paigns of McClellan. There are no more fierce intestine dissensions like those which preceded the Proclamation of Emancipation, at least not until the matter of reconstruction comes up, and reconstruction properly had not to do with the war, but with the later period. had become like the steed who has ceased fretfully to annoy the rider, while the rider, though exercising an ever-watchful control, makes less apparent exertion.

In a word, the country

By one of the odd arrangements of our governmental machine, it was not until December 7, 1863, that the members of the Thirty-eighth Congress met for the first time to express those political sentiments which had been in vogue more than a year before that time, that is to say during the months of October and November, 1862, when these gentlemen had been elected, at the close of the summer's campaign. It has been said and shown that a very great change in popular feeling had taken place and made considerable advance during this interval. The autumn of 1863 was very different from the autumn of 1862! A Congress coming more newly from the people would have been much more Republican in its complexion. Still, even as it was, the Republicans had an ample working majority, and moreover were disturbed by fewer and less serious dissensions among themselves than had been the case occasionally in times past. McClellan and the Emancipation Procla

mation had not quite yet been succeeded by any other questions of equal potency for alienating a large section of the party from the President. Not that unanimity prevailed by any means; that was impossible under the conditions of human nature. The extremists still distrusted Mr. Lincoln, and regarded him as an obstruction to sound policies. Senator Chandler of Michigan, a fine sample of the radical Republican, instructed him that, by the elections, Conservatives and traitors had been buried together, and begged him not to exhume them, since they would "smell worse than Lazarus did after he had been buried three days." Apparently he ranked Seward among these defunct and decaying Conservatives; certainly he regarded the Secretary as a "millstone about the neck " of the President. Still, in spite of such denunciations, times were not in this respect so bad as they had been, and the danger that the uncompromising Radicals would make wreck of the war was no longer great.

Another event, occurring in this autumn of 1863, was noteworthy because through it the literature of our tongue received one of its most distinguished acquisitions. On November 19 the national military cemetery at Gettysburg was to be consecrated; Edward Everett was to deliver the oration, and the President was of course invited as a guest. Mr. Arnold says that it was actually while Mr. Lin-, 1 N. and H., vii. 389.

coln was "in the cars on his way from the White House to the battle-field" that he was told that he also would be expected to say something on the occasion; that thereupon he jotted down in pencil the brief address which he delivered a few hours. later.1 But that the composition was quite so extemporaneous seems doubtful, for Messrs. Nicolay and Hay transcribe the note of invitation, written to the President on November 2 by the master of the ceremonies, and in it occurs this sentence: "It is the desire that, after the oration, you, as Chief Executive of the Nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use, by a few appropriate remarks." Probably, therefore, some forethought went to the preparation of this beautiful and famous "Gettysburg speech." When Mr. Everett sat down, the President arose and spoke as follows: 2

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.) We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedi

1 Arnold, Lincoln, 328. This writer gives a very vivid description of the delivery of the speech, derived in part from Governor Dennison, afterward the Postmaster-General, who was present on the occasion.

2 Mr. Arnold says that in an unconscious and absorbed manner, Mr. Lincoln "adjusted his spectacles" and read his address.

cate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us;-that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”1

1 It is, perhaps, not generally remembered that Mr. Lincoln added to the words which he himself had written a quotation of one of Daniel Webster's most famous flights of oratory,—that familiar passage in the reply to Hayne, beginning: "When my eyes turn to behold for the last time the sun in heaven," etc. The modesty was better than the skill of this addition; the simplicity of the President's language and the elevation of the sentiment which it expressed did not accord well with the more rhetorical enthusiasm of Webster's outburst. The two passages, each so fine in its own way, were incongruous in their juxtaposition.

CHAPTER VIII.

RECONSTRUCTION.

In his inaugural address President Lincoln said: "The union of these States is perpetual. . . No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union; resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void." In these words was imbedded a principle which later on he showed his willingness to pursue to its logical conclusions concerning the reconstruction of the body politic. If no State, by seceding, had got itself out of the Union, there was difficulty in maintaining that those citizens of a seceding State, who had not disqualified themselves by acts of treason, were not still lawfully entitled to conduct the public business and to hold the usual elections for national and state officials, so soon as the removal of hostile force should render it physically possible for them to do so. Upon the basis of this principle, the resumption by such citizens of a right which had never been lost, but only temporarily interfered with by lawless violence, could reasonably be delayed by the national government only until the loyal voters should be sufficient in number to relieve the elections from the objection of being