Three of those picnickers who missed their guess on Bull Run Sunday,Wade,Chandler and Trumbull,were destined to important parts in the stern years that were to come.Before the close of the year 1861the three made a second visit to the army;and this time they kept together.To that second visit momentous happenings may be traced.How it came about must be fully understood.
Two of the three,Wade and Chandler,were temperamentally incapable of understanding Lincoln.Both were men of fierce souls;each had but a very limited experience.Wade had been a country lawyer in Ohio;Chandler,a prosperous manufacturer in Michigan.They were party men by instinct,blind to the faults of their own side,blind to the virtues of their enemies.They were rabid for the control of the government by their own organized machine.
Of Chandler,in Michigan,it was said that he "carried the Republican organization in his breeches pocket";partly through control of the Federal patronage,which Lincoln frankly conceded to him,partly through a "judicious use of money."[3]
Chandler's first clash with Lincoln was upon the place that the Republican machine was to hold in the conduct of the war.
From the beginning Lincoln was resolved that the war should not be merely a party struggle.Even before he was inaugurated,he said that he meant to hold the Democrats "close to the Administration on the naked Union issue."[4]He had added,"We must make it easy for them"to support the government "because we can't live through the case without them."This was the foundation of his attempt--so obvious between the lines of the first message--to create an all-parties government.This,Chandler violently opposed.Violence was always Chandler's note,so much so that a scornful opponent once called him "Xantippe in pants."Lincoln had given Chandler a cause of offense in McClellan's elevation to the head of the army.*McClellan was a Democrat.
There can be little doubt that Lincoln took the fact into account in selecting him.Shortly before,Lincoln had aimed to placate the Republicans by showing high honor to their popular hero,Fremont.
*Strictly speaking he did not become head of the army until the retirement of Scott in November.Practically,he was supreme almost from the moment of his arrival in Washington.
When the catastrophe occurred at Bull Run,Fremont was a major-general commanding the Western Department with headquarters at St.Louis.He was one of the same violent root-and-branch wing of the Republicans--the Radicals of a latter day--of which Chandler was a leader.The temper of that wing had already been revealed by Senator Baker in his startling pronouncement:"We of the North control the Union,and we are going to govern our own Union in our own way.
Chandler was soon to express it still more exactly,saying,"Arebel has sacrificed all his rights.He has no right to life,liberty or the pursuit of happiness."[5]Here was that purpose to narrowing nationalism into Northernism,even to radicalism,and to make the war an outlet for a sectional ferocity,which Lincoln was so firmly determined to prevent.All things considered,the fact that on the day following Bull Run he did not summon the Re publican hero to Washington,that he did summon a Democrat,was significant.It opened his long duel with the extremists.
The vindictive Spirit of the extremists had been rebuffed by Lincoln in another way.Shortly after Bull Run,Wade and Chandler appealed to Lincoln to call out negro soldiers.
Chandler said that he did not care whether or no this would produce a servile insurrection in the South.Lincoln's refusal made another count in the score of the extremists against him.[6]
During the late summer of 1861,Chandler,Wade,Trumbull,were all busily organizing their forces for an attack on the Administration.Trumbull,indeed,seemed out of place in that terrible company.In time,he found that he was out of place.
At a crucial moment he came over to Lincoln.But not until he had done yeoman service with Lincoln's bitterest enemies.
The clue to his earlier course was an honest conviction that Lincoln,though well-intentioned,was weak.[7]Was this the nemesis of Lincoln's pliability in action during the first stage of his Presidency?It may be.The firm inner Lincoln,the unyielding thinker of the first message,was not appreciated even by well-meaning men like Trumbull.The inner and the outer Lincoln were still disconnected.And the outer,in his caution,in his willingness to be instructed,in his opposition to extreme measures,made the inevitable impression that temperance makes upon fury,caution upon rashness.
Throughout the late summer,Lincoln was the target of many attacks,chiefly from the Abolitionists.Somehow,in the previous spring,they had got it into their heads that at heart he was one of them,that he waited only for a victory to declare the war a crusade of abolition.[8]When the crisis passed and a Democrat was put at the head of the army,while Fremont was left in the relative obscurity of St.Louis,Abolition bitterness became voluble.The Crittenden Resolution was scoffed at as an "ill-timed revival of the policy of conciliation."Threats against the Administration revived,taking the old form of demands for a wholly new Cabinet The keener-sighted Abolitionists had been alarmed by the first message,by what seemed to them its ominous silence as to slavery.Late in July,Emerson said in conversation,"If the Union is incapable of securing universal freedom,its disruption were as the breaking up of a frog-pond."[9]An outcry was raised because Federal generals did not declare free all the slaves who in any way came into their hands.The Abolitionists found no solace in the First Confiscation Act which provided that an owner should lose his claim to a slave,had the slave been used to assist the Confederate government.
