she had no secret correspondence, through her relatives or otherwise, with any one in rebellion against her country. The president's secretaries, who had thus thrust upon them the duty of reading Mrs. Lincoln's correspondence, were of those who bore strongest testimony to her loyalty to her husband and the Union.

The editors of the country did not leave Mr. Lincoln lacking in instruction. They wrote long editorials for his guidance, and sent marked copies of the papers to the White House. The president, always deeply interested in public opinion, at first endeavored to read all these editorials. Finding this a physical impossibility, he directed that they should be read and briefed and arranged for his perusal. After about two weeks, however, he discovered that even this was impossible. And he gave up all attempt to keep up with the newspapers except a few of the dailies of different political faiths in the more important cities.

One of the president's perplexities grew out of the demand for appointments of chaplains. Not a few ministers, weary of the more or less monotonous and exacting demands of their parishes, and others who had no pulpits and perhaps did not deserve them, were very eager to look after the spiritual welfare of the soldiers, some of them being especially desirous of being attached to the more or less permanent posts and cantonments. Mr. Stoddard says that Lincoln had very little respect for these "loose-footed ministers." He had very little inclination to disturb himself in the effort to provide office or emolument for these men who were "anxious for the rank and pay of religious majors without the toil and exposure and peril of keeping company with a regiment in the fieid."

Nevertheless, Lincoln sometimes found himself under the pressure of influential friends on behalf of some of these men. In the case of one such man he sent to Stanton the papers of recommendation endorsed, "Appoint this man chaplain." Stanton returned them with the endorsement, "He is not a preacher." A few days later Lincoln returned the papers, with the endorsement, "He is now." Stanton replied, "There is no vacancy."

Lincoln concluded "Appoint him anyway." And so, presumably, he was appointed.

Mrs. Grimsley affirmed that Mrs. Lincoln and the other women of the White House never made but one attempt, and that a successful one, to influence the president concerning a political appointment. Their former pastor, the Reverend James Smith, had grown old and had retired from the active ministry. His son had been United States Consul at Dundee, Scotland, and had died there. Mrs. Lincoln earnestly desired that Doctor Smith be permitted to succeed his son. He was abundantly competent to care for the not very arduous duties of the consulate, and the salary, while small, was enough to assure him of a support. Mrs. Lincoln and her cousins vowed that if Lincoln would grant them this one favor, they would never again ask him to appoint any friend of theirs to any office. It was not very difficult for them to secure the granting of their request. Lincoln honored Doctor Smith, and quite probably would have done the very thing they asked even if they had not requested it. But he received the delegation with all proper dignity, and after having made his protest against being coerced in matters of this character by members of his own household, he very cheerfully made the appointment.

Notwithstanding wars and rumors of wars, there was something of home life in the White House. The Lincoln boys were constantly making new friends and new discoveries, and their daily chatter and gossip kept things alive, and Lincoln was not always sad or cast down. His ability to be natural and even mirthful when things were at their worst was a quality of saving value. Sometimes the boys were sick, and Lincoln was anxious and Mrs. Lincoln almost hysterical. She was too nervous and excitable a mother to be a good nurse, but she loved her children devotedly.

Once, Lincoln was sick. The Lincoln boys, visiting the soldiers, encountered small-pox, and the president himself had a mild attack of it. They called it varioloid, and the White House

was not quarantined. If the infectious nature of the president's illness kept any office-seeker away, the fact is not of record. "Come in," said Lincoln cheerfully, "I have something now that I can give everybody."

CHAPTER IV

THE HOUSE DIVIDED

IF WARS must be it ought at least to be clear precisely what the fighting is about. The bewilderment of the little boy in Southey's poem, and the inability of his grandfather to explain the situation intelligibly, has been shared by historians since time began. Little Peterkin asks:

"Pray tell us all about the war,

And what they fought each other for?"

The historian is hard put to it to answer this wholly reasonable, but always disconcerting inquiry:

"It was the English," Caspar cried,
"Who put the French to rout,
But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out.
But everybody said," quoth he:
"That 'twas a famous victory."

It is not easy even yet to reach entire agreement concerning the cause of America's Civil War.

A very simple answer from the southern point of view is that the United States was not organized as a nation, but a confederacy; that the states united in creating it by voluntary consent, and that some of them at the time expressly reserved the power and full right of withdrawal. Jefferson Davis, in his History of the Confederate States, reminded his readers that not only Vir

ginia, but New York and Rhode Island, in ratifying the Constitution of the United States, expressly reserved the right of secession.*

Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, wrote a history in two volumes of what he called The War Between the States. Stephens had been so earnest a defender of the Union that Lincoln at one time had serious thought of inviting him to be a member of his Cabinet, remembering his great admiration for Stephens, when Lincoln himself was a member of Congress.

Stephens, whose book was published in 1868, dedicated it "To all true friends of the Union under the Constitution." He believed, however, that that Constitution provided only for a federation based upon the common consent of the states uniting, and that any state could terminate its own union with the other states whenever it chose.

The doctrine of the right of secession was not confined to the South. Extreme abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, insistently denounced the Union, and believed that the free states had a right to secede from the states that held slaves. It would thus be a grave mistake to assume that all believers in secession were also believers in slavery. This is an assumption upon which many authors have mistakenly insisted.

Andrew Jackson firmly believed that no state had a right to nullify an act of the general government, or to withdraw from the Union. Jackson died regretting that he had never been able to shoot Henry Clay or to hang Calhoun.†

It has been said with good reason that the federal idea, that of the union of sovereign states in the more inclusive unity of a nation is the greatest contribution of the Anglo-Saxon race to

*Mr. Davis devotes a short chapter to this subject and earnestly endeavors to refute the application of any such terms as rebellion or treason as applied to the secession of the slave states. See his History, pp. 50, 52.

†Claude G. Bowers' Party Battles of the Jackson Period, p. 480.