The fundamental problem of the Lincoln Government was the raising of
armies, the sudden conversion of a community which was essentially
industrial into a disciplined military organization. The accomplishment
of so gigantic a transformation taxed the abilities of two Secretaries
of War. The first, Simon Cameron, owed his place in the Cabinet to
the double fact of being one of the ablest of political bosses and
of standing high among Lincoln's competitors for the Presidential
nomination. Personally honest, he was also a political cynic to whom
tradition ascribes the epigram defining an honest politician as one who
"when he is bought, will stay bought." As Secretary of War he showed no
particular ability.
In 1861, when the tide of enthusiasm was in flood, and volunteers
in hosts were responding to acts of Congress for the raising and
maintenance of a volunteer army, Cameron reported in December that the
Government had on foot 660,971 men and could have had a million except
that Congress had limited the number of volunteers to be received. When
this report was prepared, Lincoln was, so to speak, in the trough of two
seas. The devotion which had been offered to him in April, 1861, when
the North seemed to rise as one man, had undergone a reaction. Eight
months without a single striking military success, together with
the startling defeat at Bull Run, had had their inevitable effect.
Democracies are mercurial; variability seems to be part of the price of
freedom. With childlike faith in their cause, the Northern people,
in midsummer, were crying, "On to Richmond!" In the autumn, stung by
defeat, they were ready to cry, "Down with Lincoln."
In a subsequent report, the War Department confessed that at the
beginning of hostilities, "nearly all our arms and ammunition" came from
foreign countries. One great reason why no military successes relieve
the gloom of 1861 was that, from a soldier's point of view, there
were no armies. Soldiers, it is true, there were in myriads; but arms,
ammunition, and above all, organization were lacking. The supplies
in the government arsenals had been provided for an army of but a few
thousand. Strive as they would, all the factories in the country could
not come anywhere near making arms for half a million men; nor did the
facilities of those days make it possible for munition plants to spring
up overnight. Had it not been that the Confederacy was equally hard
pushed, even harder pushed, to find arms and ammunition, the war would
have ended inside Seward's ninety days, through sheer lack of powder.
Even with the respite given by the unpreparedness of the South, and
while Lincoln hurriedly collected arms and ammunition from abroad, the
startled nation, thus suddenly forced into a realization of what
war meant, lost its head. From its previous reckless trust in sheer
enthusiasm, it reacted to a distrust of almost everything. Why were the
soldiers not armed? Why did not millions of rounds of cartridges fall
like manna out of the sky? Why did not the crowds of volunteers become
armies at a word of command? One of the darkest pages in American
history records the way in which the crowd, undisciplined to endure
strain, turned upon Lincoln in its desire to find in the conduct of
their leader a pretext for venting upon him the fierceness of their
anxiety. Such a pretext they found in his treatment of Fremont.
The singular episode of Fremont's arrogance in 1861 is part of the
story of the border States whose friendship was eagerly sought by both
sides--Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and those mountainous counties
which in time were to become West Virginia. To retain Maryland and thus
to keep open the connection between the Capital and the North was one
of Lincoln's deepest anxieties. By degrees the hold of the Government
in Maryland was made secure, and the State never seceded. Kentucky, too,
held to the Union, though, during many anxious months in 1861, Lincoln
did not know whether this State was to be for him or against him. The
Virginia mountains, from the first, seemed a more hopeful field, for the
mountaineers had opposed the Virginia secession and, as soon as it was
accomplished, had begun holding meetings of protest. In the meantime
George B. McClellan, with the rank of general bestowed upon him by the
Federal Government, had been appointed to command the militia of Ohio.
He was sent to assist the insurgent mountaineers, and with him went the
Ohio militia. From this situation and from the small engagements with
Confederate forces in which McClellan was successful, there resulted the
separate State of West Virginia and the extravagant popular notion that
McClellan was a great general. His successes were contrasted in the
ordinary mind with the crushing defeat at Bull Run, which happened at
about the same time.
The most serious of all these struggles in the border States, however,
was that which took place in Missouri, where, owing to the strength
of both factions and their promptness in organizing, real war began
immediately. A Union army led by General Nathaniel Lyon attacked the
Confederates with great spirit at Wilson's Creek but was beaten back in
a fierce and bloody battle in which their leader was killed.
Even before these events Fremont had been appointed to chief command
in Missouri, and here he at once began a strange course of dawdling and
posing. His military career must be left to the military historians--who
have not ranked him among the great generals. Civil history accuses him,
if not of using his new position to make illegitimate profits, at least
of showing reckless favoritism toward those who did. It is hardly unfair
to say that Lincoln, in bearing with Fremont as long as he did, showed
a touch of amiable weakness; and yet, it must be acknowledged that the
President knew that the country was in a dangerous mood, that Fremont
was immensely popular, and that any change might be misunderstood.
Though Lincoln hated to appear anything but a friend to a fallen
political rival, he was at last forced to act. Frauds in government
contracts at St. Louis were a public scandal, and the reputation of the
government had to be saved by the removal of Fremont in November, 1861.
As an immediate consequence of this action the overstrained nerves of
great numbers of people snapped. Fremont's personal followers, as well
as the abolitionists whom he had actively supported while in command in
Missouri, and all that vast crowd of excitable people who are unable to
stand silent under strain, clamored against Lincoln in the wildest and
most absurd vein. He was accused of being a "dictator"; he was called an
"imbecile"; he ought to be impeached, and a new party, with Fremont as
its leader, should be formed to prosecute the war. But through all this
clamor Lincoln kept his peace and let the heathen rage.
Toward the end of the year, popular rage turned suddenly on Cameron,
who, as Secretary of War, had taken an active but proper part in the
investigation of Fremont's conduct. It was one of those tremulous
moments when people are desperately eager to have something done and are
ready to believe anything. Though McClellan, now in chief command of
the Union forces, had an immense army which was fast getting properly
equipped, month faded into month without his advancing against the
enemy. Again the popular cry was raised, "On to Richmond!" It was at
this moment of military inactivity and popular restlessness that charges
of peculation were brought forward against Cameron.
These charges both were and were not well founded. Himself a rich
man, it is not likely that Cameron profited personally by government
contracts, even though the acrimonious Thad Stevens said of his
appointment as Secretary that it would add "another million to his
fortune." There seems little doubt, however, that Cameron showered
lucrative contracts upon his political retainers. And no boss has ever
held the State of Pennsylvania in a firmer grip. His tenure of the
Secretaryship of War was one means to that end.
The restless alarm of the country at large expressed itself in such
extravagant words as these which Senator Grimes wrote to Senator
Fessenden: "We are going to destruction as fast as imbecility,
corruption, and the wheels of time can carry us." So dissatisfied,
indeed, was Congress with the conduct of the war that it appointed a
committee of investigation. During December, 1861, and January, 1862,
the committee was summoning generals before it, questioning them,
listening to all manner of views, accomplishing nothing, but rendering
more and more feverish an atmosphere already surcharged with anxiety.
On the floors of Congress debate raged as to who was responsible for
the military inaction--for the country's "unpreparedness," we should say
today--and as to whether Cameron was honest. Eventually the House in a
vote of censure condemned the Secretary of War.
Long before this happened, however, Lincoln had interfered and very
characteristically removed the cause of trouble, while taking upon
himself the responsibility for the situation, by nominating Cameron
minister to Russia, and by praising him for his "ability, patriotism,
and fidelity to the public trust." Though the President had not
sufficient hold upon the House to prevent the vote of censure, his
influence was strong in the Senate, and the new appointment of Cameron
was promptly confirmed.
There was in Washington at this time that grim man who had served
briefly as Attorney-General in the Cabinet of Buchanan--Edwin M.
Stanton. He despised the President and expressed his opinion in such
words as "the painful imbecility of Lincoln." The two had one personal
recollection in common: long before, in a single case, at Cincinnati,
the awkward Lincoln had been called in as associate counsel to serve the
convenience of Stanton, who was already a lawyer of national repute.
To his less-known associate Stanton showed a brutal rudeness that was
characteristic. It would have been hard in 1861 to find another man more
difficult to get on with. Headstrong, irascible, rude, he had a sharp
tongue which he delighted in using; but he was known to be inflexibly
honest, and was supposed to have great executive ability. He was also
a friend of McClellan, and if anybody could rouse that tortoise-like
general, Stanton might be supposed to be the man. He had been a valiant
Democrat, and Democratic support was needed by the government. Lincoln
astonished him with his appointment as Secretary of War in January,
1862. Stanton justified the President's choice, and under his strong
if ruthless hand the War Department became sternly efficient. The whole
story of Stanton's relations to his chief is packed, like the Arabian
genius in the fisherman's vase, into one remark of Lincoln's. "Did
Stanton tell you I was a fool?" said Lincoln on one occasion, in the
odd, smiling way he had. "Then I expect I must be one, for he is almost
always right, and generally says what he means."
In spite of his efficiency and personal force, Stanton was unable to
move his friend McClellan, with whom he soon quarreled. Each now sought
in his own way to control the President, though neither understood
Lincoln's character. From McClellan, Lincoln endured much condescension
of a kind perilously near impertinence. To Stanton, Lincoln's patience
seemed a mystery; to McClellan--a vain man, full of himself--the
President who would merely smile at this bullyragging on the part of
one of his subordinates seemed indeed a spiritless creature. Meanwhile
Lincoln, apparently devoid of sensibility, was seeking during the
anxious months of 1862, in one case, merely how to keep his petulant
Secretary in harness; in the other, how to quicken his tortoise of a
general.
Stanton made at least one great blunder. Though he had been three months
in office, and McClellan was still inactive, there were already several
successes to the credit of the Union arms. The Monitor and Virginia
(Merrimac) had fought their famous duel, and Grant had taken Fort
Donelson. The latter success broke through the long gloom of the North
and caused, as Holmes wrote, "a delirium of excitement." Stanton rashly
concluded that he now had the game in his hands, and that a sufficient
number of men had volunteered. This civilian Secretary of War, who had
still much to learn of military matters, issued an order putting a stop
to recruiting. Shortly afterwards great disaster befell the Union arms.
McClellan, before Richmond, was checked in May. Early in July, his
peninsula campaign ended disastrously in the terrible "Seven Days'
Battle."
Anticipating McClellan's failure, Lincoln had already determined to call
for more troops. On July 1st, he called upon the Governors of the
States to provide him with 300,000 men to serve three years. But the
volunteering enthusiasm--explain it as you will--had suffered a check.
The psychological moment had passed. So slow was the response to the
call of July 1st, that another appeal was made early in August, this
time for 300,000 men to serve only nine months. But this also failed
to rouse the country. A reinforcement of only 87,000 men was raised in
response to this emergency call. The able lawyer in the War Department
had still much to learn about men and nations.
After this check, terrible incidents of war came thick and fast--the
defeat at Second Manassas, in late August; the horrible drawn battle
of Antietam-Sharpsburg, in September; Fredericksburg, that carnival of
slaughter, in December; the dearly bought victory of Murfreesboro, which
opened 1863. There were other disastrous events at least as serious.
Foreign affairs* were at their darkest. Within the political coalition
supporting Lincoln, contention was the order of the day. There was
general distrust of the President. Most alarming of all, that ebb of the
wave of enthusiasm which began in midsummer, 1861, reached in the autumn
of 1862 perhaps its lowest point. The measure of the reaction against
Lincoln was given in the Congressional election, in which, though the
Government still retained a working majority, the Democrats gained
thirty-three seats.
* See Chapter IX.
If there could be such a thing as a true psychological history of the
war, one of its most interesting pages would determine just how far
Stanton was responsible, through his strange blunder over recruiting,
for the check to enthusiasm among the Northern people. With this
speculation there is connected a still unsolved problem in statistics.
To what extent did the anti-Lincoln vote, in 1862, stand for sympathy
with the South, and how far was it the hopeless surrender of Unionists
who felt that their cause was lost? Though certainty on this point is
apparently impossible, there can be no doubt that at the opening of
1863, the Government felt it must apply pressure to the flagging spirits
of its supporters. In order to reenforce the armies and to push the war
through, there was plainly but one course to be followed--conscription.
The government leaders in Congress brought in a Conscription Act early
in the year. The hot debates upon this issue dragged through a month's
time, and now make instructive reading for the present generation
that has watched the Great War*. The Act of 1863 was not the work of
soldiers, but was literally "made in Congress." Stanton grimly made
the best of it, though he unwaveringly condemned some of its most
conspicuous provisions. His business was to retrieve his blunder of
the previous year, and he was successful. Imperfect as it was, the
Conscription Act, with later supplementary legislation, enabled him to
replace the wastage of the Union armies and steadily to augment them.
At the close of the war, the Union had on foot a million men with an
enrolled reserve of two millions and a half, subject to call.
* The battle over conscription in England was anticipated in
America sixty-four years ago. Bagot says that the average
British point of view may be expressed thus: "What I am
sayin' is this here as I was a sayin' yesterday." The
Anglo-Saxon mind is much the same the world over. In
America, today, the enemies of effective military
organization would do well to search the arguments of their
skillful predecessors in 1888, who fought to the last ditch
for a military system that would make inescapable "peace at
any price." For the modern believers in conscription, one
of their best bits of political thunder is still the defense
of it by Lincoln.
The Act provided for a complete military census, for which purpose the
country was divided into enrollment districts. Every able-bodied
male citizen, or intending citizen, between the ages of twenty and
forty-five, unless exempted for certain specified reasons, was to be
enrolled as a member of the national forces; these forces were to be
called to the colors--"drafted," the term was--as the Government found
need of them; each successive draft was to be apportioned among the
districts in the ratio of the military population, and the number
required was to be drawn by lot; if the district raised its quota
voluntarily, no draft would be made; any drafted man could offer a
substitute or could purchase his discharge for three hundred dollars.
The latter provision especially was condemned by Stanton. It was seized
upon by demagogues as a device for giving rich men an advantage over
poor men.
American politics during the war form a wildly confused story, so
intricate that it cannot be made clear in a brief statement. But
this central fact may be insisted upon: in the North, there were two
political groups that were the poles around which various other groups
revolved and combined, only to fly asunder and recombine, with all the
maddening inconstancy of a kaleidoscope. The two irreconcilable elements
were the "war party" made up of determined men resolved to see things
through, and the "copperheads"* who for one reason or another united
in a faithful struggle for peace at any price. Around the copperheads
gathered the various and singular groups who helped to make up the ever
fluctuating "peace party." It is an error to assume that this peace
party was animated throughout by fondness for the Confederacy. Though
many of its members were so actuated, the core of the party seems to
have been that strange type of man who sustained political evasion
in the old days, who thought that sweet words can stop bullets, whose
programme in 1863 called for a cessation of hostilities and a general
convention of all the States, and who promised as the speedy result of
a debauch of talk a carnival of bright eyes glistening with the tears
of revived affection. With these strange people in 1863 there combined
a number of different types: the still stranger, still less creditable
visionary, of whom much hereafter; the avowed friends of the principle
of state rights; all those who distrusted the Government because of its
anti-slavery sympathies; Quakers and others with moral scruples against
war; and finally, sincere legalists to whom the Conscription Act
appeared unconstitutional. In the spring of 1863 the issue of
conscription drew the line fairly sharply between the two political
coalitions, though each continued to fluctuate, more or less, to the end
of the war.
* The term arose, it has been said, from the use of the
copper cent with its head of Liberty as a peace button. But
a more plausible explanation associates the peace advocates
with the deadly copperhead snake.
The peace party of 1863 has been denounced hastily rather than carefully
studied. Its precise machinations are not fully known, but the ugly fact
stands forth that a portion of the foreign population of the North was
roused in 1863 to rebellion. The occasion was the beginning of the first
draft under the new law, in July, 1863, and the scene of the rebellion
was the City of New York. The opponents of conscription had already
made inflammatory attacks on the Government. Conspicuous among them was
Horatio Seymour, who had been elected Governor of New York in that wave
of reaction in the autumn of 1862. Several New York papers joined the
crusade. In Congress, the Government had already been threatened with
civil war if the act was enforced. Nevertheless, the public drawing
by lot began on the days announced. In New York the first drawing took
place on Saturday, July 12th, and the lists were published in the Sunday
papers. As might be expected, many of the men drawn were of foreign
birth, and all day Sunday, the foreign quarter of New York was a
cauldron boiling.
On Monday, the resumption of the drawing was the signal for revolt.
A mob invaded one of the conscription offices, drove off the men in
charge, and set fire to the building. In a short while, the streets were
filled with dense crowds of foreignborn workmen shouting, "Down with
the rich men," and singing, "We'll hang Horace Greeley on a sour apple
tree." Houses of prominent citizens were attacked and set on fire, and
several drafting offices were burned. Many negroes who were seized were
either clubbed to death or hanged to lamp posts. Even an orphan asylum
for colored children was burned. The office of the "Tribune" was raided,
gutted, and set on fire. Finally a dispatch to Stanton, early in the
night, reported that the mob had taken possession of the city.
The events of the next day were no less shocking. The city was almost
stripped of soldiers, as all available reserves had already been hurried
south when Lee was advancing toward Gettysburg. But such militia as
could be mustered, with a small force of federal troops, fought the mob
in the streets. Barricades were carried by storm; blood was freely shed.
It was not, however, until the fourth day that the rebellion was finally
quelled, chiefly by New York regiments, hurried north by Stanton--among
them the famous Seventh--which swept the streets with cannon.
The aftermath of the New York riots was a correspondence between Lincoln
and Seymour. The latter had demanded a suspension of the draft until the
courts could decide on the constitutionality of the Conscription Act.
Lincoln refused. With ten thousand troops now assembled in New York, the
draft was resumed, and there was no further trouble.
The resistance to the Government in New York was but the most terrible
episode in a protracted contention which involves, as Americans are
beginning to see, one of the most fundamental and permanent questions
of Lincoln's rule: how can the exercise of necessary war powers by
the President be reconciled with the guarantees of liberty in the
Constitution? It is unfortunate that Lincoln did not draw up a fully
rounded statement of his own theory regarding this problem, instead
of leaving it to be inferred from detached observations and from his
actions. Apparently, he felt there was nothing to do but to follow the
Roman precedent and, in a case of emergency, frankly permit the use
of extraordinary power. We may attribute to him that point of view
expressed by a distinguished Democrat of our own day: "Democracy has to
learn how to use the dictator as a necessary war tool."* Whether Lincoln
set a good model for democracy in this perilous business is still to be
determined. His actions have been freely labeled usurpation. The first
notorious instance occurred in 1861, during the troubles in Maryland,
when he authorized military arrests of suspected persons. For the
release of one of these, a certain Merryman, Chief Justice Taney
issued a writ of habeas corpus**. Lincoln authorized his military
representatives to disregard the writ. In 1862 he issued a proclamation
suspending the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus in cases of
persons charged with "discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting
military drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice...." Such persons
were to be tried by military commissions.
*President Edwin A. Alderman, of the University of Virginia.
** The Constitution permits the suspension of the privileges
of the writ of habeas corpus "when in cases of rebellion or
invasion the public safety may require it," but fails to
provide a method of suspension. Taney held that the power
to suspend lay with Congress. Five years afterward, when
Chase was Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, in ex parte
Milligan, took the same view and further declared that even
Congress could not deprive a citizen of his right to trial
by jury so long as the local civil courts are in operation.
The Confederate experience differed from the Federal
inasmuch as Congress kept control of the power to suspend
the writ. But both governments made use of such suspension
to set up martial law in districts where the local courts
were open but where, from one cause or another, the
Administration had not confidence in their effectiveness.
Under ex parte Milligan, both Presidents and both Congresses
were guilty of usurpation. The mere layman waits for the
next great hour of trial to learn whether this
interpretation will stand. In the Milligan case the Chief
Justice and three others dissented.
There can be little doubt that this proclamation caused something like
a panic in many minds, filled them with the dread of military despotism,
and contributed to the reaction against Lincoln in the autumn of 1862.
Under this proclamation many arrests were made and many victims were
sent to prison. So violent was the opposition that on March 3, 1863,
Congress passed an act which attempted to bring the military and civil
courts into cooperation, though it did not take away from the President
all the dictatorial power which he had assumed. The act seems; however,
to have had little general effect, and it was disregarded in the
most celebrated of the cases of military arrest, that of Clement L.
Vallandigham.
A representative from Ohio and one of the most vituperative anti-Lincoln
men in Congress, Vallandigham in a sensational speech applied to the
existing situation Chatham's words, "My lords, you cannot conquer
America." He professed to see before him in the future nothing "but
universal political and social revolution, anarchy, and bloodshed,
compared with which the Reign of Terror in France was a merciful
visitation." To escape such a future, he demanded an armistice, to be
followed by a friendly peace established through foreign mediation.
Returning to Ohio after the adjournment of Congress, Vallandigham spoke
to a mass-meeting in a way that was construed as rank treason by General
Burnside who was in command at Cincinnati. Vallandigham was arrested,
tried by court martial, and condemned to imprisonment. There was an
immediate hue and cry, in consequence of which Burnside, who reported
the affair, felt called upon also to offer to resign. Lincoln's reply
was characteristic: "When I shall wish to supersede you I shall let
you know. All the Cabinet regretted the necessity for arresting, for
instance, Vallandigham, some perhaps doubting there was a real necessity
for it; but being done, all were for seeing you through with it."
Lincoln, however, commuted the sentence to banishment and had
Vallandigham sent through the lines into the Confederacy.
It seems quite plain that the condemnation of Lincoln on this issue of
usurpation was not confined to the friends of the Confederacy, nor has
it been confined to his enemies in later days. One of Lincoln's
most ardent admirers, the historian Rhodes, condemns his course
unqualifiedly. "There can be no question," he writes, "that from the
legal point of view the President should have rescinded the sentence and
released Vallandigham." Lincoln, he adds, "stands responsible for
the casting into prison of citizens of the United States on orders as
arbitrary as the lettres-de-cachet of Louis XIV." Since Mr. Rhodes,
uncompromising Unionist, can write as he does upon this issue, it is
plain that the opposition party cannot be dismissed as through and
through disunionist.
The trial of Vallandigham made him a martyr and brought him the
Democratic nomination for Governor of Ohio*. His followers sought to
make the issue of the campaign the acceptance or rejection of military
despotism. In defense of his course Lincoln wrote two public letters in
which he gave evidence of the skill which he had acquired as a lawyer
before a jury by the way in which he played upon the emotions of his
readers.
* Edward Everett Hale's famous story "The Man Without a
Country", though it got into print too late to affect the
election, was aimed at Vallandigham. That quaint allegory
on the lack of patriotism became a temporary classic.
"Long experience [he wrote] has shown that armies cannot be maintained
unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death.
The case requires, and the law and the Constitution sanction, this
punishment. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while
I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?
This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or
brother, or friend into a public meeting, and there working upon his
feelings till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy that he is
fighting in a bad cause for a wicked administration and a contemptible
government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I
think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is
not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy."
His real argument may be summed up in these words of his:
"You ask, in substance, whether I really claim that I may override all
the guaranteed rights of individuals, on the plea of conserving the
public safety--when I may choose to say the public safety requires it.
This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as
struggling for an arbitrary prerogative, is either simply a question
who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the
public safety does require in cases of rebellion or invasion.
"The Constitution contemplates the question as likely to occur for
decision, but it does not expressly declare who is to decide it. By
necessary implication, when rebellion or invasion comes, the decision is
to be made, from time to time; and I think the man, whom for the time,
the people have under the Constitution, made the commander-in-chief
of their army and navy, is the man who holds the power and bears the
responsibility of making it. If he uses the power justly, the same
people will probably justify him; if he abuses it, he is in their hands
to be dealt with by all the modes they have reserved to themselves in
the Constitution."
Lincoln virtually appealed to the Northern people to secure efficiency
by setting him momentarily above all civil authority. He asked them
in substance, to interpret their Constitution by a show of hands. No
thoughtful person can doubt the risks of such a method; yet in Ohio,
in 1863, the great majority--perhaps everyone who believed in the
war--accepted Lincoln's position. Between their traditional system of
legal juries and the new system of military tribunals the Ohio voters
made their choice without hesitation. They rejected Vallandigham
and sustained the Lincoln candidate by a majority of over a hundred
thousand. That same year in New York the anti-Lincoln candidate for
Secretary of State was defeated by twenty-nine thousand votes.
Though these elections in 1863 can hardly be called the turning-point in
the history of the Lincoln Government, yet it was clear that the tide
of popularity which had ebbed so far away from Lincoln in the autumn of
1862 was again in the flood. Another phase of his stormy course may be
thought of as having ended. And in accounting for this turn of the tide
it must not be forgotten that between the nomination and the defeat of
a Vallandigham the bloody rebellion in New York had taken place,
Gettysburg had been fought, and Grant had captured Vicksburg. The autumn
of 1863 formed a breathing space for the war party of the North.