him, and no further notoriety was forced upon him by the Government. Even after his expulsion, however, his remarkable usefulness continued for a season. His case and conviction, and the shiver of dread caused thereby to all similar offenders, drew the more virulent elements of the Opposition together, forced them to take public action, and so enabled Mr. Lincoln to answer them before the people, as he could not otherwise have done. Public meetings were at once held, in the larger cities, for general purposes of denunciation of the "Lincoln despotism." These meetings answered well as safety-valves, and also to convince the nation that there was really no interference with freedom of speech. Great men and small men, alike, expressed themselves from these platforms very much as the transported Ohio scapegoat had expressed himself from his platforms, and no hand of Executive tyranny was laid upon them. The meetings were largely and noisily attended, and their managers, without any such intention, afforded Mr. Lincoln the means of measuring, with fair accuracy, the extent, nature, and capacities of the disaffection.

A month after Vallandigham had been bundled across the army lines and received by "his own," the Democratic State Convention of Ohio, representing the disloyal elements of that State, nominated him for Governor of the State, and his lawcounsel for Lieutenant-Governor. They also did Mr. Lincoln the favor to send a delegation to him at Washington, to present their view of the case.

They did very rightly. They were by no means bad men. Their action, at that very hour, although they knew it not, was a marvellous expression of their personal confidence in the integrity of the President. They did not know, either, how glad he was of the opportunity they thus gave him to tell the whole country, in his answer to their address: "Your attitude, therefore, encourages desertion, resistance to the Draft, and the like, because it teaches those who incline to desert and to escape the draft to believe it is your purpose to protect them."

To the utterances of a great meeting held at Albany, New York, Mr. Lincoln made a more elaborate reply. It was a peculiarly representative assemblage, and gave him an opportunity to explain to the whole people why he had pursued so lenient a policy from the beginning, and why he had waited for the commission of actual crime, by any and every individual, before employing the strong hand of the law. It also enabled him to ask, of both friends and foes, the practical question:

"Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier-boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert? I think that, in such a case, to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy."

There was wind enough stirring to blow away a great deal of unwholesome fog. By the time all the speeches had been made and all the editorials had been printed, the people had read and digested the President's replies. They had also chuckled grimly over "Vallandigham in Dixie," and had enjoyed the panicky dismay of the demagogues. The beneficial effect was sure and rapid, and a great revulsion of popular feeling set strongly in.

The dark days were by no means shortened. There was more trouble to come. Nevertheless, the President discerned that he could safely employ the exceptional powers placed in his hands, and that all the people would sustain him. The great military events of the year, in due season, completed the work so well begun, and, when her next State election took place, Ohio declared, by the largest majority in her political history, that she preferred a patriot for her governor and had, like Mr. Lincoln, no further use for the kind of men represented by Vallandigham.

CHAPTER XLVII.

NIGHT.

Preparing for a Great Struggle-Popular Discontent-Murmurs of Sedition-European Hostilities-Chancellorsville-Bitter Hours for the President-Darkness at the South-Statesmen under a HallucinationThe Second Invasion of the North-Hooker Succeeded by Meade.

MR. LINCOLN did not retain the external equanimity of his earlier days under the galling pressure of the burdens laid upon him in 1863. The goading irritations were too many, and they gave him no rest whatever. The path he was forced to walk in was rugged with lacerating difficulties. To say that he now and then gave way to short-lived fits of petulance is but to admit that he was human. He was keenly conscious of every deficiency, in himself or in his human and other means for performing his vast undertaking, and he could not but worry when things went wrong. More than enough did go wrong, and the few admissions of harassed weariness which escaped him do not deserve especial record.

It was well understood, through many channels of information, that the Confederacy was now preparing to put forth its full and uttermost strength: and this was more than the North would or could be induced to do. There was, indeed, a sort of prophetic hope in the obvious fact that such an exhaustive effort could never be made more than once by the South; but the certainty that it was coming filled the outlook for the military year with promises of bloodshed, and these were speedily and terribly fulfilled. Mr. Lincoln read all these signs and promises, and knew their meaning perfectly. He saw and he felt that a large proportion of the men he was drawing into the

army from their homes and workshops were to be sent, by his orders, to certain and sudden death; and he was not the man to put from him carelessly any of the solemn questions asked of him by such a responsibility.

The cares heaped upon the President by the demands and perils of the military situation were made heavier by the aspect of affairs in several of the loyal States. The murmurs of the opponents of the Draft grew louder daily, as the machinery for its enforcement assumed forms which men could see. It was something new and strange and horrible, even to the minds of many who were genuinely patriotic; for it was a sort of remorseless and unavoidable "direct tax" which could only be paid, in person or by substitute, with the bodies of living men. There were yet other omens of possible disaster. More emphatic than ever came continual assurances from abroad, official, unofficial, and journalistic, that the sympathies of the great commercial powers and controlling aristocracies of Europe were strongly with the Confederacy. The sympathies of the French Imperial Government assumed their most offensive. form in the disastrous history of its Mexican expedition, and the foregone failure of this was a significant prophecy of the subsequent events by means of which the French people regained self-government. Popular good-will in France for the American Republic was without any means for making itself heard or felt in the year 1863.

The "Southern" sympathies of that part of the English nation affected by such leanings were made to be very deeply felt by the American people. We were assailed by them, and in the most hurtful modes, by land and sea. On the sea, by the continuous and often successful efforts of British blockaderunners to enter or leave the Southern ports, and by the ravages of British cruisers, like the Alabama, under the Confederate flag; on the land, by the presence, on every battle-field, of British arms and ammunition in rapidly increasing supply. That part of the English nation whose heart and hope instine

tively clung to the Free North and its long struggle for Free Labor had attained no other political power than that of suffering patiently, in the year 1863.

Whatever may have been the caste feeling of a part of the German ruling classes, the Germans as a mass were with the North. They bought our national "bonds" liberally, at wartime prices, and in due season they reaped a golden harvest of rich profits thereby.

Alone among the great powers of Europe, Russia was firmly bound to America by the ties of a friendship which bore a strict relation to her undying hatred of France and England. Her vivid memories of the Crimean War were sure guaranties of her active alliance, in case her old enemies should offer her an opportunity to obtain satisfaction for Sevastopol. Her position aided largely in checking any too aggressive an expression of the now half-triumphant malice of her rivals who mistakenly regarded themselves as interested in our political division and destruction.

The State Department was in good hands, and Mr. Seward could safely be intrusted with all diplomatic affairs. The condition and promise of the revenue and the Treasury seemed all that could be reasonably expected. The Navy grew more and more efficient, at sea and on the Western rivers. Secretary Stanton was accomplishing marvels of genius and of sleepless toil in the War Office, burning out in faithful services the fiery energy which led Mr. Lincoln to select him for that tremendous duty.

Congress adjourned and its membership went home. The very air grew hot and dense with expectations of a "battlesummer." The army was in fine condition, East and West. The forces on the line of the Potomac were necessarily somewhat scattered, but they outnumbered, two to one, the forces opposed to them under Lee.

The Army of the Potomac was still, to the perceptions of a large majority of the people, the representative army, by the