  1. Preliminary Stages. On the morning after the bombardment of Fort Sumter there appeared a Proclamation by the President calling upon the Militia of the several States to furnish 75,000 men for the service of the United States in the suppression of an "unlawful combination." Their service, however, would expire by law thirty days after the next meeting of Congress, and, in compliance with a further requirement of law upon this subject, the President also summoned Congress to meet in extraordinary session upon July 4. The Army already in the service of the United States consisted of but 16,000 officers and men, and, though the men of this force, being less affected by State ties than their officers, remained, as did the men of the Navy, true almost without exception to their allegiance, all but 3,000 of them were unavailable and scattered in small frontier forts in the West. A few days later, when it became plain that the struggle might long outlast the three months of the Militia, the President called for Volunteers to enlist for three years' service, and perhaps (for the statements are conflicting) some 300,000 troops of one kind and another had been raised by June. The affair of Fort Sumter and the President's Proclamation at once aroused and concentrated the whole public opinion of the free States in the North and, in an opposite sense, of the States which had already seceded. The border slave States had now to declare for the one side or for the other. Virginia as a whole joined the Southern Confederacy forthwith, but several Counties in the mountainous region of the west of that State were strongly for the Union. These eventually succeeded with the support of Northern troops in separating from Virginia and forming the new State of West Virginia. Tennessee also joined the South, though in Eastern Tennessee the bulk of the people held out for the Union without such good fortune as their neighbours in West Virginia. Arkansas beyond the Mississippi followed the same example, though there were some doubt and division in all parts of that State. In Delaware, where the slaves were very few, the Governor did not formally comply with the President's Proclamation, but the people as a whole responded to it. The attitude of Maryland, which almost surrounds Washington, kept the Government at the capital in suspense and alarm for a while, for both the city of Baltimore and the existing State legislature were inclined to the South. In Kentucky and Missouri the State authorities were also for the South, and it was only after a struggle, and in Missouri much actual fighting, that the Unionist majority of the people in each State had its way. The secession of Virginia had consequences even more important than the loss to the Union of a powerful State. General Robert E. Lee, a Virginian, then in Washington, was esteemed by General Scott to be the ablest officer in the service. Lincoln and his Secretary of War desired to confer on him the command of the Army. Lee's decision was made with much reluctance and, it seems, hesitation. He was not only opposed to the policy of secession, but denied the right of a State to secede; yet he believed that his absolute allegiance was due to Virginia. He resigned his commission in the United States Army, went to Richmond, and, in accordance with what Wolseley describes as the prevailing principle that had influenced most of the soldiers he met in the South, placed his sword at the disposal of his own State. The same loyalty to Virginia governed another great soldier, Thomas J. Jackson, whose historic nickname, "Stonewall," fails to convey the dashing celerity of his movements. While they both lived these two men were to be linked together in the closest comradeship and mutual trust. They sprang from different social conditions and were of contrasting types. The epithet Cavalier has been fitly enough applied to Lee, and Jackson, after conversion from the wild courses of his youth, was an austere Puritan. To quote again from a soldier's memoirs, Wolseley calls Lee "one of the few men who ever seriously impressed and awed me with their natural, their inherent, greatness"; he speaks of his "majesty," and of the "beauty," of his character, and of the "sweetness of his smile and the impressive dignity of the old-fashioned style of his address"; "his greatness," he says, "made me humble." "There was nothing," he tells us, "of these refined characteristics in Stonewall Jackson," a man with "huge hands and feet." But he possessed "an assured self-confidence, the outcome of his sure trust in God. How simple, how humble-minded a man. As his impressive eyes met yours unflinchingly, you knew that his was an honest heart." To this he adds touches less to be expected concerning a Puritan warrior, whose Puritanism was in fact inclined to ferocity—how Jackson's "remarkable eyes lit up for the moment with a look of real enthusiasm as he recalled the architectural beauty of the seven lancet windows in York Minster," how "intense" was the "benignity" of his expression, and how in him it seemed that "great strength of character and obstinate determination were united with extreme gentleness of disposition and with absolute tenderness towards all about him." Men such as these brought to the Southern cause something besides their military capacity; but as to the greatness of that capacity, applied in a war in which the scope was so great for individual leaders of genius, there is no question. A civilian reader, looking in the history of war chiefly for the evidences of personal quality, can at least discern in these two famous soldiers the moral daring which in doubtful circumstances never flinches from the responsibility of a well-considered risk, and, in both their cases as in those of some other great commanders, can recognise in this rare and precious attribute the outcome of their personal piety. We shall henceforth have to do with the Southern Confederacy and its armies, not in their inner history but with sole regard to the task which they imposed upon Lincoln and the North. But at this parting of the ways a tribute is due to the two men, pre-eminent among many devoted people, who, in their soldier-like and unreflecting loyalty to their cause, gave to it a lustre in which, so far as they can be judged, neither its statesmen nor its spiritual guides had a share. There were Virginian officers who did not thus go with their State. Of these were Scott himself, and G. H. Thomas; and Farragut, the great sailor, was from Tennessee. Throughout the free States of the North there took place a national uprising of which none who remember it have spoken without feeling anew its spontaneous ardour. Men flung off with delight the hesitancy of the preceding months, and recruiting went on with speed and enthusiasm. Party divisions for the moment disappeared. Old Buchanan made public his adhesion to the Government. Douglas called upon Lincoln to ask how best he could serve the public cause, and, at his request, went down to Illinois to guide opinion and advance recruiting there; so employed, the President's great rival, shortly after, fell ill and died, leaving the leadership of the Democrats to be filled thereafter by more scrupulous but less patriotic men. There was exultant confidence in the power of the nation to put down rebellion, and those who realised the peril in which for many days the capital and the administration were placed were only the more indignantly determined. Perhaps the most trustworthy record of popular emotions is to be found in popular humorists. Shortly after these days Artemus Ward, the author who almost vied with Shakespeare in Lincoln's affections, relates how the confiscation of his show in the South led him to have an interview with Jefferson Davis. "Even now," said Davis, in this pleasant fiction, "we have many frens in the North." "J. Davis," is the reply, "there's your grate mistaik. Many of us was your sincere frends, and thought certin parties amung us was fussin' about you and meddlin' with your consarns intirely too much. But, J. Davis, the minit you fire a gun at the piece of dry goods called the Star-Spangled Banner, the North gits up and rises en massy, in defence of that banner. Not agin you as individooals—not agin the South even—but to save the flag. We should indeed be weak in the knees, unsound in the heart, milk-white in the liver, and soft in the hed, if we stood quietly by and saw this glorus Govyment smashed to pieces, either by a furrin or a intestine foe. The gentle-harted mother hates to take her naughty child across her knee, but she knows it is her dooty to do it. So we shall hate to whip the naughty South, but we must do it if you don't make back tracks at onct, and we shall wallup you out of your boots!" In the days which followed, when this prompt chastisement could not be effected and it seemed indeed as if the South would do most of the whipping, the discordant elements which mingled in this unanimity soon showed themselves. The minority that opposed the war was for a time silent and insignificant, but among the supporters of the war there were those who loved the Union and the Constitution and who, partly for this very reason, had hitherto cultivated the sympathies of the South. These—adherents mainly of the Democratic party—would desire that civil war should be waged with the least possible breach of the Constitution, and be concluded with the least possible social change; many of them would wish to fight not to a finish but to a compromise. On the other hand, there were those who loved liberty and hated alike the slave system of the South and the arrogance which it had engendered. These—the people distinguished within the Republican party as Radicals—would pay little heed to constitutional restraints in repelling an attack on the Constitution, and they would wish from the first to make avowed war upon that which caused the war—slavery. In the border States there was of course more active sympathy with the South, and in conflict with this the Radicalism of some of these States became more stalwart and intractable. To such causes of dissension was added as time went on sheer fatigue of the war, and strangely enough this influence was as powerful with a few Radicals as it was with the ingrained Democratic partisans. They despaired of the result when success at last was imminent, and became sick of bloodshed when it passed what they presumably regarded as a reasonable amount. It was the task of the Administration not only to conduct the war, but to preserve the unity of the North in spite of differences and its resolution in spite of disappointments. Lincoln was in more than one way well fitted for this task. Old experience in Illinois and Kentucky enabled him to understand very different points of view in regard to the cause of the South. The new question that was now to arise about slavery was but a particular form of the larger question of principle to which he had long thought out an answer as firm and as definite as it was moderate and in a sense subtle. He had, moreover, a quality of heart which, as it seemed to those near him, the protraction of the conflict, with its necessary strain upon him, only strengthened. In him a tenacity, which scarcely could falter in the cause which he judged to be right, was not merely pure from bitterness towards his antagonists, it was actually bound up with a deep-seated kindliness towards them. Whatever rank may be assigned to his services and to his deserts, it is first and foremost in these directions, though not in these directions alone, that the reader of his story must look for them. Upon attentive study he will probably appear as the embodiment, in a degree and manner which are alike rare, of the more constant and the higher judgment of his people. It is plainer still that he embodied the resolute purpose which underlay the fluctuations upon the surface of their political life. The English military historians, Wood and Edmonds, in their retrospect over the course of the war, well sum up its dramatic aspect when they say: "Against the great military genius of certain of the Southern leaders fate opposed the unbroken resolution and passionate devotion to the Union, which he worshipped, of the great Northern President. As long as he lived, and ruled the people of the North, there could be no turning back." There are plenty of indications in the literature of the time that Lincoln's determination soon began to be widely felt and to be appreciated by common people. Literally, crowds of people from all parts of the North saw him, exchanged a sentence or two, and carried home their impressions; and those who were near him record the constant fortitude of his bearing, noting as marked exceptions the unrestrained words of impatience and half-humorous despondency which did on rare occasions escape him. In a negative way, too, even the political world bore its testimony to this; his administration was charged with almost every other form of weakness, but there was never a suspicion that he would give in. Nor again, in the severest criticisms upon him by knowledgeable men that have been unearthed and collected, does the suggestion of petty personal aims or of anything but unselfish devotion ever find a place. The belief that he could be trusted spread itself among plain people, and, given this belief, plain people liked him the better because he was plain. But if at the distance at which we contemplate him, and at which from the moment of his death all America contemplated him, certain grand traits emerge, it is not for a moment to be supposed that in his life he stood out in front of the people as a great leader, or indeed as a leader at all, in the manner, say, of Chatham or even of Palmerston. Lincoln came to Washington doubtless with some deep thoughts which other men had not thought, doubtless also with some important knowledge, for instance of the border States, which many statesmen lacked, but he came there a man inexperienced in affairs. It was a part of his strength that he knew this very well, that he meant to learn, thought he could learn, did not mean to be hurried where he had not the knowledge to decide, entirely appreciated superior knowledge in others, and was entirely unawed by it. But Senators and Representatives in Congress and journalists of high standing, as a rule, perceived the inexperience and not the strength. The deliberation with which he acted, patiently watching events, saying little, listening to all sides, conversing with a naÏvetÉ which was genuine but not quite artless, seemingly obdurate to the pressure of wise counsels on one side and on the other—all this struck many anxious observers as sheer incompetence, and when there was just and natural cause for their anxiety, there was no established presumption of his wisdom to set against it. And this effect was enhanced by what may be called his plainness, his awkwardness, and actual eccentricity in many minor matters. To many intelligent people who met him they were a grievous stumbling-block, and though some most cultivated men were not at all struck by them, and were pleased instead by his "seeming sincere, and honest, and steady," or the like, it is clear that no one in Washington was greatly impressed by him at first meeting. His oddities were real and incorrigible. Young John Hay, whom Nicolay, his private secretary, introduced as his assistant, a humorist like Lincoln himself, but with leanings to literary elegance and a keen eye for social distinctions, loved him all along and came to worship him, but irreverent amusement is to be traced in his recently published letters, and the glimpses which he gives us of "the Ancient" or "the Tycoon" when quite at home and quite at his ease fully justify him. Lincoln had great dignity and tact for use when he wanted them, but he did not always see the use of them. Senator Sherman was presented to the new President. "So you're John Sherman?" said Lincoln. "Let's see if you're as tall as I am. We'll measure." The grave politician, who was made to stand back to back with him before the company till this interesting question was settled, dimly perceived that the intention was friendly, but felt that there was a lack of ceremony. Lincoln's height was one of his subjects of harmless vanity; many tall men had to measure themselves against him in this manner, and probably felt like John Sherman. On all sorts of occasions and to all sorts of people he would "tell a little story," which was often enough, in Lord Lyons' phrase, an "extreme" story. This was the way in which he had grown accustomed to be friendly in company; it served a purpose when intrusive questions had to be evaded, or reproofs or refusals to be given without offence. As his laborious and sorrowful task came to weigh heavier upon him, his capacity for play of this sort became a great resource to him. As his fame became established people recognised him as a humorist; the inevitable "little story" became to many an endearing form of eccentricity; but we may be sure it was not so always or to everybody. "Those," says Carl Schurz, a political exile from Prussia, who did good service, military and political, to the Northern cause—"those who visited the White House—and the White House appeared to be open to whosoever wished to enter—saw there a man of unconventional manners, who, without the slightest effort to put on dignity, treated all men alike, much like old neighbours; whose speech had not seldom a rustic flavour about it; who always seemed to have time for a homely talk and never to be in a hurry to press business; and who occasionally spoke about important affairs of State with the same nonchalance—I might almost say irreverence—with which he might have discussed an every-day law case in his office at Springfield, Illinois." Thus Lincoln was very far from inspiring general confidence in anything beyond his good intentions. He is remembered as a personality with a "something" about him—the vague phrase is John Bright's—which widely endeared him, but his was by no means that "magnetic" personality which we might be led to believe was indispensable in America. Indeed, it is remarkable that to some really good judges he remained always unimpressive. Charles Francis Adams, who during the Civil War served his country as well as Minister in London as his grandfather had done after the War of Independence, lamented to the end that Seward, his immediate chief, had to serve under an inferior man; and a more sympathetic man, Lord Lyons, our representative at Washington, refers to Lincoln with nothing more than an amused kindliness. No detail of his policy has escaped fierce criticism, and the man himself while he lived was the subject of so much depreciation and condescending approval, that we are forced to ask who discovered his greatness till his death inclined them to idealise him. The answer is that precisely those Americans of trained intellect whose title to this description is clearest outside America were the first who began to see beneath his strange exterior. Lowell, watching the course of public events with ceaseless scrutiny; Walt Whitman, sauntering in Washington in the intervals of the labour among the wounded by which he broke down his robust strength, and seeing things as they passed with the sure observation of a poet; Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic, studying affairs in the thick of them at the outset of the war, and not less closely by correspondence when he went as Minister to Vienna—such men when they praised Lincoln after his death expressed a judgment which they began to form from the first; a judgment which started with the recognition of his honesty, traced the evidence of his wisdom as it appeared, gradually and not by repentant impulse learned his greatness. And it is a judgment large enough to explain the lower estimate of Lincoln which certainly had wide currency. Not to multiply witnesses, Motley in June, 1861, having seen him for the second time, writes: "I went and had an hour's talk with Mr. Lincoln. I am very glad of it, for, had I not done so, I should have left Washington with a very inaccurate impression of the President. I am now satisfied that he is a man of very considerable native sagacity; and that he has an ingenuous, unsophisticated, frank, and noble character. I believe him to be as true as steel, and as courageous as true. At the same time there is doubtless an ignorance about State matters, and particularly about foreign affairs, which he does not attempt to conceal, but which we must of necessity regret in a man placed in such a position at such a crisis. Nevertheless his very modesty in this respect disarms criticism. We parted very affectionately, and perhaps I shall never set eyes on him again, but I feel that, so far as perfect integrity and directness of purpose go, the country will be safe in his hands." Three years had passed, and the political world of America was in that storm of general dissatisfaction in which not a member of Congress would be known as "a Lincoln man," when Motley writes again from Vienna to his mother, "I venerate Abraham Lincoln exactly because he is the true, honest type of American democracy. There is nothing of the shabby-genteel, the would-be-but-couldn't-be fine gentleman; he is the great American Demos, honest, shrewd, homely, wise, humorous, cheerful, brave, blundering occasionally, but through blunders struggling onwards towards what he believes the right." In a later letter he observes, "His mental abilities were large, and they became the more robust as the more weight was imposed upon them." This last sentence, especially if in Lincoln's mental abilities the qualities of his character be included, probably indicates the chief point for remark in any estimate of his presidency. It is true that he was judged at first as a stranger among strangers. Walt Whitman has described vividly a scene, with "a dash of comedy, almost farce, such as Shakespeare puts in his blackest tragedies," outside the hotel in New York where Lincoln stayed on his journey to Washington; "his look and gait, his perfect composure and coolness," to cut it short, the usually noted marks of his eccentricity, "as he stood looking with curiosity on that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces returned the look with similar curiosity, not a single one" among the crowd "his personal friend." He was not much otherwise situated when he came to Washington. It is true also that in the early days he was learning his business. "Why, Mr. President," said some one towards the end of his life, "you have changed your mind." "Yes, I have," said he, "and I don't think much of a man who isn't wiser to-day than he was yesterday." But it seems to be above all true that the exercise of power and the endurance of responsibility gave him new strength. This, of course, cannot be demonstrated, but Americans then living, who recall Abraham Lincoln, remark most frequently how the man grew to his task. And this perhaps is the main impression which the slight record here presented will convey, the impression of a man quite unlike the many statesmen whom power and the vexations attendant upon it have in some piteous way spoiled and marred, a man who started by being tough and shrewd and canny and became very strong and very wise, started with an inclination to honesty, courage, and kindness, and became, under a tremendous strain, honest, brave, and kind to an almost tremendous degree. The North then started upon the struggle with an eagerness and unanimity from which the revulsion was to try all hearts, and the President's most of all; and not a man in the North guessed what the strain of that struggle was to be. At first indeed there was alarm in Washington for the immediate safety of the city. Confederate flags could be seen floating from the hotels in Alexandria across the river; Washington itself was full of rumours of plots and intended assassinations, and full of actual Southern spies; everything was disorganised; and Lincoln himself, walking round one night, found the arsenal with open doors, absolutely unguarded. By April 20, first the Navy Yard at Gosport, in Virginia, had to be abandoned, then the Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and on the day of this latter event Lee went over to the South. One regiment from Massachusetts, where the State authorities had prepared for war before the fall of Sumter, was already in Washington; but it had had to fight its way through a furious mob in Baltimore, with some loss of life on both sides. A deputation from many churches in that city came to the President, begging him to desist from his bloodthirsty preparations, but found him "constitutionally genial and jovial," and "wholly inaccessible to Christian appeals." It mattered more that a majority of the Maryland Legislature was for the South, and that the Governor temporised and requested that no more troops should pass through Baltimore. The Mayor of Baltimore and the railway authorities burned railway bridges and tore up railway lines, and the telegraph wires were cut. Thus for about five days the direct route to Washington from the North was barred. It seemed as if the boast of some Southern orator that the Confederate flag would float over the capital by May 1 might be fulfilled. Beauregard could have transported his now drilled troops by rail from South Carolina and would have found Washington isolated and hardly garrisoned. As a matter of fact, no such daring move was contemplated in the South, and the citizens of Richmond, Virginia, were themselves under a similar alarm; but the South had a real opportunity. The fall of Washington at that moment would have had political consequences which no one realised better than Lincoln. It might well have led the Unionists in the border States to despair, and there is evidence that even then he so fully realised the task which lay before the North as to feel that the loss of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri would have made it impossible. He was at heart intensely anxious, and quaintly and injudiciously relieved his feelings by the remark to the "6th Massachusetts" that he felt as if all other help were a dream, and they were "the only real thing." Yet those who were with him testify to his composure and to the vigour with which he concerted with his Cabinet the various measures of naval, military, financial, postal, and police preparation which the occasion required, but which need not here be detailed. Many of the measures of course lay outside the powers which Congress had conferred on the public departments, but the President had no hesitation in "availing himself," as he put it, "of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection," and looking for the sanction of Congress afterwards, rather than "let the Government at once fall into ruin." The difficulties of government were greatly aggravated by the uncertainty as to which of its servants, civil, naval, or military, were loyal, and the need of rapidly filling the many posts left vacant by unexpected desertion. Meanwhile troops from New England, and also from New York, which had utterly disappointed some natural expectations in the South by the enthusiasm of its rally to the Union, quickly arrived near Baltimore. They repaired for themselves the interrupted railway tracks round the city, and by April 25 enough soldiers were in Washington to put an end to any present alarm. In case of need, the law of "habeas corpus" was suspended in Maryland. The President had no wish that unnecessary recourse should be had to martial law. Naturally, however, one of his generals summarily arrested a Southern recruiting agent in Baltimore. The ordinary law would probably have sufficed, and Lincoln is believed to have regretted this action, but it was obvious that he must support it when done. Hence arose an occasion for the old Chief Justice Taney to make a protest on behalf of legality, to which the President, who had armed force on his side, could not give way, and thus early began a controversy to which we must recur. It was gravely urged upon Lincoln that he should forcibly prevent the Legislature of Maryland from holding a formal sitting; he refused on the sensible ground that the legislators could assemble in some way and had better not assemble with a real grievance in constitutional law. Then a strange alteration came over Baltimore. Within three weeks all active demonstration in favour of the South had subsided; the disaffected Legislature resolved upon neutrality; the Governor, loyal at heart—if the brief epithet loyal may pass, as not begging any profound legal question—carried on affairs in the interest of the Union; postal communication and the passage of troops were free from interruption by the middle of May; and the pressing alarm about Maryland was over. These incidents of the first days of war have been recounted in some detail, because they may illustrate the gravity of the issue in the border States, in others of which the struggle, though further removed from observation, lasted longer; and because, too, it is well to realise the stress of agitation under which the Government had to make far-reaching preparation for a larger struggle, while Lincoln, whose will was decisive in all these measures, carried on all the while that seemingly unimportant routine of a President's life which is in the quietest times exacting. The alarm in Washington was only transitory, and it was generally supposed in the North that insurrection would be easily put down. Some even specified the number of days necessary, agreeably fixing upon a smaller number than the ninety days for which the militia were called out. Secretary Seward has been credited with language of this kind, and even General Scott, whose political judgment was feeble, though his military judgment was sound, seems at first to have rejected proposals, for example, for drilling irregular cavalry, made in the expectation of a war of some length. There is evidence that neither Lincoln nor Cameron, the Secretary of War, indulged in these pleasant fancies. Irresistible public opinion, in the East especially, demanded to see prompt activity. The North had arisen in its might; it was for the Administration to put forth that might, capture Richmond, to which the Confederate Government had moved, and therewith make an end of rebellion. The truth was that the North had to make its army before it could wisely advance into the assured territory of the South; the situation of the Southern Government in this respect was precisely the same. The North had enough to do meantime in making sure of the States which were still debatable ground. Such forces as were available must of necessity be used for this purpose, but for any larger operations of war military considerations, especially on the side which had the larger resources at its back, were in favour of waiting and perfecting the instrument which was to be used. But in the course of July the pressure of public opinion and of Congress, which had then assembled, overcame, not without some reason, the more cautious military view, and on the 21st of that month the North received its first great lesson in adversity at the battle of Bull Run. Before recounting this disaster we may proceed with the story of the struggle in the border States. At an early date the rising armies of the North had been organised into three commands, called the Department of the Potomac, on the front between Washington and Richmond, the Department of the Ohio, on the upper watershed of the river of that name, and the Department of the West. Of necessity the generals commanding in these two more Western Departments exercised a larger discretion than the general at Washington. The Department of the Ohio was under General McClellan, before the war a captain of Engineers, who had retired from active service and had been engaged as a railway manager, in which capacity he has already been noticed, but who had earned a good name in the Mexican War, had been keen enough in his profession to visit the Crimea, and was esteemed by General Scott. The people of West Virginia, who, as has been said, were trying to organise themselves as a new State, adhering to the Union, were invaded by forces despatched by the Governor of their old State. They lay mainly west of the mountains, and help could reach them up tributary valleys of the Ohio. They appealed to McClellan, and the successes quickly won by forces despatched by him, and afterwards under his direct command, secured West Virginia, and incidentally the reputation of McClellan. In Kentucky, further west, the Governor endeavoured to hold the field for the South with a body known as the State Guard, while Unionist leaders among the people were raising volunteer regiments for the North. Nothing, however, was determined by fighting between these forces. The State Legislature at first took up an attitude of neutrality, but a new Legislature, elected in June, was overwhelmingly for the Union. Ultimately the Confederate armies invaded Kentucky, and the Legislature thereupon invited the Union armies into the State to expel them, and placed 40,000 Kentucky volunteers at the disposal of the President. Thenceforward, though Kentucky, stretching as it does for four hundred miles between the Mississippi and the Alleghanies, remained for long a battle-ground, the allegiance of its people to the Union was unshaken. But the uncertainty about their attitude continued till the autumn of 1861, and while it lasted was an important element in Lincoln's calculations. (It must be remembered that slavery existed in Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri.) In Missouri the strife of factions was fierce. Already in January there had been reports of a conspiracy to seize the arsenal at St. Louis for the South when the time came, and General Scott had placed in command Captain Nathaniel Lyon, on whose loyalty he relied the more because he was an opponent of slavery. The Governor was in favour of the South—as was also the Legislature, and the Governor could count on some part of the State Militia; so Lincoln, when he called for volunteers, commissioned Lyon to raise them in Missouri. In this task a Union State Committee in St. Louis greatly helped him, and the large German population in that city was especially ready to enlist for the Union. Many of the German immigrants of those days had come to America partly for the sake of its free institutions. A State Convention was summoned by the Governor to pass an Ordinance of Secession, but its electors were minded otherwise, and the Convention voted against secession. In several encounters Lyon, who was an intrepid soldier, defeated the forces of the Governor; in June he took possession of the State capital, driving the Governor and Legislature away; the State Convention then again assembled and set up a Unionist Government for the State. This new State Government was not everywhere acknowledged; conspiracies in the Southern interest continued to exist in Missouri; and the State was repeatedly molested by invasions, of no great military consequence, from Arkansas. Indeed, in the autumn there was a serious recrudescence of trouble, in which Lyon lost his life. But substantially Missouri was secured for the Union. Naturally enough, a great many of the citizens of Missouri who had combined to save their State to the Union became among the strongest of the "Radicals" who will later engage our attention. Many, however, of the leading men who had done most in this cause, including the friends of Blair, Lincoln's Postmaster-General, adhered no less emphatically to the "Conservative" section of the Republicans. 2. Bull Run. Thus, in the autumn of 1861, North and South had become solidified into something like two countries. In the month of July, which now concerns us, this process was well on its way, but it is to be marked that the whole long tract of Kentucky still formed a neutral zone, which the Northern Government did not wish to harass, and which perhaps the South would have done well to let alone, while further west in Missouri the forces of the North were not even as fully organised as in the East. So the only possible direction in which any great blow could be struck was the direction of Richmond, now the capital, and it might seem, therefore, the heart, of the Confederacy. The Confederate Congress was to meet there on July 20. The New York Tribune, which was edited by Mr. Horace Greeley, a vigorous writer whose omniscience was unabated by the variation of his own opinion, was the one journal of far-reaching influence in the North; and it only gave exaggerated point to a general feeling when it declared that the Confederate Congress must not meet. The Senators and Congressmen now in Washington were not quite so exacting, but they had come there unanimous in their readiness to vote taxes and support the war in every way, and they wanted to see something done; and they wanted it all the more because the three months' service of the militia was running out. General Scott, still the chief military adviser of Government, was quite distinct in his preference for waiting and for perfecting the discipline and organisation of the volunteers, who had not yet even been formed into brigades. On the militia he set no value at all. For long he refused to countenance any but minor movements preparatory to a later advance. It is not quite certain, however, that Congress and public opinion were wrong in clamouring for action. The Southern troops were not much, if at all, more ready for use than the Northerners; and Jefferson Davis and his military adviser, Lee, desired time for their defensive preparations. It was perhaps too much to expect that the country after its great uprising should be content to give supplies and men without end while nothing apparently happened; and the spirit of the troops themselves might suffer more from inaction than from defeat. A further thought, while it made defeat seem more dangerous, made battle more tempting. There was fear that European Powers might recognise the Southern Confederacy and enter into relations with it. Whether they did so depended on whether they were confirmed in their growing suspicion that the North could not conquer the South. Balancing the military advice which was given them as to the risk against this political importunity, Lincoln and his Cabinet chose the risk, and Scott at length withdrew his opposition. Lincoln was possibly more sensitive to pressure than he afterwards became, more prone to treat himself as a person under the orders of the people, but there is no reason to doubt that he acted on his own sober judgment as well as that of his Cabinet. Whatever degree of confidence he reposed in Scott, Scott was not very insistent; the risk was not overwhelming; the battle was very nearly won, would have been won if the orders of Scott had been carried out. No very great harm in fact followed the defeat of Bull Run; and the danger of inaction was real. He was probably then, as he certainly was afterwards, profoundly afraid that the excessive military caution which he often encountered would destroy the cause of the North by disheartening the people who supported the war. That is no doubt a kind of fear to which many statesmen are too prone, but Lincoln's sense of real popular feeling throughout the wide extent of the North is agreed to have been uncommonly sure. Definite judgment on such a question is impossible, but probably Lincoln and his Cabinet were wise. However, they did not win their battle. The Southern army under Beauregard lay near the Bull Run river, some twenty miles from Washington, covering the railway junction of Manassas on the line to Richmond. The main Northern army, under General McDowell, a capable officer, lay south of the Potomac, where fortifications to guard Washington had already been erected on Virginian soil. In the Shenandoah Valley was another Southern force, under Joseph Johnston, watched by the Northern general Patterson at Harper's Ferry, which had been recovered by Scott's operations. Each of these Northern generals was in superior force to his opponent. McDowell was to attack the Confederate position at Manassas, while Patterson, whose numbers were nearly double Johnston's, was to keep him so seriously occupied that he could not join Beauregard. With whatever excuse of misunderstanding or the like, Patterson made hardly an attempt to carry out his part of Scott's orders, and Johnston, with the bulk of his force, succeeded in joining Beauregard the day before McDowell's attack, and without his gaining knowledge of this movement. The battle of Bull Run or Manassas (or rather the earlier and more famous of two battles so named) was an engagement of untrained troops in which up to a certain point the high individual quality of those troops supplied the place of discipline. McDowell handled with good judgment a very unhandy instrument. It was only since his advance had been contemplated that his army had been organised in brigades. The enemy, occupying high wooded banks on the south side of the Bull Run, a stream about as broad as the Thames at Oxford but fordable, was successfully pushed back to a high ridge beyond; but the stubborn attacks over difficult ground upon this further position failed from lack of co-ordination, and, when it already seemed doubtful whether the tired soldiers of the North could renew them with any hope, they were themselves attacked on their right flank. It seems that from that moment their success upon that day was really hopeless, but some declare that the Northern soldiers with one accord became possessed of a belief that this flank attack by a comparatively small body was that of the whole force of Johnston, freshly arrived upon the scene. In any case they spontaneously retired in disorder; they were not effectively pursued, but McDowell was unable to rally them at Centreville, a mile or so behind the Bull Run. Among the camp followers the panic became extreme, and they pressed into Washington in wild alarm, accompanied by citizens and Congressmen who had come out to see a victory, and who left one or two of their number behind as prisoners of war. The result was a surprise to the Southern army. Johnston, who now took over the command, declared that it was as much disorganised by victory as the Northern army by defeat. With the full approval of his superiors in Richmond, he devoted himself to entrenching his position at Manassas. But in Washington, where rumours of victory had been arriving all through the day of battle, there prevailed for some time an impression that the city was exposed to immediate capture, and this impression was shared by McClellan, to whom universal opinion now turned as the appointed saviour, and who was forthwith summoned to Washington to take command of the army of the Potomac. Within the circle of the Administration there was, of course, deep mortification. Old General Scott passionately declared himself to have been the greatest coward in America in having ever given way to the President's desire for action. Lincoln, who was often to prove his readiness to take blame on his own shoulders, evidently thought that the responsibility in this case was shared by Scott, and demanded to know whether Scott accused him of having overborne his judgment. The old general warmly, if a little ambiguously, replied that he had served under many Presidents, but never known a kinder master. Plainly he felt that his better judgment had somehow been overpowered, and yet that there was nothing in their relations for which in his heart he could blame the President; and this trivial dialogue is worth remembering during the dreary and controversial tale of Lincoln's relations with Scott's successor. Lincoln, however bitterly disappointed, showed no signs of discomposure or hesitancy. The business of making the army of the Potomac quietly began over again. To the four days after Bull Run belongs one of the few records of the visits to the troops which Lincoln constantly paid when they were not too far from Washington, cheering them with little talks which served a good purpose without being notable. He was reviewing the brigade commanded at Bull Run by William Sherman, later, but not yet, one of the great figures in the war. He was open to all complaints, and a colonel of militia came to him with a grievance; he claimed that his term of service had already expired, that he had intended to go home, but that Sherman unlawfully threatened to shoot him if he did so. Lincoln had a good look at Sherman, and then advised the colonel to keep out of Sherman's way, as he looked like a man of his word. This was said in the hearing of many men, and Sherman records his lively gratitude for a simple jest which helped him greatly in keeping his brigade in existence. Not one of the much more serious defeats suffered later in the war produced by itself so lively a sense of discomfiture in the North as this; thus none will equally claim our attention. But, except for the first false alarms in Washington, there was no disposition to mistake its military significance. The "second uprising of the North," which followed upon this bracing shock, left as vivid a memory as the little disaster of Bull Run. But there was of necessity a long pause while McClellan remodelled the army in the East, and the situation in the West was becoming ripe for important movements. The eagerness of the Northern people to make some progress, again asserted itself before long, but to their surprise, and perhaps to that of a reader to-day, the last five months of 1861 passed without notable military events. Here then we may turn to the progress of other affairs, departmental affairs, foreign affairs, and domestic policy, which, it must not be forgotten, had pressed heavily upon the Administration from the moment that war began. 3. Lincoln's Administration Generally. Long before the Eastern public was very keenly aware of Lincoln the members of his Cabinet had come to think of the Administration as his Administration, some, like Seward, of whom it could have been little expected, with a loyal, and for America most fortunate, acceptance of real subordination, and one at least, Chase, with indignant surprise that his own really great abilities were not dominant. One Minister early told his friends that there was but one vote in the Cabinet, the President's. This must not be taken in the sense that Lincoln's personal guidance was present in every department. He had his own department, concerned with the maintenance of Northern unity and with that great underlying problem of internal policy which will before long appear again, and the business of the War Department was so immediately vital as to require his ceaseless attention; but in other matters the degree and manner of his control of course varied. Again, it is far from being the case that the Cabinet had little influence on his action. He not only consulted it much, but deferred to it much. His wisdom seems to have shown itself in nothing more strongly than in recognising when he wanted advice and when he did not, when he needed support and when he could stand alone. Sometimes he yielded to his Ministers because he valued their judgment, sometimes also because he gauged by them the public support without which his action must fail. Sometimes, when he was sure of the necessity, he took grave steps without advice from them or any one. More often he tried to arrive with them at a real community of decision. It is often impossible to guess what acts of an Administration are rightly credited to its chief. The hidden merit or demerit of many statesmen has constantly lain in the power, or the lack of it, of guiding their colleagues and being guided in turn. If we tried to be exact in saying Lincoln, or Lincoln's Cabinet, or the North did this or that, it would be necessary to thresh out many bushels of tittle-tattle. The broad impression, however, remains that in the many things in which Lincoln did not directly rule he ruled through a group of capable men of whom he made the best use, and whom no other chief could have induced to serve so long in concord. As we proceed some authentic examples of his precise relations with them will appear, in which, unimportant as they seem, one test of his quality as a statesman and of his character should be sought. The naval operations of the war afford many tales of daring on both sides which cannot here be noticed. They afford incidents of strange interest now, such as the exploit of the first submarine. (It belonged to the South; its submersion invariably resulted in the death of the whole crew; and, with full knowledge of this, a devoted crew went down and destroyed a valuable Northern iron-clad.) The ravages on commerce of the Alabama and some other Southern cruisers became only too famous in England, from whose ship-building yards they had escaped. The North failed too in some out of the fairly numerous combined naval and military expeditions, which were undertaken with a view to making the blockade more complete and less arduous by the occupation of Southern ports, and perhaps to more serious incursions into the South. Among those of them which will require no special notice, most succeeded. Thus by the spring of 1863 Florida was substantially in Northern hands, and by 1865 the South had but two ports left, Charleston and Wilmington; but the venture most attractive to Northern sentiment, an attack upon Charleston itself, proved a mere waste of military force. Moreover, till a strong military adviser was at last found in Grant there was some dissipation of military force in such expeditions. Nevertheless, the naval success of the North was so continuous and overwhelming that its history in detail need not be recounted in these pages. Almost from the first the ever-tightening grip of the blockade upon the Southern coasts made its power felt, and early in 1862 the inland waterways of the South were beginning to fall under the command of the Northern flotillas. Such a success needed, of course, the adoption of a decided policy from the outset; it needed great administrative ability to improvise a navy where hardly any existed, and where the conditions of its employment were in many respects novel; and it needed resourceful watching to meet the surprises of fresh naval invention by which the South, poor as were its possibilities for ship-building, might have rendered impotent, as once or twice it seemed likely to do, the Northern blockade. Gideon Welles, the responsible Cabinet Minister, was constant and would appear to have been capable at his task, but the inspiring mind of the Naval Department was found in Gustavus V. Fox, a retired naval officer, who at the beginning of Lincoln's administration was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The policy of blockade was begun by Lincoln's Proclamation on April 19, 1861. It was a hardy measure, certain to be a cause of friction with foreign Powers. The United States Government had contended in 1812 that a blockade which is to confer any rights against neutral commerce must be an effective blockade, and has not lately been inclined to take lax views upon such questions; but when it declared its blockade of the South it possessed only three steamships of war with which to make it effective. But the policy was stoutly maintained. The Naval Department at the very first set about buying merchant ships in Northern ports and adapting them to warlike use, and building ships of its own, in the design of which it shortly obtained the help of a Commission of Congress on the subject of ironclads. The Naval Department had at least the fullest support and encouragement from Lincoln in the whole of its policy. Everything goes to show that he followed naval affairs carefully, but that, as he found them conducted on sound lines by men that he trusted, his intervention in them was of a modest kind. Welles continued throughout the member of his Cabinet with whom he had the least friction, and was probably one of those Ministers, common in England, who earn the confidence of their own departments without in any way impressing the imagination of the public; and a letter by Lincoln to Fox immediately after the affair of Fort Sumter shows the hearty esteem and confidence with which from the first he regarded Fox. Of the few slight records of his judgment in these matters one is significant. The unfortunate expedition against Charleston in the spring of 1863 was undertaken with high hopes by the Naval Department; but Lincoln, we happen to know, never believed it could succeed. He has, rightly or wrongly, been blamed for dealings with his military officers in which he may be said to have spurred them hard; he cannot reasonably be blamed for giving the rein to his expert subordinates, because his own judgment, which differed from theirs, turned out right. This is one of very many instances which suggest that at the time when his confidence in himself was full grown his disposition, if any, to interfere was well under control. It is also one of the indications that his attention was alert in many matters in which his hand was not seen. He was no financier, and that important part of the history of the war, Northern finance, concerns us little. The real economic strength of the North was immense, for immigration and development were going on so fast, that, for all the strain of the war, production and exports increased. But the superficial disturbance caused by borrowing and the issue of paper money was great, and, though the North never bore the pinching that was endured in the South, it is an honourable thing that, for all the rise in the cost of living and for all the trouble that occurred in business when the premium on gold often fluctuated between 40 and 60 and on one occasion rose to 185, neither the solid working class of the country generally nor the solid business class of New York were deeply affected by the grumbling at the duration of the war. The American verdict upon the financial policy of Chase, a man of intellect but new to such affairs, is one of high praise. Lincoln left him free in that policy. He had watched the acts and utterances of his chief contemporaries closely and early acquired a firm belief in Chase's ability. How much praise is due to the President, who for this reason kept Chase in his Cabinet, a later part of this story may show. One function of Government was that of the President alone. An English statesman is alleged to have said upon becoming Prime Minister, "I had important and interesting business in my old office, but now my chief duty will be to create undeserving Peers." Lincoln, in the anxious days that followed his first inauguration, once looked especially harassed; a Senator said to him: "What is the matter, Mr. President? Is there bad news from Fort Sumter?" "Oh, no," he answered, "it's the Post Office at Baldinsville." The patronage of the President was enormous, including the most trifling offices under Government, such as village postmasterships. In the appointment to local offices, he was expected to consult the local Senators and Representatives of his own party, and of course to choose men who had worked for the party. In the vast majority of cases decent competence for the office in the people so recommended might be presumed. The established practice further required that a Republican President on coming in should replace with good Republicans most of the nominees of the late Democratic administration, which had done the like in its day. Lincoln's experience after a while led him to prophesy that the prevalence of office-seeking would be the ruin of American politics, but it certainly never occurred to him to try and break down then the accepted rule, of which no party yet complained. It would have been unmeasured folly, even if he had thought of it, to have taken during such a crisis a new departure which would have vexed the Republicans far more than it would have pleased the Democrats. And at that time it was really of great consequence that public officials should be men of known loyalty to the Union, for obviously a postmaster of doubtful loyalty might do mischief. Lincoln, then, except in dealing with posts of special consequence, for which men with really special qualifications were to be found, frankly and without a question took as the great principle of his patronage the fairest possible distribution of favours among different classes and individuals among the supporters of the Government, whom it was his primary duty to keep together. His attitude in the whole business was perfectly understood and respected by scrupulous men who watched politics critically. It was the cause in one way of great worry to him, for, except when his indignation was kindled, he was abnormally reluctant to say "no,"—he once shuddered to think what would have happened to him if he had been a woman, but was consoled by the thought that his ugliness would have been a shield; and his private secretaries accuse him of carrying out his principle with needless and even ridiculous care. In appointments to which the party principle did not apply, but in which an ordinary man would have felt party prejudice, Lincoln's old opponents were often startled by his freedom from it. If jobbery be the right name for his persistent endeavour to keep the partisans of the Union pleased and united, his jobbery proved to have one shining attribute of virtue; later on, when, apart from the Democratic opposition which revived, there arose in the Republican party sections hostile to himself, the claims of personal adherence to him and the wavering prospects of his own reelection seem, from recorded instances, to have affected his choice remarkably little. 4. Foreign Policy and England. The question, what was his influence upon foreign policy, is more difficult than the general praise bestowed upon it might lead us to expect; because, though he is known to have exercised a constant supervision over Seward, that influence was concealed from the diplomatic world. For at least the first eighteen months of the war, apart from lesser points of quarrel, a real danger of foreign intervention hung over the North. The danger was increased by the ambitions of Napoleon III. in regard to Mexico, and by the loss and suffering caused to England, above all, not merely from the interruption of trade but from the suspension of cotton supplies by the blockade. From the first there was the fear that foreign powers would recognise the Southern Confederacy as an independent country; that they were then likely to offer mediation which it would at the best have been embarrassing for the President to reject; that they might ultimately, when their mediation had been rejected, be tempted to active intervention. It is curious that the one European Government which was recognised all along as friendly to the Republic was that of the Czar, Alexander II. of Russia, who in this same year, 1861, was accomplishing the project, bequeathed to him by his father, of emancipating the serfs. Mercier, the French Minister in Washington, advised his Government to recognise the South Confederacy as early as March, 1861. The Emperor of the French, though not the French people, inclined throughout to this policy; but he would not act apart from England, and the English Government, though Americans did not know it, had determined, and for the present was quite resolute, against any hasty action. Nevertheless an almost accidental cause very soon brought England and the North within sight of a war from which neither people was in appearance averse. Neither the foreign policy of Lincoln's Government nor, indeed, the relations of England and America from his day to our own can be understood without some study of the attitude of the two countries to each other during the war. If we could put aside any previous judgment on the cause as between North and South, there are still some marked features in the attitude of England during the war which every Englishman must now regret. It should emphatically be added that there were some upon which every Englishman should look back with satisfaction. Many of the expressions of English opinion at that time betray a powerlessness to comprehend another country and a self-sufficiency in judging it, which, it may humbly be claimed, were not always and are not now so characteristic of Englishmen as they were in that period of our history, in many ways so noble, which we associate with the rival influences of Palmerston and of Cobden. It is not at all surprising that ordinary English gentlemen started with a leaning towards the South; they liked Southerners and there was much in the manners of the North, and in the experiences of Englishmen trading with or investing in the North, which did not impress them favourably. Many Northerners discovered something snobbish and unsound in this preference, but they were not quite right. With this leaning, Englishmen readily accepted the plea of the South that it was threatened with intolerable interference; indeed to this day it is hardly credible to Englishmen that the grievance against which the South arose in such passionate revolt was so unsubstantial as it really was. On the other hand, the case of the North was not apprehended. How it came to pass, in the intricate and usually uninteresting play of American politics, that a business community, which had seemed pretty tolerant of slavery, was now at war on some point which was said to be and said not to be slavery, was a little hard to understand. Those of us who remember our parents' talk of the American Civil War did not hear from them the true and fairly simple explanation of the war, that the North fought because it refused to connive further in the extension of slavery, and would not—could not decently—accept the disruption of a great country as the alternative. It is strictly true that the chivalrous South rose in blind passion for a cause at the bottom of which lay the narrowest of pecuniary interests, while the over-sharp Yankees, guided by a sort of comic backwoodsman, fought, whether wisely or not, for a cause as untainted as ever animated a nation in arms. But it seems a paradox even now, and there is no reproach in the fact, that our fathers, who had not followed the vacillating course of Northern politics hitherto, did not generally take it in. We shall see in a later chapter how Northern statesmanship added to their perplexity. But it is impossible not to be ashamed of some of the forms in which English feeling showed itself and was well known in the North to show itself. Not only the articles of some English newspapers, but the private letters of Americans who then found themselves in the politest circles in London, are unpleasant to read now. It is painful, too, that a leader of political thought like Cobden should even for a little while—and it was only a little while—have been swayed in such a matter by a sympathy relatively so petty as agreement with the Southern doctrine of Free Trade. We might now call it worthier of Prussia than of England that a great Englishman like Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) should have expressed friendship for the South as a good customer of ours, and antagonism for the North as a rival in our business. When such men as these said such things they were, of course, not brutally indifferent to right, they were merely blind to the fact that a very great and plain issue of right and wrong was really involved in the war. Gladstone, to take another instance, was not blind to that, but with irritating misapprehension he protested against the madness of plunging into war to propagate the cause of emancipation. Then came in his love of small states, and from his mouth, while he was a Cabinet Minister, came the impulsive pronouncement, bitterly regretted by him and bitterly resented in the North: "Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made—what is more than either—they have made a nation." Many other Englishmen simply sympathised with the weaker side; many too, it should be confessed, with the apparently weaker side which they were really persuaded would win. ("Win the battles," said Lord Robert Cecil to a Northern lady, "and we Tories shall come round at once.") These things are recalled because their natural effect in America has to be understood. What is really lamentable is not that in this distant and debatable affair the sympathy of so many inclined to the South, but that, when at least there was a Northern side, there seemed at first to be hardly any capable of understanding or being stirred by it. Apart from politicians there were only two Englishmen of the first rank, Tennyson and Darwin, who, whether or not they understood the matter in detail, are known to have cared from their hearts for the Northern cause. It is pleasant to associate with these greater names that of the author of "Tom Brown." The names of those hostile to the North or apparently quite uninterested are numerous and surprising. Even Dickens, who had hated slavery, and who in "Martin Chuzzlewit" had appealed however bitterly to the higher national spirit which he thought latent in America, now, when that spirit had at last and in deed asserted itself, gave way in his letters to nothing but hatred of the whole country. And a disposition like this—explicable but odious—did no doubt exist in the England of those days. There is, however, quite another aspect of this question besides that which has so painfully impressed many American memories. When the largest manufacturing industry of England was brought near to famine by the blockade, the voice of the stricken working population was loudly and persistently uttered on the side of the North. There has been no other demonstration so splendid of the spirit which remains widely diffused among individual English working men and which at one time animated labour as a concentrated political force. John Bright, who completely grasped the situation in America, took a stand, in which J. S. Mill, W. E. Forster, and the Duke of Argyll share his credit, but which did peculiar and great honour to him as a Quaker who hated war. But there is something more that must be said. The conduct of the English Government, supported by the responsible leaders of the Opposition, was at that time, no less than now, the surest indication of the more deep-seated feelings of the real bulk of Englishmen on any great question affecting our international relations; and the attitude of the Government, in which Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister and Lord John Russell Foreign Secretary, and with which in this matter Conservative leaders like Disraeli and Sir Stafford Northcote entirely concurred, was at the very least free from grave reproach. Lord John Russell, and, there can be little doubt, his colleagues generally, regarded slavery as an "accursed institution," but they felt no anger with the people of the South for it, because, as he said, "we gave them that curse and ours were the hands from which they received that fatal gift"; in Lord John at least the one overmastering sentiment upon the outbreak of the war was that of sheer pain that "a great Republic, which has enjoyed institutions under which the people have been free and happy, is placed in jeopardy." Their insight into American affairs did not go deep; but the more seriously we rate "the strong antipathy to the North, the strong sympathy with the South, and the passionate wish to have cotton," of which a Minister, Lord Granville, wrote at the time, the greater is the credit due both to the Government as a whole and to Disraeli for having been conspicuously unmoved by these considerations; and "the general approval from Parliament, the press, and the public," which, as Lord Granville added, their policy received, is creditable too. It is perfectly true, as will be seen later, that at one dark moment in the fortunes of the North, the Government very cautiously considered the possibility of intervention, but Disraeli, to whom a less patriotic course would have offered a party advantage, recalled to them their own better judgment; and it is impossible to read their correspondence on this question without perceiving that in this they were actuated by no hostility to the North, but by a sincere belief that the cause of the North was hopeless and that intervention, with a view to stopping bloodshed, might prove the course of honest friendship to all America. Englishmen of a later time have become deeply interested in America, and may wish that their fathers had better understood the great issue of the Civil War, but it is matter for pride, which in honesty should be here asserted, that with many selfish interests in this contest, of which they were most keenly aware, Englishmen, in their capacity as a nation, acted with complete integrity. But for our immediate purpose the object of thus reviewing a subject on which American historians have lavished much research is to explain the effect produced in America by demonstrations of strong antipathy and sympathy in England. The effect in some ways has been long lasting. The South caught at every mark of sympathy with avidity, was led by its politicians to expect help, received none, and became resentful. It is surprising to be told, but may be true, that the embers of this resentment became dangerous to England in the autumn of 1914. In the North the memory of an antipathy which was almost instantly perceived has burnt deep—as many memoirs, for instance those recently published by Senator Lodge, show—into the minds of precisely those Americans to whom Englishmen have ever since been the readiest to accord their esteem. There were many men in the North with a ready-made dislike of England, but there were many also whose sensitiveness to English opinion, if in some ways difficult for us to appreciate, was intense. Republicans such as James Russell Lowell had writhed under the reproaches cast by Englishmen upon the acquiescence of all America in slavery; they felt that the North had suddenly cut off this reproach and staked everything on the refusal to give way to slavery any further; they looked now for expressions of sympathy from many quarters in England; but in the English newspapers which they read and the reports of Americans in England they found evidence of nothing but dislike. There soon came evidence, as it seemed to the whole North, of actually hostile action on the part of the British Government. It issued a Proclamation enjoining neutrality upon British subjects. This was a matter of course on the outbreak of what was nothing less than war; but Northerners thought that at least some courteous explanation should first have been made to their Government, and there were other matters which they misinterpreted as signs of an agreement of England with France to go further and open diplomatic relations with the Confederate Government. Thus alike in the most prejudiced and in the most enlightened quarters in the North there arose an irritation which an Englishman must see to have been natural but can hardly think to have been warranted by the real facts. Here came in the one clearly known and most certainly happy intervention of Lincoln's in foreign affairs. Early in May Seward brought to him the draft of a vehement despatch, telling the British Government peremptorily what the United States would not stand, and framed in a manner which must have frustrated any attempt by Adams in London to establish good relations with Lord John Russell. That draft now exists with the alterations made in Lincoln's own hand. With a few touches, some of them very minute, made with the skill of a master of language and of a life-long peacemaker, he changed the draft into a firm but entirely courteous despatch. In particular, instead of requiring Adams, as Seward would have done, to read the whole despatch to Russell and leave him with a copy of it, he left it to the man on the spot to convey its sense in what manner he judged best. Probably, as has been claimed for him, his few penstrokes made peaceful relations easy when Seward's despatch would have made them almost impossible; certainly a study of this document will prove both his strange, untutored diplomatic skill and the general soundness of his view of foreign affairs. Now, however, followed a graver crisis in which his action requires some discussion. Messrs. Mason and Slidell were sent by the Confederate Government as their emissaries to England and France. They got to Havana and there took ship again on the British steamer Trent. A watchful Northern sea captain overhauled the Trent, took Mason and Slidell off her, and let her go. If he had taken the course, far more inconvenient to the Trent, of bringing her into a Northern harbour, where a Northern Prize Court might have adjudged these gentlemen to be bearers of enemy despatches, he would have been within the law. As it was he violated well-established usage, and no one has questioned the right and even the duty of the British Government to demand the release of the prisoners. This they did in a note of which the expression was made milder by the wish of the Queen (conveyed in almost the last letter of the Prince Consort), but which required compliance within a fortnight. Meanwhile Secretary Welles had approved the sea captain's action. The North was jubilant at the capture, the more so because Mason and Slidell were Southern statesmen of the lower type and held to be specially obnoxious; and the House of Representatives, to make matters worse, voted its approval of what had been done. Lincoln, on the very day when the news of the capture came, had seen and said privately that on the principles which America had itself upheld in the past the prisoners would have to be given up with an apology. But there is evidence that he now wavered, and that, bent as he was on maintaining a united North, he was still too distrustful of his own better judgment as against that of the public. At this very time he was already on other points in painful conflict with many friends. In any case he submitted to Seward a draft despatch making the ill-judged proposal of arbitration. He gave way to Seward, but at the Cabinet meeting on Christmas Eve, at which Seward submitted a despatch yielding to the British demand, it is reported that Lincoln, as well as Chase and others, was at first reluctant to agree, and that it was Bates and Seward that persuaded the Cabinet to a just and necessary surrender. |
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