them-Mr. Chase among others stating that they were all harmonious. That must have been a surprising statement for Chase to make in the presence of Wade! The committee could not say very much after that, nor does it appear that Lincoln said much of anything. He had no need to say much. If the committee was astonished at this information, so was the caucus when the committee made its report. "I asked Judge Collamer," wrote Browning, "how Mr. Chase could venture to make such a statement in the presence of senators to whom he had said that Seward exercised a backstairs and malign influence upon the president and thwarted all the measures of the Cabinet." Collamer could only growl out an angry answer concerning Chase. That answer was in two words "He lied." With such a report before it, what could the Republican caucus do? It did not see that it could do anything. It heard the report of the committee, learned that it could not depend on Chase to repeat in the presence of the president and the rest of the Cabinet what he had said to Wade, and the caucus ingloriously adjourned. That night Browning called again at the White House. He was ready with suggestions for the new Cabinet which he hoped Lincoln would appoint. He suggested as secretary of state, first Collamer, of New York, and then Ewing, of Ohio. For secretary of war he would have General Banks. If Lincoln took Collamer as secretary of state, then Ewing would be a good man for secretary of the treasury. For one of the other places he suggested Guthrie, of Kentucky. He did not propose himself as a member, but it is scarcely possible that he thought of a new Cabinet with himself out of it. Lincoln told him frankly that he did not propose to have any new Cabinet. He said that if he got a new one, the same men would attack it who were now opposing the old one. He said he would rather get along with the one he had than try a new one. By this time, he had Browning half convinced. And then Browning recalled, and mentioned to the president, that the men who had instigated this revolt were partisans of Chase: I told him that their game was to drive all the Cabinet out, then force upon him the recall of Mr. Chase as premier, and form a Cabinet of ultra men around him. Lincoln understood this quite as well as Browning did, and assured Browning that the Senate would not be allowed to compel him to adopt any such measure. When Browning went to the White House that night, December 22, 1861, he told the president "that this was a time of more peril than any we had encountered" and wanted him to make up a new slate for a Cabinet. He left convinced that the president was right in his determination to keep the old Cabinet, and let his opponents howl. "He said with a good deal of emphasis that he was master," wrote Browning. He said the truth. He was master, and he knew it, and those who opposed him were to learn it. Let us pause for a moment to consider this emergence and ascent of Lincoln from out of the depths. Perhaps in no other crisis of his presidency is there a more complete and significant example. He had promised God that if General Lee was driven out of Maryland, he would issue the proclamation of emancipation. He issued that proclamation against the judgment of several members of his Cabinet, believing that it would commend itself to the favor of the people and to the blessing of God. Apparently it did neither. Lincoln never felt more completely Godforsaken than in the weeks after that proclamation bore its fruit. It seemed to him, as he told Browning, that God was against him, and it seemed also that the people, whom he trusted next to God, had also cast him adrift. Repudiated at the polls, he was deserted by Congress and betrayed by members of his Cabinet. The ballot failed him; the army failed him; the heavens above him were brass. Never was he nearer despair than on the night when the committee from the Republican senatorial caucus was on its way to the White House. He met that committee courteously, and received their report requesting him to dismiss his Cabinet and change his entire policy. He dismissed them with a request that they leave their report with him for consideration, and come again. When they came he had his Cabinet there, save only Seward, whose presence might have provoked them and led Seward to indiscretions. He shrewdly kept still and let Chase speak for himself, following the wisdom of the Arab proverb, "When the wind blows your fire, save your breath." He sent the committee back, discomfited, but with no occasion for anger against any one but Chase. Again he could chuckle, as he did when Buchanan and Douglas were fighting each other-"Go it, husband, go it, bear!" Then, when the committee had gone back to the caucus, and the caucus, having exhausted its oratory and accomplished nothing, adjourned, Browning, thinking the president would now gladly do voluntarily what he could not with good grace have done under compulsion, went over to assist Lincoln with the new Cabinet, and found Lincoln adamantine, and went away more than half believing that Lincoln was right. That lonely man, no longer despairing, no longer forsaken of his God, no longer hesitating between opposing counsels, calmly declared that he was master of the situation. Though his army was defeated and without a general, his Cabinet divided and without heart, his Congress rebellious and his friends in despair, Abraham Lincoln. stood calmly, with a new faith in God and the cause for which he was fighting. That faith was justified. The proclamation of emancipation raised up new friends in Great Britain, and drove the last nail in the coffin of Europe's recognition of the Confederate Government. It gave a new moral definition to the conflict. Again the armies prepared for battle, singing as they marched : We will rally round the flag, boys, Shouting the battle-cry of freedom. The fortunes of the administration were at a low ebb. One thing, however, was becoming apparent; so far as any one in Washington was in control of the situation, it was not Congress, nor the Committee on the Conduct of the War, nor the Cabinet, nor the army, nor even, as Chief Justice Taney was to learn, the Supreme Court; it was the president. They who had thought him a weak man, easily controlled by stronger natures, were learning that Abraham Lincoln could be almost despotic. They did not hesitate to say this of him, and to declare that under his administration the United States had become a military despotism. The country was beginning to learn who was at the head of the administration. There was one man who never had any doubt who was master. That was the man who was accustomed to receive stacks of letters and telegrams and editorials requesting or demanding that he do this or refrain from doing that, and to stuff them all into a pigeonhole, saying, "I know more about it than any of them." That was the man whom some people thought self-distrustful and many now call modest, Abraham Lincoln. "He said with a good deal of emphasis that he was master." CHAPTER XIII "ABRAHAM LINCOLN, GIVE US A MAN!" MILITARY Success is much more promptly won than is political success. As it is swiftly won, so is it easily lost. Before the close of the Civil War, Horace Greeley published the first volume of his American Conflict. It was illustrated with steel engravings, each of them a group picture containing a number of portraits. One of these showed the faces of twelve Union generals who had won fame before the middle of 1863. These were, General Scott, who had the central place, and Generals Wool, McClellan, Butler, Fremont, McDowell, Halleck, Hooker, Burnside, Hunter, Anderson and Buell. The second volume, published shortly after the close of the war, had as its frontispiece a companion group. Not one portrait from the first volume appeared in the second. This was not wholly because the publishers and engravers desired a new group; no general who had made his reputation in the first half of the war retained it to the end. Aspirants for military glory could find few more thought-provoking or profitable lessons than those suggested by a prolonged study of these two groups of pictures. With a few possible exceptions, almost any one could at a guess recall the names that of necessity must have appeared in the second list. General Grant, of course, had the central place. Around him were the portraits of Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Meade, Hancock, Blair, Howard, Terry, Curtis, Gilmore and Banks. One can not study this list long without the reflection that not all these names would have survived to appear in a third volume. A large proportion of the nation's trained soldiers had gone |