the Supreme Court in 1869. Secretary Chase had meanwhile become chief justice and the court consisted of eight members. The chief justice and four of his associates held that the act making treasury notes a legal tender in payment of pre-existing debts was unconstitutional; that the nearly $400,000,000 in paper issued under the several acts of which that of February, 1862, was first-were not a legal tender and that the cause of their free circulation among the people was their quality of receivability for public debts and not their quality as legal tender notes. Mr. Justice Miller and two other associate justices dissented, holding that the acts were necessary and proper to execute the powers vested by the Constitution in the national government and that Congress had the choice of means and was empowered to use any which in its judgment might bring about the end desired. Two years later the Court reversed its decision; but meanwhile the Court had been enlarged to nine members, and one of the four who had supported the chief justice, had resigned-Mr. Justice Grier. Both of the new justices, William Strong, of Pennsylvania, and Joseph P. Bradley, of New Jersey, held to the constitutionality of the legal tender acts. The decision went further than in 1869 the dissenting opinion of the minority had gone. The Court now held that Congress could give the quality of money to United States notes; that the promise of the government to pay money was for the time equivalent in value to gold and silver coin. Chief Justice Chase and three associate justices dissented, holding that the government could emit treasury notes as a means of borrowing money but, under the Constitution, could make nothing but gold or silver a legal tender. Again, in 1883, the Court sustained the constitutionality of the act of 1878. Its earlier decision had held to the constitutionality of the legal tender acts during the war, largely because of the war powers of Congress under the Constitution; in 1883, it held that Congress had power to enact the law of 1878 by which, in time of peace, the notes could be re-issued

and made a legal tender for the payment of private debts. In its later decision the Court followed the decisions of Chief Justice Marshall adverse to the power of the States to issue legal tender notes: that is, the United States can make paper money a legal tender but a State cannot, a doctrine and decision, which, growing out of the definition of the nature of the national government given by the Civil War, goes far to overthrow the old doctrine of State sovereignty on which the right of secession was said to rest. The legal tender acts which characterize the financial legislation of Congress during the War were a part of that whole legislative movement which tended to and actually did overthrow the doctrine of State sovereignty and tended to establish and did establish the doctrine of national sovereignty: the final decisions of the Supreme Court sustaining the latter doctrine.

That the legal tender acts cost the American people dearly cannot be doubted; that some other financial plan, cheaper, equally effective, might have been adopted, it is possible to conceive. The important fact in the whole matter is, that, whether pursuant to a false or a true economy, the financiering of the war, as actually carried on by Congress, exemplified, equally with the ultimate success of the national arms, the supremacy of the National idea over the Confederate idea: and the question of supremacy of the one or of the other was the supreme issue of the war. If the financial legislation of the War proceeded along wrong economic lines, that error must be set down along with military and naval errors, with errors of the executive, with errors of all sorts: and the Civil War was a period of errors. The important question is What occurred despite the errors?

Critically important as was the financial legislation of Congress, at the opening of 1862, and uneconomical and therefore wasteful as the legal tender act may have been, the North at the time was far less concerned about the matter than over the Army of the Potomac. McClellan was doing nothing and the North was asking, why does it not

move? Inaction was already counting as national defeat in the minds of European statesmen and in the convictions of the people at home. Chase had the confidence of the public, who believed him a great minister of finance; foreign relations were steadier and the North thought well of Seward, but the immediate cause of all this enormous expense, this enlisting and recruiting and ceaseless drilling, the army, was doing nothing. The North was losing faith in McClellan. It was at this time that Lincoln said: "If something is not done soon the bottom will be out of the whole affair; and if General McClellan does not want to use the army I would like to borrow it, provided I could see how it could be made to do something." McClellan gave no definite answer to the president's inquiry when he purposed to move and after waiting two weeks longer Lincoln issued his “General War Order Number 1," January 27th, naming the 22d of February for a general forward movement of the National forces, land and naval, against the Confederates and specially ordered that the Army of the Potomac seize Manassas Junction.

In the West the national cause had fared better: General George H. Thomas, a Virginian, defeated the Confederates at Mill Spring, Kentucky, on January 19th; and on February 7th, General Burnside in conjunction with Commodore Goldsborough seized Roanoke Island, North Carolina, and General Grant had been active in Tennessee. The Confederate line extended from Columbus, at the junction of the Tennessee with the Ohio, eastward to Bowling Green. Fort Henry, on the Tennessee, and Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland, eleven miles apart, made the Confederate line seemingly impregnable. Grant received authority from General Halleck-who, chief in command of the armies of the West, had his headquarters at St. Louis-to attack Fort Henry. Co-operating with Flag-officer Foote, who commanded the Federal fleet on the Tennessee, Grant attacked Fort Henry. It fell February 6th and Grant at once telegraphed Halleck that he would destroy Fort Donelson on