their inclusion in the Confederacy being conditional on their acceptance of slavery. If this be so, it seems clear that Lincoln was right in maintaining that the cause of liberty was one with the cause of the Union, and that his immediate duty was not to destroy slavery but to maintain the Union.

Lincoln did not, however, anticipate, like Greeley, the dissolution of the Union; he was confident of the ultimate issue. But in the meantime he had cause enough for anxiety.

In mid-winter, M'Clellan fell ill of typhoid, and the President-who by his office was constituted Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy-had now to study tactics and strategy in earnest. He attacked his problem with the same concentration of energy he had displayed at New Salem when confronted with the science of surveying, and mastered it. He took up the threads of the campaign and eagerly followed out their intricacies and entanglements, his mind always keeping the great lines clearly before it. Whatever blunders he may have made-blunders serious enough in themselves, which we must leave to the military critics-it seems certain that on these great lines his judgment was singularly sound. He certainly had advice enough to confuse the wisest of men; the President's business was everybody's business, and he was made to feel, indeed, he liked to feel it such. Moreover, Congress had created a Committee on the Conduct of the War, which was, from this time forward, continually in evidence.

Lincoln's broad military policy is suggested in a letter written in January 1862, to one of his generals in the West; "We have the greater numbers and

the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision," therefore we must menace "him with superior forces at different points at the same time," and so attack where he is weakest. And all through these winter months of military inaction and political discouragement, one truth was clear in the President's mind, and admitted of no doubt whatever. The situation was not an impasse : there was a way through, and the vital forces of the nation would yet find and follow it. Moreover, while he relied on "the military men. men" as he called them, to find the precise "points," he had a very clear idea of the necessary direction.

At the end of January, 1862, he ordered a forward movement all along the line, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, to take place on Washington's Birthday, and further required M'Clellan to advance towards Richmond. Neither of these orders became actually effective, but they served to reassure the popular mind, now thoroughly discouraged by the long inaction. They showed that the President at least realised the perils of delay.

When at last he yielded his own plan, and accepted the alternative of his military advisers, allowing M'Clellan to attack Richmond from the rear, Lincoln at the same time so far accepted the popular judgment passed upon his general, that, while loyally supporting him in his campaign in Virginia, he removed him from the supreme command. This he put as it were "into Commission," under Stanton, the new Secretary of War, and finally under Halleck whom he called to Washington from the West.

Domestic trouble was added to the public worry of

these months. The two younger boys who were with him in Washington fell ill, and after long days and nights of anxiety, Willie the elder, died on Thursday, the 20th of February. Perhaps no personal incident of his life since the death of Anne Rutledge had touched him so intimately.

"That blow overwhelmed me," he said afterwards, speaking of his bereavement. "It showed me myweakness, as I never had felt it before." On another occasion he said, "Did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that you were holding sweet communion with that friend, and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a reality?

of my boy Willie."

Just so I dream

The anguish of those days had made his heart very tender. At the child's bedside he cried in perplexity, "This is the hardest trial of my life. Why is it? Why is it?" The nurse, a woman who had lost both her husband and her children, and after much tribulation had come into a great peace, told him her experience, and how she had been able to rest and abide contented in the will of God. The stricken man gratefully acknowledged this sharing of her experience with him. On the morning of the funeral he expressed his desire that others should pray for him; and added, "I will try to go to God with my sorrows.

Later he said, "I wish I had that childlike faith you speak of... I trust He will give it me." And he recalled his own mother's death, saying, "I remember her prayers, and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."

For a time, as Thursdays returned he shut himself up, and would see no one. But a friend, a Dr Vinton,

took him severely but kindly to task for this, assuring him his son still lived, and that he did wrong to mourn as though he were dead. On such occasions, the giant bearing the burden of a nation's agony upon his Atlantean shoulders, broke down, sobbing like a child and casting himself even as a child upon the faith of his friend.

There can be no doubt that this was one of the crises in Abraham Lincoln's inner life. To those who were nearest him he seemed different after those days; always a religious man, he had undergone some new initiation into the mysteries of the Spirit.

His bereavement was alluded to in a letter of 19th March to a Quaker correspondent, in which after apologising for the delay which it had caused in acknowledging a communication, he added, "Engaged, as I am in a great war, I fear it will be difficult for the world to understand how fully I appreciate the principles of peace inculcated in this letter and everywhere by the Society of Friends."

Was it merely the irony of Fate which had set this born peace-maker, this pathetically affectionate father, at the head of an immense army, and which was presently to snatch him away at the moment when a lasting peace was about to be proclaimed ? It is to such men as he, haters of violence, men quick to fell all the sufferings that make up a war, that a nation may best entrust her guidance in the hours of crisis. For it is they who are

66 more able to endure

As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness."

Chapter XI

The Cause

Gradual Emancipation-M'Clellan's Fiasco-First Proposal of Proclamation-Delays-Preliminary Proclamation issued-Annual Message (1862)-Seward and Chase-Final Proclamation of Emancipation— English Friends and Critics-The Summer of '63-Gettysburg and Vicksburg—Dedication Address—Sympathy with sufferers.

THE second year of Lincoln's Presidency1 opens with his recommendation to Congress of Federal grants in aid of gradual emancipation. His Message took the form of a political argument to prove that since the National Cause largely depended on the final adhesion of the Border States, that is to say of the slave-holding States which had not yet joined the rebellion, it was important that any measure which might be expected to secure that adhesion should be at once adopted. The offer of generous compensation by Congress to any State which should begin the gradual emancipation of negroes within its own limits, was surely such a measure; for slavery was the one interest which could induce the border States to join the Confederacy.

Lincoln was, as we have seen, opposed on conviction to sudden emancipation; for the nation as well as for the negro he saw its dangers. But he almost certainly foresaw even at this stage, that it might be forced upon him, against his will, as a measure of

1 6th March 1862.