gotiate for peace. Those commissioners, however, had no such credentials as could justify their accepting the invitation. Greeley found himself in a false position, and without stopping to ask whether he himself was not to blame for it, he blamed the president. In a letter which was not published until long afterward, Greeley made the president this hysterical proposal:

I fear that my chance for usefulness has passed. I know that nine-tenths of the whole American people, North and South, are anxious for peace-peace on almost any terms-and utterly sick of human slaughter and devastation. I know that, to the general eye, it now seems that the rebels are anxious to negotiate and that we refuse their advances. I know that if this impression be not removed we shall be beaten out of sight next November. I firmly believe that, were the election to take place to-morrow, the Democratic majority in this State and Pennsylvania would amount to 100,000, and that we should lose Connecticut also. Now if the rebellion can be crushed before November it will do to go on; if not, we are rushing to certain ruin. What, then, can I do in Washington? Your trusted advisers nearly all think I ought to go to Fort Lafayette for what I have done already. Seward wanted me sent there for my brief conference with M. Mercier. The cry has steadily been, No truce! No armistice! No negotiation! No mediation! Nothing but surrender at discretion! I never heard of such fatuity before. There is nothing like it in history. It must result in disaster, or all experience is delusive.

Now I do not know that a tolerable peace could be had, but I believe it might have been last month; and, at all events, I know that an honest, sincere effort for it would have done us immense good. And I think no Government fighting a rebellion should ever close its ears to any proposition the rebels may make.

I beg you, implore you, to inaugurate or invite proposals for peace forthwith. And in case peace cannot now be made consent to an armistice for one year, each party to retain unmolested all it now holds, but the rebel ports to be opened. Meantime let a national convention be held, and there will surely be no more war at all events.

Missouri in those days was sadly divided. Two factions each

led by vigorous men, had long been at war in that state, and Lincoln had in his Cabinet enough to remind him constantly of the hostility of some of the Missouri politicians. It was not, however, for the most part hostility to Lincoln. But he was so situated as to take the buffetings of both factions on occasion. The divided counsels of that state proved a bone of contention. It was conditions such as these which confronted the president in the summer and autumn of 1864.

When Lincoln was nominated in June of 1864, it seemed probable that the war would be ended within a few months, but that summer wore away and the war did not end. Grant with an army of 120,000 men started what had ruined many a brave general before him, a campaign in Virginia. A terrific battle was fought in the Wilderness, where Lee's 52,000 men, fighting on the defensive, were a full match for Grant's 120,000. Then came the battle of Cold Harbor, with more loss of life. In a month's campaign, Grant lost nearly 60,000 men. It is not too much to say that the country was appalled by these losses. Any previous general would have resigned the leadership of the army in despair. Grant doggedly held on. His loss of 60,000 men had caused Lee a loss of 30,000. He was winning the war in what was probably the shortest way, but the country was horrified by so much apparently fruitless bloodshed.

If the election had occurred while these battles were in progress, Lincoln would have been defeated. McClellan would have been elected on his platform which declared the war to be a failure. Lincoln himself on August twenty-third, if not earlier, reached definitely the opinion that he was to be defeated, and he handed to the Cabinet a sealed document which he asked them to sign and witness. What it contained they did not know, but the act was ominous.

There was, however, no longer any doubt what the armies were fighting for. They were fighting to establish the truth that this was one nation. Equally they were fighting to establish the truth that one nation was a free nation.

Early in the war the soldiers had caught up a negro campmeeting melody to which they fitted words of their own:

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah,

His soul goes marching on.

The song went into other stanzas declaring among other things the intention to hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree; but these did not obscure the real spirit of the song. The armies caught the step; they were marching after the soul of Old John Brown.

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe caught the spirit of the melody, and wrote her Battle Hymn of the Republic:

In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea, With the glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me; As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

Freedom had become a watchword. George F. Root had written a rallying song to which men came, "Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom." Lincoln had sought as his paramount object to save the Union. He now knew he was equally committed to the policy of making the whole Union free. The whole nation had come clearly to recognize this modification of the situation.

All through the conflict up and down,
Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown,
One face, one form, ideal;

And which was false and which was true,
The wisest sybil never knew,

Since both alike were real.

As to slavery and the border states, Lincoln now defined his attitude, tactfully but uncompromisingly, in a letter of April 4, 1864, addressed to A. G. Hodges, of Kentucky:

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. . . . When, early in the war, General Frémont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When still later, General Cameron, the Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not think it an indispensable necessity. When still later, General Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not think the indispensable necessity had come. When in March, and May, and July, 1862, I made earnest and successive appeals to the border states to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition, and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hands upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss, but of this I was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our white military force, no loss by it anyhow or anywhere. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite an hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no caviling. We have the men; and we could not have them without the

measure. ...

I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale, I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle, the nation's condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

The president was gratified by the reception which the news

papers accorded this letter. John Hay wrote on April 30, 1864:

The President came loafing in as it grew late, and talked about the reception which his Hodges letter had met with. He seemed rather gratified that the tribute was in the main inspired by a kindly spirit in its criticism. He thought of, and found, and gave me to decipher, Greeley's letter to him of 29 July, 1861.* This most remarkable letter still retains for me its wonderful interest as the most insane specimen of pusillanimity that I have ever read. When I finished reading, Nicolay said: "That would be nuts to the Herald; Bennett would willingly give $10,000 for that." To which the President, tying red tape around the package, answered, "I need $10,000 very much, but he can't have it for many times that."

Lincoln made no campaign speeches either in 1860 or in 1864. In his brief occasional utterances during the latter campaign, he made no references to his own reelection or to the men who were opposing him. He wrote no letters for publication, and authorized no interviews containing any direct reference to the contest between him and General McClellan. He did, however, write out what he regarded as the platform upon which he was seeking reelection. He was invited to attend a union mass meeting at Buffalo. He declined the invitation, but had some thought that it might be well to send a letter outlining his views on the campaign. He finally decided that it would be more dignified to maintain his silence, but the following fragment found among his papers after he died, gives the platform upon which Lincoln understood himself to be accepting his renomination:

Yours inviting me to attend a Union mass meeting at Buffalo is received. Much is being said about peace, and no man desires peace more ardently than I. Still I am yet unprepared to give up the Union for a peace which, so achieved, could not be of much duration. The preservation of our Union was not the sole avowed object for which the war was commenced. It was com

*The text of this letter which followed the Battle of Bull Run, is quoted in the chapter relating to that battle.