1862. CHAP. I. Mr. Lincoln, during the first days of September, was unusually cool and determined. Grieved and disappointed as he was at the failure of Pope's campaign, his principal preoccupation was not at any time the safety of Washington. It was that Lee's army, as he frequently expressed it, "should not get away without being hurt." On Monday morning he said: "They must be whipped here and now. Pope must fight them; and if they are too strong for him, he can gradually get back to these fortifications." At the time McClellan represents him as hopeless of saving Washington he had no thought of the safety of that place in his mind, except as a secondary and permanent consideration. He was making ready a force to attack the enemy. On the 3d of September he wrote with his own hand this order, which sufficiently shows the mood he was in: J. H., Diary. Ordered, that the General-in-Chief, Major-General Halleck, immediately commence and proceed with all possible dispatch to organize an army for active operations from all the material within and coming within his control, independent of the forces he may deem necessary Vol. XIX., for the defense of Washington, when such active army shall take the field. W. R. Part II., p. 169. J. H., Diary. This order, countersigned by the Secretary of War, was delivered to Halleck by General Townsend, and the work of preparing the army for the offensive was at once begun. McClellan, under Halleck's direction, went heartily to work to execute the orders of the President. He had none of the protecting airs he gives himself in his memoirs; his conduct was exemplary. "McClellan," said Lincoln on the 5th, "is working like a beaver. He CHAP. I. "Mc seems to be aroused to doing something by the sort of snubbing he got last week." The work he was now engaged upon was congenial staff work, and he performed it with great zeal and efficiency. It suited him in after years to pretend that he was acting without orders and without communication with the Government. It was his favorite phrase that he went to Antietam with a "halter about his neck." But his letters written at the time contradict such assertions. He wrote from Washington, on the 7th of September: "I leave here this afternoon to take command of the troops in the field. The feeling of the Government towards me, I am Ibid., p. 567. sure, is kind and trusting." Clellan's Own Story," p. 551. СНАР. ІІ. CHAPTER II MEXICO HILE the Administration of Mr. Lincoln was exerting all its energies to cope with the exacting emergencies of civil war, it was compelled to watch with unsleeping vigilance the measures and intentions of enemies all over the world. The hostility of European powers, unable to find a pretext for a direct attack, manifested itself in a movement on what may be called the right flank of the Republic-against its sister nation, Mexico. This unhappy country, so long torn by internal dissensions which were the direct result of the cruel and corrupt rule of Spain, had reached, and perhaps passed, its lowest point of anarchy and misrule. The Presidency was now occupied by the most remarkable man that Mexico had produced;' and, 1 Benito Pablo Juarez was born of Indian parents, poor people of unmixed native blood. He did not know a word of Spanish when at twelve years of age he was adopted by a lay friar of Oajaca and educated. He did not, however, pursue the calling of his benefactor. He adopted the profession of the law and rapidly rose to the position of Chief-Justice of the Republic. In the course of his eventful life he filled the highest offices of the nation, showing equal ability in judicial, financial, and executive functions. From the office of President of the Supreme Court he passed to the Presidency of the Republic amidst the revolutions which were tearing the State to pieces in 1858. In the next year the United States recognized him as President, and for thirteen years thereafter, through endless struggles, through war, through under the firm and patient hands of Benito Juarez, CHAP. II. the beginnings of something like social order were already making their appearance in the public life of the country. But the state of things existing there was still deplorable. All the evil growths that spring up in the track of a long and devastating civil war flourished in rank luxuriance. There was little safety for life or property; assassinations were of frequent occurrence; there was only the most imperfect security for the enforcement of contracts. These evils, which the Mexicans themselves were forced to bear uncomplainingly, roused constant and vehement reclamations on the part of foreigners doing business in Mexico; yet still they remained there. It was difficult for many who had embarked all their interests in affairs to get away, and it is to be presumed that there, as elsewhere, fishing in troubled waters afforded a prospect of such large gains as to compensate for the enormous risks involved. But on the 17th of July, 1861, on the recommendation of President Juarez, the Congress, which had already suppressed the religious orders and confiscated the church property, as a further means of financial relief to the nation, suspended for two years all payments on the national debt, which was principally in the hands of foreigners. Shortly after this there was a slight street disturbance in which a political procession, revolution, and through widespread disorder and anarchy, he sustained himself with unflinching courage and faith in the future of Mexico. After infinite trials peace was restored to his country. In 1871 he was reelected to the Presidency, and might justly have looked forward CHAP. II. finding itself in front of the French legation, as if with a premonition of the hostile relations which were soon to exist between the two countries, broke out in shouts of "death to the French," and a shot was fired at the legation. This outrage led to a severe protest on the part of the diplomatic body, not confined to the European Ministers, but headed by Thomas Corwin, the American plenipotentiary, whose sincere friendship for Mexico was well known. The Government, struggling with every kind of embarrassment, was unable to give prompt redress, either in the matter of financial default or in the more flagrant cases of outrage and murder. ⚫ 1861. A tax of one per cent. on all capital exceeding two thousand dollars was imposed in the month of August, and this led to new protests on the part of the diplomatic body. Sir Charles Lennox Wyke, the representative of Great Britain in Mexico, addressed frequent communications to the Mexican Foreign Office in terms of frank disrespect, to which Mr. Zamacona, the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, replied in a tone of exquisite courtesy, trying to excuse what could not be remedied and continually making promises which it was impossible to keep, until at last Sir Charles Wyke made upon the Mexican Government the impossible demand that they should, by executive action, within forty-eight hours, annul the decree of Congress of the 17th of July; failing which, he ceased his official diplomatic relations with them. Meanwhile, diplomacy had been busy on the other side of the Atlantic between the courts of London, Paris, and Madrid. The British Government appears in the matter to have had no object in view |