The moment Jackson had accomplished his purpose, having drawn a great army northwestward away from McClellan, most of which should have been marching southeastward to join McClellan, he slipped away, rushed his own army across the whole width of Virginia, and joined Lee in the terrible fighting of the Seven Days before Richmond.
In the midst of this furious confusion, the men surrounding Lincoln may be excused for not observing a change in him. They have recorded his appearance of indecision, his solicitude over McClellan, his worn and haggard look. The changing light in those smoldering fires of his deeply sunken eyes escaped their notice. Gradually, through profound unhappiness, and as always in silence, Lincoln was working out of his last eclipse. No certain record of his inner life during this transition, the most important of his life, has survived. We can judge of it only by the results. The outstanding fact with regard to it is a certain change of attitude, an access of determination, late in June. What desperate wrestling with the angel had taken place in the months of agony since his son's death, even his private secretaries have not felt able to say. Neither, apparently, did they perceive, until it flashed upon them full-blown, the change that was coming over his resolution. Nor did the Cabinet have any warning that the President was turning a corner, developing a new phase of himself, something sterner, more powerful than anything they had suspected. This was ever his way. His instinctive reticence stood firm until the moment of the new birth. Not only the Cabinet but the country was amazed and startled, when, late in June, the President suddenly left Washington. He made a flying trip to West Point where Scott was living in virtual retirement.(30) What passed between the two, those few hours they spent together, that twenty-fourth of June, 1862, has never been divulged. Did they have any eyes, that day, for the wonderful prospect from the high terrace of the parade ground; for the river so far below, flooring the valley with silver; for the mountains pearl and blue? Did they talk of Stanton, of his waywardness, his furies? Of the terrible Committee? Of the way Lincoln had tied his own hands, brought his will to stalemate, through his recognition of the unofficial councils? Who knows?
Lincoln was back in Washington the next day. Another day, and by a sweeping order he created a new army for the protection of Washington, and placed in command of it, a western general who was credited with a brilliant stroke on the Mississippi.(31) No one will now defend the military genius of John Pope. But when Lincoln sent for him, all the evidence to date appeared to be in his favor. His follies were yet to appear. And it is more than likely that in the development of Lincoln's character, his appointment has a deep significance. It appears to mark the moment when Lincoln broke out of the cocoon of advisement he had spun unintentionally around his will. In the sorrows of the grim year, new forces had been generated. New spiritual powers were coming to his assistance. At last, relatively, he had found peace. Worn and torn as he was, after his long inward struggle, few bore so calmly as he did the distracting news from the front in the closing days of June and the opening days of July, when Lee was driving his whole strength like a superhuman battering-ram, straight at the heart of the wavering McClellan. A visitor at the White House, in the midst of the terrible strain of the Seven Days, found Lincoln "thin and haggard, but cheerful . . . quite as placid as usual . . . his manner was so kindly and so free from the ordinary cocksureness of the politician, and the vanity and self-importance of official position that nothing but good will was inspired by his presence."(32)
His serenity was all the more remarkable as his relations with Congress and the Committee were fast approaching a crisis. If McClellan failed-and by the showing of his own despatches, there was every reason to expect him to fail, so besotted was he upon the idea that no one could prevail with the force allowed him—the Committee who were leaders of the congressional party against the presidential party might be expected promptly to measure strength with the Administration. And McClellan failed. At that moment Chandler, with the consent of the Committee, was making use of its records preparing a Philippic against the government. Lincoln, acting on his own initiative, without asking the Secretary of War to accompany him, went immediately to the front. He passed two days questioning McClellan and his generals.(33) But there was no council of war. It was a different Lincoln from that other who, just four months previous, had called together the general officers and promised them to abide by their decisions. He returned to Washington without telling them what he meant to do.
The next day closed a chapter and opened a chapter in the history of the Federal army. Stanton's brief and inglorious career as head of the national forces came to an end. He fell back into his rightful position, the President's executive officer in military affairs. Lincoln telegraphed another Western general, Halleck, ordering him to Washington as General-in-Chief.(34) He then, for a season, turned his whole attention from the army to politics. Five days after the telegram to Halleck, Chandler in the Senate, loosed his insatiable temper in what ostensibly was a denunciation of McClellan, what in point of fact was a sweeping arraignment of the military efficiency of the government.(35)
XXII. LINCOLN EMERGES
While Lincoln was slowly struggling out of his last eclipse, giving most of his attention to the army, the Congressional Cabal was laboring assiduously to force the issue upon slavery. The keen politicians who composed it saw with unerring vision where, for the moment, lay their opportunity. They could not beat the President on any one issue then before the country. No one faction was strong enough to be their stand-by. Only by a combination of issues and a coalition of factions could they build up an anti-Lincoln party, check-mate the Administration, and get control of the government. They were greatly assisted by the fatuousness of the Democrats. That party was in a peculiar situation. Its most positive characters, naturally, had taken sides for or against the government. The powerful Southerners who had been its chief leaders were mainly in the Confederacy. Such Northerners as Douglas and Stanton, and many more, had gone over to the Republicans. Suddenly the control of the party organization had fallen into the hands of second-rate men. As by the stroke of an enchanter's wand, men of small caliber who, had the old conditions remained, would have lived and died of little consequence saw opening before them the role of leadership. It was too much for their mental poise. Again the subjective element in politics! The Democratic party for the duration of the war became the organization of Little Men. Had they possessed any great leaders, could they have refused to play politics and responded to Lincoln's all-parties policy, history might have been different. But they were not that sort. Neither did they have the courage to go to the other extreme and become a resolute opposition party, wholeheartedly and intelligently against the war. They equivocated, they obstructed, they professed loyalty and they practised-it would be hard to say what! So short-sighted was their political game that its effect continually was to play into the hands of their most relentless enemies, the grim Jacobins.
Though, for a brief time while the enthusiasm after Sumter was still at its height they appeared to go along with the all-parties program, they soon revealed their true course. In the autumn of 1861, Lincoln still had sufficient hold upon all factions to make it seem likely that his all-parties program would be given a chance. The Republicans generally made overtures to the Democratic managers, offering to combine in a coalition party with no platform but the support of the war and the restoration of the Union. Here was the test of the organization of the Little Men. The insignificant new managers, intoxicated by the suddenness of their opportunity, rang false. They rejected the all-parties program and insisted on maintaining their separate party formation.(1) This was a turning point in Lincoln's career. Though nearly two years were to pass before he admitted his defeat, the all-parties program was doomed from that hour. Throughout the winter, the Democrats in Congress, though steadily ambiguous in their statements of principle, were as steadily hostile to Lincoln. If they had any settled policy, it was no more than an attempt to hold the balance of power among the warring factions of the Republicans. By springtime the game they were playing was obvious; also its results. They had prevented the President from building up a strong Administration group wherewith he might have counterbalanced the Jacobins. Thus they had released the Jacobins from the one possible restraint that might have kept them from pursuing their own devices.
The spring of 1862 saw a general realignment of factions. It was then that the Congressional Cabal won its first significant triumph. Hitherto, all the Republican platforms had been programs of denial. A brilliant new member of the Senate, john Sherman, bluntly told his colleagues that the Republican party had always stood on the defensive. That was its weakness. "I do not know any measure on which it has taken an aggressive position."(2) The clue to the psychology of the moment was in the raging demand of the masses for a program of assertion, for aggressive measures. The President was trying to meet this demand with his all-parties program, with his policy of nationalism, exclusive of everything else. And recently he had added that other assertion, his insistence that the executive in certain respects was independent of the legislative. Of his three assertions, one, the all-parties program, was already on the way to defeat Another, nationalism, as the President interpreted it, had alienated the Abolitionists. The third, his argument for himself as tribune, was just what your crafty politician might twist, pervert, load with false meanings to his heart's content. Men less astute than Chandler and Wade could not have failed to see where fortune pointed. Their opportunity lay in a combination of the two issues. Abolition and the resistance to executive "usurpation." Their problem was to create an anti-Lincoln party that should also be a war party. Their coalition of aggressive forces must accept the Abolitionists as its backbone, but it must also include all violent elements of whatever persuasion, and especially all those that could be wrought into fury on the theme of the President as a despot. Above all, their coalition must absorb and then express the furious temper so dear to their own hearts which they fondly believed-mistakenly, they were destined to discover-was the temper of the country.