FOOTNOTES:
[65] Letters and Diaries, i, 47.
[66] The New York Tribune, June 6, said: "We trust the great majority of considerate and loyal citizens share the relief and satisfaction we feel in view of the President's course in revoking the order of General Burnside which directs the suppression of the Chicago Times. And we further trust that the zealous and impulsive minority, who would have had General Burnside's order sustained, will, on calm reflection, realize and admit that the President has taken the wiser and safer course. We cannot reconcile the decision of the Executive in this case with his action in regard to Vallandigham. Journalists have no special license to commit treason, and Vallandigham's sympathy with the rebels was neither more audacious nor more mischievous than that of the Times. Yet it is better to be inconsistently right than consistently wrong—better to be right to-day, though wrong yesterday, than to be wrong both days alike."
CHAPTER XIII
INCIDENTS OF THE YEARS 1863 AND 1864
James W. White, of New York City, writes, March 6, to ask Trumbull, as a member of the Seward Committee, whether it is a fact that President Lincoln had knowledge of the dispatches written by Secretary Seward to Minister Adams, dated April 10, 1861, and July 5, 1862, before they were sent, and whether he approved the same.
This refers to an event which very nearly upset President Lincoln's Cabinet in the beginning of 1863. Secretary Seward had entered the Cabinet under strong suspicions of lukewarmness toward the war policy of the President, which suspicions were shared by the Republican Senators generally. Consequently they were prepared to believe that the want of success which attended the Union arms was due to a lack of earnestness at headquarters, and that the man who paralyzed Lincoln was the Secretary of State. While this feeling was rankling in many bosoms, and especially among those who had considered the Executive remiss in dealing with the slavery question, the official correspondence of the State Department of the preceding year came from the press, containing, among other letters, one from Seward to Minister Adams dated July 5, 1862, with the following words:
It seems as if the extreme advocates of African slavery and its most vehement opponents were acting in concert together to precipitate a servile war—the former by making the most desperate attempts to overthrow the Federal Union, the latter by demanding an edict of universal emancipation as a lawful and necessary, if not, as they say, the only legitimate way of saving the Union.