sponsibility vested in the Congress or in the president? Very largely the members of Lincoln's own party in Congress held that these powers belonged to Congress, but Lincoln assumed that they belonged to the executive. As the war proceeded, arrests grew frequent, and the Federal prisons in Washington and elsewhere filled with men and women who were unable to secure through the civil courts their constitutional peace-time right of trial. Was this arbitrary power one which the constitution intended to lodge with the president? If so, what was the Government of the United States but a military despotism? This question was asked by newspapers and orators in many parts of the country; and it was asked very insistently by certain members of Congress.

There is no way to wage a war gently. Washington was full of Confederate spies, and many of them escaped detection and arrest in spite of the powers assumed by the president. But the president believed that these powers, in time of war, must belong to the commander-in-chief of the army; that is, to the president. Congress could not well exercise this function, nor did Lincoln believe that the Constitution recognized Congress as capable of its exercise; but this opinion of the president was not popular in Congress, nor yet among the Copperheads. President Lincoln had before him a long and hard fight concerning the areas of power which the government does not assume in time of peace, nor definitely locate in time of war. Lincoln was a cautious man, but such power as he believed was necessary to the conduct of the war, he assumed; and in time there was loud wailing in protest in Congress.

If Lincoln ever replied to these criticisms we do not know it. Certain distinguished lawyers wrote briefs defending the president's assumption of extraordinary powers in war times, and some of his strong supporters in Congress gave utterance to views so fully in accord with the position which Lincoln assumed, that some authors believe their addresses to have been inspired by Lincoln. Senator Browning, on March 10, 1862,

delivered an address which one brilliant biographer of Lincoln is confident "Surely was inspired-or if not directly inspired, so close a reflection of the president's thinking that it comes to the same thing in the end."* But the remarkable fact is that neither Browning nor any other of the defenders of Lincoln claimed Lincoln's authority for their utterances. At the time when Browning delivered this address, he was calling at the White House almost daily, but did not record in his Diary any intimation that what he said on this subject was suggested by the president or that the president thanked him for it.

Lincoln all this time was keeping in close touch with those members of both Houses who could best interpret his spirit to Congress, but no one of these men had the comfortable feeling that he was the president's spokesman.

On the whole, Congress supported the president, and the legislation of the long session was intended to be in accord with his plans. But still he knew that there was a deep-seated occasion of difference between him and the law-making body, and he intended to retain all his powers under the Constitution, and in addition to hold to those that he deemed necessary to him as commander-in-chief of the army.

Lincoln seldom made a pun, a fact which is mentioned elsewhere in this work. He made one toward the end of the first session of Congress. A member of the opposition called upon him, and somewhat testily commented on the fact that the welfare of the negro had had so large a place in the discussions of that session. He said, "Mr. President, we have had Nigger served to us three times a day regularly, dished up in every possible style." Lincoln had learned a new culinary term. He knew about roast chicken, and boiled chicken, and especially about fried chicken, but he had had occasion to learn a new French way of serving that familiar bird. When he was told of the monotony of a diet of Nigger, and of the styles in which

*Professor N. W. Stephenson, in Lincoln, p. 216.

it had been served to Congress, he said, "The principal style, I think, was free-cuss-ee."

When Congress adjourned, and Lincoln saw the members departing, he chuckled, and said:

"In 1831, I went to New Orleans on a flat-boat, and we tied up for a day at Alton. The gate of the State Prison opened, and a group of men came out. I inquired who they were and where they were going, and I was told that they were a lot of thieves, going home. They had served their time!"

CHAPTER VII

LINCOLN AND MC CLELLAN

THE battle of Bull Run made one fact ominously plain; the army must have a younger commanding officer than General Scott. Able and experienced as he was, he was not in condition to fight in the field; and the army needed a visible head. General Scott remained first in command; but Lincoln must already have convinced himself that a younger man must assume the active leadership; and he thought he knew the man.

On the day after the battle of Bull Run, Lincoln summoned General George B. McClellan to Washington. He arrived on the twenty-eighth of July. On the day before his arrival Lincoln appointed him commander of the Army of the Potomac.

McClellan at this time was thirty-four years old. He was in full physical vigor and of fine appearance and bearing. He was a West Point graduate of the class of 1846. He had distinguished himself under General Scott in the Mexican War. He entered the war at the age of nineteen, with the rank of second lieutenant, having recently graduated from West Point; he emerged with the brevet rank of captain, and had won his promotion by undoubted gallantry on the field of battle. When Jefferson Davis was secretary of war in 1855, he sent Captain McClellan to Europe to study army organization, and McClellan was with the British Army during the siege of Sebastopol. After the war he had a varied and successful career. He was for a time chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad Company, and later its vice-president. In that capacity he met Abraham Lincoln in connection with certain litigation of the company. In later years he recalled that acquaintance:

More than once I have been with him in out-of-the-way county-seats where some important case was being tried, and, in the lack of sleeping accommodations, have spent the night in front of a stove listening to the unceasing flow of anecdotes from his lips. He was never at a loss for a story, and I could never make up my mind how many of them he had really heard before, and how many he invented on the spur of the moment. His stories were seldom refined, but were always to the point.

McClellan was far from being a partisan of Lincoln in his campaign against Douglas. On the contrary, Douglas traveled in McClellan's private car, and Lincoln rode on regular trains.

The early military record of General McClellan was one of success. At the outbreak of the war he was commissioned a major general in command of the Department of the Ohio. In a series of engagements in Western Virginia he was notably successful. Any Union success at that time was vastly encouraging. McClellan's victories were not large, but they were decisive; and he himself turned them to good account in a series of well-phrased proclamations which he issued from a portable printing press.

It is not remarkable that the country made McClellan its first military idol. No one of the generals who came earlier to public notice combined in anything like the same degree such elements for popularity. He was handsome, he was well educated, he had a record of success. On horseback he appeared to good advantage. His features, his pose, his military bearing all combined to win for him an admiration and affection bordering upon idolatry.

Furthermore, he was a man of integrity and of deep religious feeling. In his private life he was as pure as Sir Galahad. He possessed a rare power of inspiring confidence and devotion. Of all the tragedies of the Civil War, and they were not few, there is none that fills the student with keener sorrow than that of this brilliant officer. He seemed not only by far the best man whom Lincoln could have chosen, but a man especially raised up to meet the nation's need.