and fears and self-interests, and, what was all-important, with their sure changes of opinion.

In the same Message to the Congress above mentioned, he was able to say: "These three States, of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, neither of which would promise a single soldier at the first, have now an aggregate of not less than forty thousand in the field for the Union; while, of their citizens, certainly not more than a third of that number, and they of doubtful whereabouts and doubtful existence, are in arms against it."

CHAPTER XLIV.

A DARK WINTER.

Fredericksburg-A Lost Opportunity-Burnside and Hooker-The Burdens of a Military Establishment-Congressional Counselors-The Heart of the Nation-An Extraordinary Ambassador-The Birth of the Union League.

THE year 1862 closed, both for the country and for Mr. Lincoln, in the great grief of the defeat of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg. It was a blow of peculiar severity to the President, for he was made to seem responsible for the movements which led to it and for the mismanaged battle itself. It affected him very deeply, and yet, now that all the facts have been sought out, it is impossible to charge him with any fault in the premises.

That he had earnestly insisted upon active operations was true. He had done that daily, from the outset; but he had not undertaken to direct details; and the inexcusable blunders of the Fredericksburg fight were committed without his knowledge.

The history of the affair had deep lessons in it. By an understanding with General Burnside, General McClellan continued in command until the 9th of November, and the orders for the forward movement were issued by him in person. No change, for a number of days, was made in the plans which he had previously approved. General Halleck had at once called upon General Burnside for a "plan of campaign," and the latter prepared and submitted an abstract of his conception of the situation. This did not meet the approval of the Generalin-Chief, and he at once went, in person, to General Burnside's headquarters, at Warrenton, Virginia. Here, on the 12th and

13th of the month, a long conference was held, which resulted in the submission of their separate plans to the President. On the 14th, General Halleck telegraphed to General Burnside Mr. Lincoln's assent to the views of the latter, but with this vital and unmistakable indication, in the express words of the dispatch: "He thinks it [your plan] will succeed if you move rapidly. Otherwise, not."

Nothing could be more plain and definite in the rendering of a military decision. Subsequent investigations justify Mr. Lincoln. If General Burnside had moved rapidly, as he did not, his troops would have been in possession of the very position at Fredericksburg, then unoccupied, from which he afterwards vainly strove to dislodge the iron veterans of General Lee.

The approval of his plan, as submitted, by no means implied that he should permit the best general of the Confederacy, with a recorded force of 78,228 effectiv men and guns in proportion, to deliberately intrench himself on ground of his own choosing, and then, without any definite plan of battle, to hurl against them, in vague incapacity, column after column of doomed volunteers.

That is about all that can be said of the generalship of the battle of Fredericksburg. The men behaved splendidly. They inflicted sharp losses upon their antagonists. They were sent to do an impossibility, and they failed simply because it was an impossibility; but, for a hurt and disappointed moment, half the nation believed that they had been ordered to the vain effort by a "civilian" President, interfering with and overruling his general in the field.

General Burnside was under no pressure whatever which need have impelled him to the assault of General Lee's position; and there was no good reason, political or military, why the Rebel army should not have been permitted to encamp all winter in those particular intrenchments. If Lee could have been induced to do that very thing, as he surely could not have

been, being a man of uncommon good sense in such matters, the result would have been a greater advantage to the Union arms than had been won upon the banks of the Antietam Creek. The very maintenance of his army was draining the life-blood of the Confederacy, while the resources of the North had hardly as yet been drawn upon. "Active operations" to keep him there would have been grand generalship. Much hard fighting would have been required for such a feat; but all the while the Confederacy would have been bleeding to death, and the Army of the Potomac would not have scored another bloody disaster.

The American people had no experience of what is called "militarism,” and had but little actual knowledge of the needless monstrosities which curse the Old World under the guise of "governments." A consequence of this was that a most erroneous impression prevailed, throughout the free States, as to the nature and extent of the sacrifices they had made and as to their remaining capacity for more of the same kind.

Every great nation in Europe is compelled, habitually, year by year, to do all that the North had done, up to that time, except as to the cost of what manufacturing establishments describe as "the plant" of their undertakings. That is, the provision of machinery and appliances and the needful outlays involved in beginnings upon new ground. The waste had been considerable, in many directions, but the growth and prosperity of the community, as a whole, had not been dangerously interfered with. A very different state of things existed at the South, owing to fundamental defects of the Southern social structure.

The battle of Fredericksburg was fought on the 13th of December, just after the assembling of Congress, while Mr. Lincoln was preparing to deal with the most dangerous period of his political administration. It rendered a winter campaign in Virginia an impossibility, and made necessary another change in the command of the Army of the Potomac. Gen

eral Burnside was relieved and General Joseph Hooker was named in his place.

"Fighting Joe," as his immediate command had delighted to call him, was a tried soldier, but, regarded as a general in charge of a great army, he was necessarily another experiment. Neither the President, nor the army, nor the country at large, was ready to invest him with unlimited confidence as to his fitness for his new and vast responsibilities. He himself was probably the only man in the nation who never for a moment lacked or lost that very unlimited confidence: and there was both good and evil in that trait of his character.

Congress assembled in a perplexed and captious frame of mind. Almost every member was filled to the lips with uttered, or unuttered and unutterable, criticisms upon the policy of the Administration and the management of the war. A steady stream of Senators and Representatives poured into and out of Mr. Lincoln's office at the White House, and their recommendations of their constituents for appointments and promotions were accompanied by statements, more or less frank and positive, of their individual views upon the questions of the day. It is very interesting, now, to discover how unvarying is the testimony borne by all these intelligent and patriotic men to the kindly and considerate reception they met with at the hands of the President. This, too, even when the strength of their convictions or the warmth of their tempers gave their language the tone and form of severe censure. He could afford to take it from such men, and to present, in return his own understanding of the matter. So it came to pass, before long, that his Congressional censors became bound to him by near ties of mutual understanding and respect. A sort of family feeling grew in the hearts of many, unconsciously regarding themselves as watching the control of the common household by a man who oddly combined the functions of a father and an elder brother. As for the people generally, they had become well accustomed to talking, half affectionately, about