembled Lincoln first entertained them by reading the short chapter of Artemus Ward entitled "High-handed Outrage at Utica." It is less amusing than most of Artemus Ward; but it had just appeared; it pleased all the Ministers except Stanton, to whom the frivolous reading he sometimes had to hear from Lincoln was a standing vexation; and it was precisely that sort of relief to which Lincoln's mind when overwrought could always turn. Having thus composed himself for business, he reminded his Cabinet that he had, as they were aware, thought a great deal about the relation of the war to slavery, and had a few weeks before read them a draft Proclamation on this subject. Ever since then, he said, his mind had been occupied on the matter, and, though he wished it were a better time, he thought the time had come now. "When the rebel army was at Frederick," he is related to have continued, "I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation such as I thought likely to be most useful. I said nothing to any one, but I made the promise to myself and"—here he hesitated a little—"to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfil that promise. I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter, for that I have determined for myself. This I say without intending anything but respect for any one of you." He then invited their suggestions upon the expressions used in his draft and other minor matters, and concluded: "One other observation I will make. I know very well that many others might in this matter, as in others, do better than I can; and if I was satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But though I believe I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take." Then he read his draft, and in the long discussion which followed, and owing to which a few slight changes were made in it, he told them further, without any false reserve, just how he came to his decision. In his great perplexity he had gone on his knees, before the battle of Antietam, and, like a child, he had promised that if a victory was given which drove the enemy out of Maryland he would consider it as an indication that it was his duty to move forward. "It might be thought strange," he said, "that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters, when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do. God had decided this question in favour of the slaves."

Such is the story of what we may now remember as one of the signal events in the chequered progress of Christianity. We have to follow its consequences a little further. These were not at first all that its author would have hoped. "Commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is," he said in a private letter, "all that a vain man could wish," but recruits for the Army did not seem to come in faster. In October and November there were elections for Congress, and in a number of States the Democrats gained considerably, though it was noteworthy that the Republicans held their ground not only in New England and in the furthest Western States, but also in the border slave States. The Democrats, who from this time on became very formidable to Lincoln, had other matters of complaint, as will be seen later, but they chiefly denounced the President for trying to turn the war into one against slavery. "The Constitution as it is and the Union as it was" had been their election cry. The good hearing that they got, now as at a later time, was due to the fact that people were depressed about the war; and it is plain enough that Lincoln had been well advised in delaying his action till after a military success. As it was, there was much that seemed to show that public confidence in him was not strong, but public confidence in any man is hard to estimate, and the forces that in the end move opinion most are not quickly apparent. There are little indications that his power and character were slowly establishing their hold; it seems, for instance, to have been about this time that "old Abe" or "Uncle Abe" began to be widely known among common people by the significant name of "Father Abraham," and his secretaries say that he was becoming conscious that his official utterances had a deeper effect on public opinion than any immediate response to them in Congress showed.

In his Annual Message of December, 1862, Lincoln put before Congress, probably with little hope of result, a comprehensive policy for dealing with slavery justly and finally. He proposed that a Constitutional Amendment should be submitted to the people providing: first, that compensation should be given in United States bonds to any State, whether now in rebellion or not, which should abolish slavery before the year 1900; secondly, that the slaves who had once enjoyed actual freedom through the chances of the war should be permanently free and that their owners should be compensated; thirdly, that Congress should have authority to spend money on colonisation for negroes. Even if the greater part of these objects could have been accomplished without a Constitutional Amendment, it is evident that such a procedure would have been more satisfactory in the eventual resettlement of the Union. He urged in his Message how desirable it was, as a part of the effort to restore the Union, that the whole North should be agreed in a concerted policy as to slavery, and that parties should for this purpose reconsider their positions. "The dogmas of the quiet past," he said, "are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed, this could not fail." The last four words expressed too confident a hope as to what Northern policy apart from Northern arms could do towards ending the war, but it was impossible to exaggerate the value which a policy, concerted between parties in a spirit of moderation, would have had in the settlement after victory. Every honest Democrat who then refused any action against slavery must have regretted it before three years were out, and many sensible Republicans who saw no use in such moderation may have lived to regret their part too. Nothing was done. It is thought that Lincoln expected this; but the Proclamation of Emancipation would begin to operate within a month; it would produce by the end of the war a situation in which the country would be compelled to decide on the principle of slavery, and Lincoln had at least done his part in preparing men to face the issue.

Before this, the nervous and irritable feeling of many Northern politicians, who found in emancipation a good subject for quarrel among themselves and in the slow progress of the war a good subject of quarrel with the Administration, led to a crisis in Lincoln's Cabinet. Radicals were inclined to think Seward's influence in the Administration the cause of all public evils; some of them had now got hold of a foolish private letter, which he had written to Adams in England a few months before, denouncing the advocates of emancipation. Desiring his downfall, they induced a small "caucus" of Republican Senators to speak in the name of the party and the nation and send the President a resolution demanding such changes in his Cabinet as would produce better results in the war. Discontented men of opposite opinions could unite in demanding success in the war; and Conservative Senators joined in this resolution hoping that it would get rid not only of Seward, but also of Chase and Stanton, the objects of their particular antipathy. Seward, on hearing of this, gave Lincoln his resignation, which was kept private. Though egotistic, he was a clever man, and evidently a pleasant man to work with; he was a useful Minister under a wise chief, though he later proved a harmful one under a foolish chief. Stanton was most loyal, and invaluable as head of the War Department. Chase, as Lincoln said in private afterwards, was "a pretty good fellow and a very able man"; Lincoln had complete confidence in him as a Finance Minister, and could not easily have replaced him. But this handsome, dignified, and righteous person was unhappily a sneak. Lincoln found as time went on that, if he ever had to do what was disagreeable to some important man, Chase would pay court to that important man and hint how differently he himself would have done as President. On this occasion he was evidently aware that Chase had encouraged the Senators who attacked Seward. Much as he wished to retain each of the two for his own worth, he was above all determined that one should not gain a victory over the other. Accordingly, when a deputation of nine important Senators came to Lincoln to present their grievances against Seward, they found themselves, to their great annoyance, confronted with all the Cabinet except Seward, who had resigned, and they were invited by Lincoln to discuss the matter in his presence with these Ministers. Chase, to his still greater annoyance, found himself, as the principal Minister there, compelled for decency's sake to defend Seward from the very attack which he had helped to instigate. The deputation withdrew, not sure that, after all, it wanted Seward removed. Chase next day tendered, as was natural, his resignation. Lincoln was able, now that he had the resignations of both men, to persuade both of their joint duty to continue in the public service. By this remarkable piece of riding he saved the Union from a great danger. The Democratic opposition, not actually to the prosecution of the war, but to any and every measure essential for it, was now developing, and a serious division, such as at this stage any important resignation would have produced in the ranks of the Republicans, or, as they now called themselves, the "Union men," would have been perilous.

On the first day of January, 1863, the President signed the further Proclamation needed to give effect to emancipation. The small portions of the South which were not in rebellion were duly excepted; the naval and military authorities were ordered to maintain the freedom of the slaves seeking their protection; the slaves were enjoined to abstain from violence and to "labour faithfully for reasonable wages" if opportunity were given them; all suitable slaves were to be taken into armed service, especially for garrison duties. Before the end of 1863, a hundred thousand coloured men were already serving, as combatants or as labourers, on military work in about equal number. They were needed, for volunteering was getting slack, and the work of guarding and repairing railway lines was specially repellent to Northern volunteers. The coloured regiments fought well; they behaved well in every way. Atrocious threats of vengeance on them and their white officers were officially uttered by Jefferson Davis, but, except for one hideous massacre wrought in the hottest of hot blood, only a few crimes by individuals were committed in execution of these threats. To Lincoln himself it was a stirring thought that when democratic government was finally vindicated and restored by the victory of the Union, "then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue and clenched teeth and steady eye and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consummation." There was, however, prejudice at first among many Northern officers against negro enlistment. The greatest of the few great American artists, St. Gaudens, commemorated in sculpture (as the donor of the new playing fields at Harvard commemorated by his gift) the action of a brilliant and popular Massachusetts officer, Robert Gould Shaw, who set the example of leaving his own beloved regiment to take command of a coloured regiment, at the head of which he died, gallantly leading them and gallantly followed by them in a desperate fight.

It was easier to raise and train these negro soldiers than to arrange for the control, shelter, and employment of the other refugees who crowded especially to the protection of Grant's army in the West. The efforts made for their benefit cannot be related here, but the recollections of Army Chaplain John Eaton, whom Grant selected to take charge of them in the West, throw a little more light on Lincoln and on the spirit of his dealing with "the nigger question." When Eaton after some time had to come to Washington, upon the business of his charge and to visit the President, he received that impression, of versatile power and of easy mastery over many details as well as over broad issues, which many who worked under Lincoln have described, but he was above all struck with the fact that from a very slight experience in early life Lincoln had gained a knowledge of negro character such as very few indeed in the North possessed. He was subjected to many seemingly trivial questions, of which he was quick enough to see the grave purpose, about all sorts of persons and things in the West, but he was also examined closely, in a way which commanded his fullest respect as an expert, about the ideas, understanding, and expectations of the ordinary negroes under his care, and more particularly as to the past history and the attainments of the few negroes who had become prominent men, and who therefore best illustrated the real capacities of their race. Later visits to the capital and to Lincoln deepened this impression, and convinced Eaton, though by trifling signs, of the rare quality of Lincoln's sympathy. Once, after Eaton's difficult business had been disposed of, the President turned to relating his own recent worries about a colony of negroes which he was trying to establish on a small island off Hayti. There flourishes in Southern latitudes a minute creature called Dermatophilus penetrans, or the jigger, which can inflict great pain on barefooted people by housing itself under their toe-nails. This Colony had a plague of jiggers, and every expedient for defeating them had failed. Lincoln was not merely giving the practical attention to this difficulty that might perhaps be expected; the Chaplain was amazed to find that at that moment, at the turning point of the war, a few days only after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, with his enormous pre-occupations, the President's mind had room for real and keen distress about the toes of the blacks in the Cow Island. At the end of yet another interview Eaton was startled by the question, put by the President with an air of shyness, whether Frederick Douglass, a well-known negro preacher, could be induced to visit him. Of course he could. Frederick Douglass was then reputed to be the ablest man ever born as a negro slave; he must have met many of the best and kindest Northern friends of the negro; and he went to Lincoln distressed at some points in his policy, particularly at his failure to make reprisals for murders of negro prisoners by Southern troops. When he came away he was in a state little short of ecstasy. It was not because he now understood, as he did, Lincoln's policy. Lincoln had indeed won his warm approval when he told him "with a quiver in his voice" of his horror of killing men in cold blood for what had been done by others, and his dread of what might follow such a policy; but he had a deeper gratification, the strangeness of which it is sad to realise. "He treated me as a man," exclaimed Douglass. "He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our skins."

Perhaps the hardest effort of speech that Lincoln ever essayed was an address to negroes which had to do with this very subject of colour. His audience were men who had been free from birth or for some time and were believed to be leaders among their community. It was Lincoln's object to induce some of them to be pioneers in an attempt at colonisation in some suitable climate, an attempt which he felt must fail if it started with negroes whose "intellects were clouded by slavery." He clung to these projects of colonisation, as probably the best among the various means by which the improvement of the negro must be attempted, because their race, "suffering the greatest wrong ever inflicted on any people," would "yet be far removed from being on an equality with the white race" when they ceased to be slaves; a "physical difference broader than exists between almost any other two races" and constituting "a greater disadvantage to us both," would always set a "ban" upon the negroes even where they were best treated in America. This unpalatable fact he put before them with that total absence of pretence which was probably the only possible form of tact in such a discussion, with no affectation of a hope that progress would remove it or of a desire that the ordinary white man should lose the instinct that kept him apart from the black. But this only makes more apparent his simple recognition of an equality and fellowship which did exist between him and his hearers in a larger matter than that of social intercourse or political combination. His appeal to their capacity for taking large and unselfish views was as direct and as confident as in his addresses to his own people; it was made in the language of a man to whom the public spirit which might exist among black people was of the same quality as that which existed among white, in whose belief he and his hearers could equally find happiness in "being worthy of themselves" and in realising the "claim of kindred to the great God who made them."

It may be well here, without waiting to trace further the course of the war, in which at the point where we left it the slow but irresistible progress of conquest was about to set in, to recount briefly the later stages of the abolition of slavery in America. In 1863 it became apparent that popular feeling in Missouri and in Maryland was getting ripe for abolition. Bills were introduced into Congress to compensate their States if they did away with slavery; the compensation was to be larger if the abolition was immediate and not gradual. There was a majority in each House for these Bills, but the Democratic minority was able to kill them in the House of Representatives by the methods of "filibustering," or, as we call it, obstruction, to which the procedure of that body seems well adapted. The Republican majority had not been very zealous for the Bills; its members asked "why compensate for a wrong" which they had begun to feel would soon be abolished without compensation; but their leaders at least did their best for the Bills. It would have been idle after the failure of these proposals to introduce the Bills that had been contemplated for buying out the loyal slave owners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which was now fast being regained for the Union. Lincoln after his Message of December, 1862, recognised it as useless for him to press again the principles of gradual emancipation or of compensation, as to which it is worth remembrance that the compensation which he proposed was for loyal and disloyal owners alike. His Administration, however, bought every suitable slave in Delaware for service (service as a free man) in the Army. In the course of 1864 a remarkable development of public opinion began to be manifest in the States chiefly concerned. In the autumn of that year Maryland, whose representatives had paid so little attention to Lincoln two years before, passed an Amendment to the State Constitution abolishing slavery without compensation. A movement in the same direction was felt to be making progress in Kentucky and Tennessee; and Missouri followed Maryland's example in January, 1865. Meanwhile, Louisiana had been reconquered, and the Unionists in these States, constantly encouraged and protected by Lincoln when Congress looked upon them somewhat coldly or his generals showed jealousy of their action, had banded themselves together to form State Governments with Constitutions that forbade slavery. Lincoln, it may be noted, had suggested to Louisiana that it would be well to frame some plan by which the best educated of the negroes should be admitted to the franchise. Four years after his death a Constitutional Amendment was passed by which any distinction as to franchise on the ground of race or colour is forbidden in America. The policy of giving the vote to negroes indiscriminately had commended itself to the cold pedantry of some persons, including Chase, on the ground of some natural right of all men to the suffrage; but it was adopted as the most effective protection for the negroes against laws, as to vagrancy and the like, by which it was feared they might practically be enslaved again. Whatever the excuse for it, it would seem to have proved in fact a great obstacle to healthy relations between the two races. The true policy in such a matter is doubtless that which Rhodes and other statesmen adopted in the Cape Colony and which Lincoln had advocated in the case of Louisiana. It would be absurd to imagine that the spirit which could champion the rights of the negro and yet face fairly the abiding difficulty of his case died in America with Lincoln, but it lost for many a year to come its only great exponent.

But the question of overwhelming importance, between the principles of slavery and of freedom, was ready for final decision when local opinion in six slave States was already moving as we have seen. The Republican Convention of 1864, which again chose Lincoln as its candidate for the Presidency, declared itself in favour of a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery once for all throughout America. Whether the first suggestion came from him or not, it is known that Lincoln's private influence was energetically used to procure this resolution of the Convention. In his Message to Congress in 1864 he urged the initiation of this Amendment. Observation of elections made it all but certain that the next Congress would be ready to take this action, but Lincoln pleaded with the present doubtful Congress for the advantage which would be gained by ready, and if possible, unanimous concurrence in the North in the course which would soon prevail. The necessary Resolution was passed in the Senate, but in the House of Representatives till within a few hours of the vote it was said to be "the toss of a copper" whether the majority of two-thirds, required for such a purpose, would be obtained. In the efforts made on either side to win over the few doubtful voters Lincoln had taken his part. Right or wrong, he was not the man to see a great and beneficent Act in danger of postponement without being tempted to secure it if he could do so by terrifying some unprincipled and white-livered opponents. With the knowledge that he was always acquiring of the persons in politics, he had been able to pick out two Democratic Congressmen who were fit for his purpose—presumably they lay under suspicion of one of those treasonable practices which martial law under Lincoln treated very unceremoniously. He sent for them. He told them that the gaining of a certain number of doubtful votes would secure the Resolution. He told them that he was President of the United States. He told them that the President of the United States in war time exercised great and dreadful powers. And he told them that he looked to them personally to get him those votes. Whether this wrong manoeuvre affected the result or not, on January 31, 1865, the Resolution was passed in the House by a two-thirds majority with a few votes to spare, and the great crowd in the galleries, defying all precedent, broke out in a demonstration of enthusiasm which some still recall as the most memorable scene in their lives. On December 18 of that year, when Lincoln had been eight months dead, William Seward, as Secretary of State, was able to certify that the requisite majority of States had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the cause of that "irrepressible conflict" which he had foretold, and in which he had played a weak but valuable part, was for ever extinguished.

At the present day, alike in the British Empire and in America, the unending difficulty of wholesome human relations between races of different and unequal development exercises many minds; but this difficulty cannot obscure the great service done by those who, first in England and later and more hardly in America, stamped out that cardinal principle of error that any race is without its human claim. Among these men William Lloyd Garrison lived to see the fruit of his labours, and to know and have friendly intercourse with Lincoln. There have been some comparable instances in which men with such different characters and methods have unconsciously conspired for a common end, as these two did when Garrison was projecting the "Liberator" and Lincoln began shaping himself for honourable public work in the vague. The part that Lincoln played in these events did not seem to him a personal achievement of his own. He appeared to himself rather as an instrument. "I claim not," he once said in this connection, "to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." In 1864, when a petition was sent to him from some children that there should be no more child slaves, he wrote, "Please tell these little people that I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that, while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it." Yet, at least, he redeemed the boyish pledge that has been, fancifully perhaps, ascribed to him; each opportunity that to his judgment ever presented itself of striking some blow for human freedom was taken; the blows were timed and directed by the full force of his sagacity, and they were never restrained by private ambition or fear. It is probable that upon that cool review, which in the case of this singular figure is difficult, the sense of his potent accomplishment would not diminish, but increase.



CHAPTER XI

THE APPROACH OF VICTORY

1. The War to the End of 1863.

The events of the Eastern theatre of war have been followed into the early summer of 1863, when Lee was for the second time about to invade the North. The Western theatre of war has been left unnoticed since the end of May, 1862. From that time to the end of the year no definite progress was made here by either side, but here also the perplexities of the military administration were considerable; and in Lincoln's life it must be noted that in these months the strain of anxiety about the Eastern army and about the policy of emancipation was accompanied by acute doubt in regard to the conduct of war in the West.

When Halleck had been summoned from the West, Lincoln had again a general by his side in Washington to exercise command under him of all the armies. Halleck was a man of some intellectual distinction who might be expected to take a broad view of the war as a whole; this and his freedom from petty feelings, as to which Lincoln's known opinion of him can be corroborated, doubtless made him useful as an adviser; nor for a considerable time was there any man with apparently better qualifications for his position. But Lincoln soon found, as has been seen, that Halleck lacked energy of will, and cannot have been long in discovering that his judgment was not very good. The President had thus to make the best use he could of expert advice upon which he would not have been justified in relying very fully.

When Halleck arrived at Corinth at the end of May, 1862, the whole of Western and Middle Tennessee was for the time clear of the enemy, and he turned his attention at once to the long delayed project of rescuing the Unionists in Eastern Tennessee, which was occupied by a Confederate army under General Kirby Smith. His object was to seize Chattanooga, which lay about 150 miles to the east of him, and invade Eastern Tennessee by way of the valley of the Tennessee River, which cuts through the mountains behind Chattanooga. With this in view he would doubtless have been wise if he had first continued his advance with his whole force against the Confederate army under Beauregard, which after evacuating Corinth had fallen back to rest and recruit in a far healthier situation 50 miles further south. Beauregard would have been obliged either to fight him with inferior numbers or to shut himself up in the fortress of Vicksburg. As it was, Halleck spent the month of June merely in repairing the railway line which runs from Corinth in the direction of Chattanooga. When he was called to Washington he left Grant, who for several months past had been kept idle as his second in command, in independent command of a force which was to remain near the Mississippi confronting Beauregard, but he restricted him to a merely defensive part by ordering him to keep a part of his army ready to send to Buell whenever that general needed it, as he soon did. Buell, who again took over his former independent command, was ordered by Halleck to advance on Chattanooga, using Corinth as his base of supply. Buell had wished that the base for the advance upon Chattanooga should be transferred to Nashville, in the centre of Tennessee, in which case the line of railway communication would have been shorter and also less exposed to raids by the Southern cavalry. After Halleck had gone, Buell obtained permission to effect this change of base. The whole month of June had been wasted in repairing the railway with a view to Halleck's faulty plan. When Buell himself was allowed to proceed on his own lines and was approaching Chattanooga, his communications with Nashville were twice, in the middle of July and in the middle of August, cut by Confederate cavalry raids, which did such serious damage as to impose great delay upon him. In the end of August and beginning of September Kirby Smith, whose army had been strengthened by troops transferred from Beauregard, crossed the mountains from East Tennessee by passes some distance northeast of Chattanooga, and invaded Kentucky, sending detachments to threaten Louisville on the Indiana border of Kentucky and Cincinnati in Ohio. It was necessary for Buell to retreat, when, after a week or more of uncertainty, it became clear that Kirby Smith's main force was committed to this invasion. Meanwhile General Bragg, who, owing to the illness of Beauregard, had succeeded to his command, left part of his force to hold Grant in check, marched with the remainder to support Kirby Smith, and succeeded in placing himself between Buell's army and Louisville, to protect which from Kirby Smith had become Buell's first object. It seems that Bragg, who could easily have been reinforced by Kirby Smith, had now an opportunity of fighting Buell with great advantage. But the Confederate generals, who mistakenly believed that Kentucky was at heart with them, saw an imaginary political gain in occupying Frankfort, the State capital, and formally setting up a new State Government there. Bragg therefore marched on to join Kirby Smith at Frankfort, which was well to the east of Buell's line of retreat, and Buell was able to reach Louisville unopposed by September 25.

These events were watched in the North with all the more anxiety because the Confederate invasion of Kentucky began just about the time of the second battle of Bull Run, and Buell arrived at Louisville within a week after the battle of Antietam while people were wondering how that victory would be followed up. Men of intelligence and influence, especially in the Western States, were loud in their complaints of Buell's want of vigour. It is remarkable that the Unionists of Kentucky, who suffered the most through his supposed faults, expressed their confidence in him; but his own soldiers did not like him, for he was a strict disciplinarian without either tact or any quality which much impressed them. Their reports to their homes in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, from which they mostly came, increased the feeling against him which was arising in those States, and his relations with the Governors of Ohio and Indiana, who were busy in sending him recruits and whose States were threatened with invasion, seem, wherever the fault may have lain, to have been unfortunate. Buell's most powerful friend had been McClellan, and by an irrational but unavoidable process of thought the real dilatoriness of McClellan became an argument for blaming Buell as well. Halleck defended him loyally, but this by now probably seemed to Lincoln the apology of one irresolute man for another. Stanton, whose efficiency in the business of the War Department gave him great weight, had become eager for the removal of Buell. Lincoln expected that as soon as Buell could cover Louisville he would take the offensive promptly. His army appears to have exceeded in numbers, though not very much, the combined forces of Bragg and Kirby Smith, and except as to cavalry it was probably as good in quality. If energetically used by Halleck some months before, the Western armies should have been strong enough to accomplish great results; and if the attempt had been made at first to raise much larger armies, it seems likely that the difficulties of training and organisation and command would have increased out of proportion to any gain. Buell remained some days at Louisville itself, receiving reinforcements which were considerable, but consisted mainly of raw recruits. While he was there orders arrived from Lincoln removing him and appointing his second in command, the Virginian Thomas, in his place. This was a wise choice; Thomas was one of the four Northern generals who won abiding distinction in the Civil War. But Thomas felt the injustice which was done to Buell, and he refused the command in a letter magnanimously defending him. The fact was that Lincoln had rescinded his orders before they were received, for he had issued them under the belief that Buell was remaining on the defensive, but learnt immediately that an offensive movement was in progress, and had no intention of changing commanders under those circumstances.

On October 8 a battle, which began in an accidental minor conflict, took place between Buell with 58,000 men and Bragg with considerably less than half that number of tried veterans. Buell made little use of his superior numbers, for which the fault may have lain with the corps commander who first became engaged and who did not report at once to him; the part of Buell's army which bore the brunt of the fighting suffered heavy losses, which made a painful impression in the North, and the public outcry against him, which had begun as soon as Kentucky was invaded by the Confederates, now increased. After the battle Bragg fell back and effected a junction with Kirby Smith. Their joint forces were not very far inferior to Buell's in numbers, but after a few more days Bragg determined to evacuate Kentucky, in which his hope of raising many recruits had been disappointed. Buell, on perceiving his intention, pursued him some distance, but, finding the roads bad for the movement of large bodies of troops, finally took up a position at Bowling Green, on the railway to the north of Nashville, intending later in the autumn to move a little south of Nashville and there to wait for the spring before again moving on Chattanooga. He was urged from Washington to press forward towards Chattanooga at once, but replied decidedly that he was unable to do so, and added that if a change of command was desired the present was a suitable time for it. At the end of October he was removed from command. In the meantime the Confederate forces that had been left to oppose Grant had attacked him and been signally defeated in two engagements, in each of which General Rosecrans, who was serving under Grant, was in immediate command on the Northern side. Rosecrans, who therefore began to be looked upon as a promising general, and indeed was one of those who, in the chatter of the time, were occasionally spoken of as suitable for a "military dictatorship," was now put in Buell's place, which Thomas had once refused. He advanced to Nashville, but was as firm as Buell in refusing to go further till he had accumulated rations enough to make him for a time independent of the railway. Ultimately he moved on Murfreesborough, some thirty miles further in the direction of Chattanooga. Here on December 31, 1862, Bragg, with somewhat inferior numbers, attacked him and gained an initial success, which Rosecrans and his subordinates, Thomas and Sheridan, were able to prevent him from making good. Bragg's losses were heavy, and, after waiting a few days in the hope that Rosecrans might retreat first, he fell back to a point near the Cumberland mountains a little in advance of Chattanooga. Thus the battle of Murfreesborough counted as a victory to the North, a slight set-off to the disaster at Fredericksburg a little while before. But it had no very striking consequences. For over six months Rosecrans proceeded no further. The Northern armies remained in more secure possession of all Tennessee west of the mountains than they had obtained in the first half of 1862; but the length of their communications and the great superiority of the South in cavalry, which could threaten those communications, suspended their further advance. Lincoln urged that their army could subsist on the country which it invaded, but Buell and Rosecrans treated the idea as impracticable; in fact, till a little later all Northern generals so regarded it.

Thus Chattanooga, which it was hoped would be occupied soon after Halleck had occupied Corinth, remained in Southern hands for more than a year after that, notwithstanding the removal of Buell, to whom this disappointment and the mortifying invasion of Kentucky were at first attributed. This was rightly felt to be unsatisfactory, but the chief blame that can now be imputed falls upon the mistakes of Halleck while he was still commanding in the West. There is no reason to suppose that Buell had any exceptional amount of intuition or of energy and it was right to demand that a general with both these qualities should be appointed if he could be found. But he was at least a prudent officer, of fair capacity, doing his best. The criticisms upon him, of which the well informed were lavish, were uttered without appreciation of practical difficulties or of the standard by which he was really to be judged. So, with far more justice than McClellan, he has been numbered among the misused generals. Lincoln, there is no doubt, had watched his proceedings, as he watched those of Rosecrans after him, with a feeling of impatience, and set him down as unenterprising and obstinate. In one point his Administration was much to blame in its treatment of the Western commanders. It became common political talk that the way to get victories was to treat unsuccessful generals almost as harshly as the French in the Revolution were understood to have treated them. Lincoln did not go thus far, but it was probably with his authority that before Buell was removed Halleck, with reluctance on his own part, wrote a letter referring to this prevalent idea and calculated to put about among the Western commanders an expectation that whichever of them first did something notable would be put over his less successful colleagues. Later on, and, as we can hardly doubt, with Lincoln's consent, Grant and Rosecrans were each informed that the first of them to win a victory would get the vacant major-generalship in the United States Army in place of his present volunteer rank. This was not the way to handle men with proper professional pride, and it is one of those cases, which are strangely few, where Lincoln made the sort of mistake that might have been expected from his want of training and not from his native generosity. But in the main his treatment of this difficult question was sound. Sharing as he did the prevailing impatience with Buell, he had no intention of yielding to it till there was a real prospect that a change of generals would be a change for the better. When the appointment of Thomas was proposed there really was such a prospect. When Rosecrans was eventually put in Buell's place the result was disappointing to Lincoln, but it was evidently not a bad appointment, and a situation had then arisen in which it would have been folly to retain Buell if any capable successor to him could be found; for the Governors of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, of whom the first named was reputed the ablest of the "war Governors" in the West, and on whom his army depended for recruits, now combined in representations against him which could not be ignored. Lincoln, who could not have personal acquaintance with the generals of the Western armies as he had with those in the East, was, it should be observed, throughout unceasing in his efforts to get the fullest and clearest impression of them that he could; he was always, as it has been put, "taking measurements" of men, and a good deal of what seemed idle and gossipy talk with chance visitors, who could tell him little incidents or give him new impressions, seems to have had this serious purpose. For the first half of the war the choice of men for high commands was the most harassing of all the difficulties of his administration. There is no doubt of his constant watchfulness to discern and promote merit. He was certainly beset by the feeling that generals were apt to be wanting in the vigour and boldness which the conduct of the war demanded, but, though this in some cases probably misled him, upon the whole there was good reason for it. On the other hand, it must be considered that all this while he knew himself to be losing influence through his supposed want of energy in the war, and that he was under strong and unceasing pressure from every influential quarter to dismiss every general who caused disappointment. Newspapers and private letters of the time demonstrate that there was intense impatience against him for not producing victorious generals. This being so, his own patience in this matter and his resolution to give those under him a fair chance appear very remarkable and were certainly very wise.

We have come, however, to the end, not of all the clamour against Lincoln, but of his own worst perplexities. In passing to the operations further west we are passing to an instance in which Lincoln felt it right to stand to the end by a decried commander, and that decried commander proved to possess the very qualities for which he had vainly looked in others. The reverse side of General Grant's fame is well enough known to the world. Before the war he had been living under a cloud. In the autumn of 1862, while his army lay between Corinth and Memphis, the cloud still rested on his reputation. In spite of the glory he had won for a moment at Fort Donelson, large circles were ready to speak of him simply as an "incompetent and disagreeable man." The crowning work of his life was accomplished with terrible bloodshed which was often attributed to callousness and incapacity on his part. The eight years of his Presidency afterwards, which cannot properly be discussed here, added at the best no lustre to his memory. Later still, when he visited Europe as a celebrity the general impression which he created seems to be contained in the words "a rude man." Thus the Grant that we discover in the recollections of a few loyal and loving friends, and in the memoirs which he himself began when late in life he lost his money and which he finished with the pains of death upon him, is a surprising, in some ways pathetic, figure. He had been a shy country boy, ready enough at all the work of a farm and good with horses, but with none of the business aptitude that make a successful farmer, when his father made him go to West Point. Here he showed no great promise and made few friends; his health became delicate, and he wanted to leave the army and become a teacher of mathematics. But the Mexican War, one of the most unjust in all history, as he afterwards said, broke out, and—so he later thought—saved his life from consumption by keeping him in the open air. After that he did retire, failed at farming and other ventures, and at thirty-nine, when the Civil War began, was as has been seen, a shabby-looking, shiftless fellow, pretty far gone in the habit of drink, and more or less occupied about a leather business of his father's. Rough in appearance and in manner he remained—the very opposite of smart, the very opposite of versatile, the very opposite of expansive in speech or social intercourse. Unlike many rough people, he had a really simple character—truthful, modest, and kind; without varied interests, or complicated emotions, or much sense of fun, but thinking intensely on the problems that he did see before him, and in his silent way keenly sensitive on most of the points on which it is well to be sensitive. His friends reckoned up the very few occasions on which he was ever seen to be angry; only one could be recalled on which he was angry on his own account; the cruelty of a driver to animals in his supply train, heartless neglect in carrying out the arrangements he had made for the comfort of the sick and wounded, these were the sort of occasions which broke down Grant's habitual self-possession and good temper. "He was never too anxious," wrote Chaplain Eaton, who, having been set by him in charge of the negro refugees with his army, had excellent means of judging, "never too preoccupied with the great problems that beset him, to take a sincere and humane interest in the welfare of the most subordinate labourer dependent upon him." And he had delicacy of feeling in other ways. Once in the crowd at some hotel, in which he mingled an undistinguished figure, an old officer under him tried on a lecherous story for the entertainment of the General, who did not look the sort of man to resent it; Grant, who did not wish to set down an older man roughly, and had no ready phrases, but had, as it happens, a sensitive skin, was observed to blush to the roots of his hair in exquisite discomfort. It would be easy to multiply little recorded traits of this somewhat unexpected kind, which give grace to the memory of his determination in a duty which became very grim.

The simplicity of character as well as manner which endeared him to a few close associates was probably a very poor equipment for the Presidency, which, from that very simplicity, he afterwards treated as his due; and Grant presented in some ways as great a contrast as can be imagined to the large and complex mind of Lincoln. But he was the man that Lincoln had yearned for. Whatever degree of military skill may be ascribed to him, he had in the fullest measure the moral attributes of a commander. The sense that the war could be put through and must be put through possessed his soul. He was insusceptible to personal danger—at least, so observers said, though he himself told a different story—and he taught himself to keep a quiet mind in the presence of losses, rout in battle, or failure in a campaign. It was said that he never troubled himself with fancies as to what the enemy might be doing, and he confessed to having constantly told himself that the enemy was as much afraid of him as he of the enemy. His military talent was doubled in efficacy by his indomitable constancy. In one sense, moreover, and that a wholly good sense, he was a political general; for he had constantly before his mind the aims of the Government which employed him, perceiving early that there were only two possible ends to the war, the complete subjugation of the South or the complete failure of the Union; perceiving also that there was no danger of exhausting the resources of the North and great danger of discouraging its spirit, while the position of the South was in this respect the precise contrary. He was therefore the better able to serve the State as a soldier, because throughout he measured by a just standard the ulterior good or harm of success or failure in his enterprises.

The affectionate confidence which existed between Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson till the latter was killed at Chancellorsville had a parallel in the endearing friendship which sprung up between Grant and his principal subordinate, William T. Sherman, who was to bear a hardly less momentous part than his own in the conclusion of the war. Sherman was a man of quick wits and fancy, bright and mercurial disposition, capable of being a delightful companion to children, and capable of being sharp and inconsiderate to duller subordinates. It is a high tribute both to this brilliant soldier and to Grant himself that he always regarded Grant as having made him, not only by his confidence but by his example.

As has been said, Grant was required to remain on the defensive between Memphis and Corinth, which mark the line of the Northern frontier at this period, while Buell was advancing on Chattanooga. Later, while the Confederates were invading Kentucky further east, attacks were also directed against Grant to keep him quiet. These were defeated, though Grant was unable to follow up his success at the time. When the invasion of Kentucky had collapsed and the Confederates under Bragg were retreating before Buell and his successor out of Middle Tennessee, it became possible for Grant and for Halleck and the Government at Washington to look to completing the conquest of the Mississippi River. The importance to the Confederates of a hold upon the Mississippi has been pointed out; if it were lost the whole of far South-West would manifestly be lost with it; in the North, on the other hand, public sentiment was strongly set upon freeing the navigation of the great river. The Confederacy now held the river from the fortress of Vicksburg, which after taking New Orleans Admiral Farragut had attacked in vain, down to Port Hudson, 120 miles further south, where the Confederate forces had since then seized and fortified another point of vantage. Vicksburg, it will be observed, lies 175 to 180 miles south of Memphis, or from Grand Junction, between Memphis and Corinth, the points in the occupation of the North which must serve Grant as a base. At Vicksburg itself, and for some distance south of it, a line of bluffs or steep-sided hills lying east of the Mississippi comes right up to the edge of the river. The river as it approaches these bluffs makes a sudden bend to the north-east and then again to the south-west, so that two successive reaches of the stream, each from three to four miles long, were commanded by the Vicksburg guns, 200 feet above the valley; the eastward or landward side of the fortress was also well situated for defence. To the north of Vicksburg the country on the east side of the Mississippi is cut up by innumerable streams and "bayous" or marshy creeks, winding and intersecting amid a dense growth of cedars. The North, with a flotilla under Admiral Porter, commanded the Mississippi itself, and the Northern forces could freely move along its western shore to the impregnable river face of Vicksburg beyond. But the question of how to get safely to the assailable side of Vicksburg presented formidable difficulty to Grant and to the Government.

Grant's operations began in November, 1862. Advancing directly southward along the railway from Memphis with the bulk of his forces, he after a while detached Sherman with a force which proceeded down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo, a little north-west of Vicksburg. Here Sherman was to land, and, it was hoped, surprise the enemy at Vicksburg itself while the bulk of the enemy's forces were fully occupied by Grant's advance from the north. But Grant's lengthening communications were cut up by a cavalry raid, and he had to retreat, while Sherman came upon an enemy fully prepared and sustained a defeat a fortnight after Burnside's defeat at Fredericksburg. This was the first of a long series of failures during which Grant, who for his part was conspicuously frank and loyal in his relations with the Government, received upon the whole the fullest confidence and support from them. There occurred, however, about this time an incident which was trying to Grant, and of which the very simple facts must be stated, since it was the last of the occasions upon which severe criticism of Lincoln's military administration has been founded. General McClernand was an ambitious Illinois lawyer-politician of energy and courage; he was an old acquaintance of Lincoln's, and an old opponent; since the death of Douglas he and another lawyer-politician, Logan, had been the most powerful of the Democrats in Illinois; both were zealous in the war and had joined the Army upon its outbreak. Logan served as a general under Grant with confessed ability. It must be repeated that, North and South, former civilians had to be placed in command for lack of enough soldiers of known capacity to go round, and that many of them, like Logan and like the Southern general, Polk, who was a bishop in the American Episcopal Church, did very good service. McClernand had early obtained high rank and had shown no sign as yet of having less aptitude for his new career than other men of similar antecedents. Grant, however, distrusted him, and proved to be right. In October, 1862, McClernand came to Lincoln with an offer of his personal services in raising troops from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa, with a special view to clearing the Mississippi. He of course expected to be himself employed in this operation. Recruiting was at a low ebb, and it would have been folly to slight this offer. McClernand did in fact raise volunteers to the number of a whole army corps. He was placed under Grant in command of the expedition down the Mississippi which had already started under Sherman. Sherman's great promise had not yet been proved to any one but Grant; he appears at this time to have come under the disapproval of the Joint Committee of Congress on the War, and the newspaper Press had not long before announced, with affected regret, the news that he had become insane. McClernand, arriving just after Sherman's defeat near Vicksburg, fell in at once with a suggestion of his to attack the Post of Arkansas, a Confederate stronghold in the State of Arkansas and upon the river of that name, from the shelter of which Confederate gunboats had some chance of raiding the Mississippi above Vicksburg. The expedition succeeded in this early in January, 1863, and was then recalled to join Grant. This was a mortification to McClernand, who had hoped for a command independent of Grant. In his subsequent conduct he seems to have shown incapacity; he was certainly insubordinate to Grant, and he busied himself in intrigues against him, with such result as will soon be seen. As soon as Grant told the Administration that he was dissatisfied with McClernand, he was assured that he was at liberty to remove him from command. This he eventually did after some months of trial.

In the first three months of 1863, while the army of the Potomac, shattered at Fredericksburg, was being prepared for the fresh attack upon Lee which ended at Chancellorsville, and while Bragg and Rosecrans lay confronting each other in Middle Tennessee, each content that the other was afraid to weaken himself by sending troops to the Mississippi, Grant was occupied in a series of enterprises apparently more cautious than that in which he eventually succeeded, but each in its turn futile. An attempt was made to render Vicksburg useless by a canal cutting across the bend of the Mississippi to the west of that fortress. Then Grant endeavoured with the able co-operation of Admiral Porter and his flotilla to secure a safe landing on the Yazoo, which enters the Mississippi a little above Vicksburg, so that he could move his army to the rear of Vicksburg by this route. Next Grant and Porter tried to establish a sure line of water communication from a point far up the Mississippi through an old canal, then somehow obstructed, into the upper waters of the Yazoo and so to a point on that river 30 or 40 miles to the north-east of Vicksburg, by which they would have turned the right of the main Confederate force; but this was frustrated by the Confederates, who succeeded in establishing a strong fort further up the Yazoo. Yet a further effort was made to establish a waterway by a canal quitting the Mississippi about 40 miles north of Vicksburg and communicating, through lakes, bayous, and smaller rivers, with its great tributary the Red River far to the south. This, like the first canal attempted, would have rendered Vicksburg useless.