The only way the President could stop desertions and prevent the actual secession of the great Northern States of the Middle West, now under the control of these men, was to use his arbitrary power to suspend the civil law and put them in prison. Through the State and War Departments he did this sorrowfully, but promptly.
His answer to his critics was the soundest reasoning and it justified him in the judgment of thinking men.
"I make such arrests," he declared, "because these men are laboring to prevent the raising of troops and encouraging desertion. Armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the penalty of death.
"I will not shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, and refuse to touch a wily agitator who induces him to commit the crime. To silence the agitator and save the boy is not only Constitutional, but withal a great mercy."
Volunteers were no longer to be had and a draft of five hundred thousand men had been ordered for the summer. The Democratic leaders in solid array were threatening to resist this draft by every means in their power, even to riot and revolution.
The masses of the North were profoundly discouraged at the unhappy results of the war. In thousands of patriotic loyal homes, men and women had begun to ask themselves whether it were not cruel folly to send their brave boys to be slaughtered.
The prestige of the Southern army was at its highest point and its terrible power was nowhere more gravely realized than in the North, whose thousands of mourning homes attested its valor.
Europe at last seemed ready to spring on the throat of America. Distinct reports were in circulation in the Old World that the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, intended to interfere in our affairs. On the 9th of January, the French Government denied this. The Emperor himself, however, sent to the President an offer of mediation so blunt and surprising it could not be doubted that it was a veiled hint of his purpose to intervene. Beyond a doubt he expected the Union to be dismembered and he proposed to form an alliance between the Latin Empire which he was founding in Mexico and the triumphant Confederate States.
Great Britain was behind this Napoleonic adventure. Outwitted by the President in the affair of the Trent, the British Government was eager for the chance to strike the Republic.
To cap the climax of disasters Lee was preparing to invade the North with his victorious army. The announcement struck terror to the Northern cities and produced a condition among them little short of panic.