Very different was the treatment the Charcoals received at the hands of General Grant when he became President. He made the leader of the anti-Scofield delegation to Washington Chief Justice of the Court of Claims. He made two or three other leading Missouri Radicals foreign ministers and officially remembered many of the rest of them. He had been a Missourian, and it was well known that he was in sympathy with the Radicals in their fight with Lincoln.
Although the Missouri Radicals did not favor Mr. Lincoln's candidature, with the exception of a few supporters of Frémont, they gave him their loyal support at the polls, and through this a large majority in the State. They acted towards him much more cordially than he ever acted toward them.
That Mr. Lincoln, in antagonizing the Missouri Free Soilers, acted otherwise than from the most conscientious impulses the writer does not for a moment believe. He opposed them because he disapproved of their views and policy. He said so most distinctly on one occasion. Certain German societies of St. Louis, having adopted a set of resolutions, entrusted them to James Taussig, a leading lawyer of that city, to present to the President in person. Mr. Taussig's report of the results of a two hours' interview can be found in several of Mr. Lincoln's biographies. One passage from the report is here given because it clearly shows Mr. Lincoln's attitude toward the Missouri problem.
"The President," says Mr. Taussig, "said that the Union men in Missouri who are in favor of gradual
emancipation, represented his views better than those who are in favor of immediate emancipation. In explanation of his views on this subject the President said that in his speeches he had frequently used as an illustration the case of a man who had an excrescence on the back of his neck, the removal of which in one operation would result in the death of the patient, while tinkering it off by degrees would preserve life."
"Although sorely tempted," continues Mr. Taussig, "I did not reply with the illustration of the dog whose tail was amputated by inches, but confined myself to arguments. The President announced clearly that, so far as he was at present advised, the Radicals in Missouri had no right to consider themselves the representatives of his views on the subject of emancipation in that State."
The foregoing interview, it is well enough to state, was long after the issuance of Mr. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
In addition to carrying the State for Mr. Lincoln, the Missouri Radicals carried it for themselves. They elected a constitutional convention that promptly passed an unconditional freedom ordinance. And thus terminated what is certainly one of the most notable contests in our political history, bringing about, as it did, the triumph of a reform of unquestionable value to civilization and humanity, which was accomplished by men working without patronage or other outside help, with no pecuniary interest at stake, and no incentive beyond the principle involved.