folly of many successive generations upon the most cruelly misgoverned empires of the Old World. Restrictions foreign to the habits of the people and to the spirit of the Constitution had been imposed upon liberty of speech and of the press. In many sections of the country, quite beyond the sphere of hostilities, life had been made almost intolerable, not only to those who differed from the dominant party in respect to the wisdom of its war policy, but to those also who impugned its capacity for administering that policy. It had been openly proclaimed by those who had a right to be heard as speaking for the administration, that rebels had no rights which loyal men were bound to respect; that the war begun for the enforcement of their constitutional obligations upon the seceded States ought to be waged in contempt of the constitutional rights of those States; that the rebellion of the South justified and demanded a revolution by the North.

In the course of these two years of Aulic power men had gradually come to see that, in the language of Mr. Lincoln himself, "the civil war had radically changed the occupations and habits of the American people;" but it was by no means so clear that, in the language of Mr. Lincoln, this change was effecting "for the moment" only. The war had been so illmanaged, in a military sense, by the presidential commanderin-chief and his councillors, that notwithstanding repeated victories of the national armies in the stricken field, no substantial progress appeared to be making towards the dispersion of the great Confederate armies and the pacification of the Confederate populations. Richmond, after defying repeated attempts at its reduction according to the plan of campaign which the Aulic council at Washington and the President had vainly endeavored to coerce General McClellan into adopting, still held out against the concentrated force of the national armies moving at last as that commander had two years before urged that they should move. Vast regions of territory west and east of the Mississippi, which had once been occupied by the

troops of the Union, had been abandoned again to the Confede rate arms. The solemn petitions put up to the Divine Majesty in executive proclamations that He would "subdue the anger which had produced and so long sustained a needless and cruel rebellion, and change the hearts of the insurgents,"* had been turned almost into a mockery by measures directly calculated to inflame the anger of the populations in rebellion and to harden the hearts of the insurgents against the government and the people of the Union.

In contemplating this condition of affairs men who, as Mr. Jefferson said of himself in the dark hours of the alien and sedition laws, "retained unadulterated the principles of 1775," had begun seriously to tremble for the future of the Republic. Of the war so conducted, in such a spirit and for such objects, they saw but two possible issues: the subjugation of the South and the degradation of its States to the condition of conquered provinces; or the collapse of the national resources and the consequent recognition of the Confederate States as a rival and victorious power.

Both of these issues were abhorrent to the minds of such

men.

To the former issue no specious representations of the moral glory and the national health to be acquired by the abolition of the institution of slavery could reconcile even those among them who held slavery in the deepest detestation. They saw that a sincere hatred of slavery could no more excuse a social war in its name upon communities originally independent than a sincere hatred of heresy could justify the enforcement of the Catholic religion by the sword upon such communities. Nor could they look forward to the prolonged struggle which such a war would necessitate, without the gravest concern as to the effects of such a struggle upon the character of the American people and upon their political institutions. Mr. Lincoln had already announced that "the dogmas of the quiet past were * Proclamation of a Day of National Thanksgiving, 15th July, 1863.

inadequate to the stormy present." If the storm was to be protracted indefinitely, not the dogmas only, but the whole social order also of the quiet past must vanish before its violence. Mr. Lincoln, it is true, had also announced that he was not "able to appreciate the danger that the American people” might come, by familiarity with military rule, "to lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence, trial by jury, and the habeas corpus." But those who remembered that Mr. Lincoln and his Aulic councillors had been conspicuous for years among those who could not "appreciate the danger" that sectional controversy, conducted in a temper of unfraternal passion, might lead to civil war, were more likely to take warning from the dismal experience than to find comfort in the cheerful confidence of the President. Mr. Lincoln's easy faith that “ our strife pertains to ourselves, to the passing generations of men, and can, without convulsion, be hushed forever with the passing of one generation,”* seemed to such men somewhat at variance with the facts of history and the characteristics of mankind. It has been well said by one who had himself passed through the fiery furnace of civil war: "The most frightful feature of a civil war is not the blood which flows on every side, nor the dead who strew the streets and roads, nor the shattered walls of once happy homes; it is the passions which ferment in men's souls. * * * The sombre legend which begins the story of the world, the legend of Cain and Abel, seems to hover over these fratricidal conflicts, and to stamp them with a seal of infernal rage." To transmit these fermenting passions through indefinite years to come, is a crime against the human race which has an associated and progressive destiny. For men are not isolated to the point they occupy in space or time. "They hold on one to the other; they act one on the other by ties and means which do not require their personal presence and which survive them, so that successive generations of men

* Message of President Lincoln, December, 1862.

are inter-connected with each other and linked together by the act of succession."

Mr. Lincoln's quaint notion of a geographical nationality, his dogma that the "land we inhabit would ere long force re-union, however much of blood and treasure the separation might have cost," may perhaps be a formidable indictment of himself and his administration for spending blood and treasure to do the work of the equator and the poles; but it could hardly be expected to reconcile those who believe a nation to consist of men and not of acres, to seeing the life of a generation given up to a war of moral or material domination.

To the issue of the recognition of the Confederate States, those who shuddered at the idea of a prolonged social war against the South, were equally averse. They looked upon such a recognition as a calamity both to the North and to the South. They saw in it the copious seed of future strife, as well as a present source of national humiliation. They believed that it could be avoided by a prosecution of the war at once soldierlike and statesmanlike, by the prostration of the military strength of the seceded States, and by the protection of their political rights.

In argument with those who thus believed and felt, the Aulic council was powerless. The force of its appeals to the vehemence of the Southern resistance, and to the reiterated demands of the South for absolute independence, was broken by the simple fact that throughout nearly the whole of its course the war had not been fought for the Union, nor under the control of men who held the maintenance of the Union paramount to all other considerations. It was idle to say what the South would or would not do in a contingency which had never been presented to the South, the contingency of a complete overthrow of the military power of the South accompanied by a strictly constitutional assertion of the authority of the Union.

To raise to power a Federal administration capable of pre

senting this contingency to the South became the great animating purpose, not of the Democratic party alone, but of thousands upon thousands of conservative citizens of all parties, as the time drew near in the summer of the present year, for the nomination of a presidential candidate in opposition to Mr. Lincoln.

In obedience to this purpose it is that Major-General McClellan has been summoned from his enforced retirement into the foreground of the political field.

The record of General McClellan's connexion with the conduct of the war most assuredly justifies the confidence thus reposed in him.

We have seen that at the outset of his career as a Federal commander in Western Virginia, he clearly set before himself, his soldiers and the people of Virginia, the specific objects of the war, and the limitations imposed by those objects upon the duty of the government in arms.

We have seen that in his counsels addressed to the President, at the request of that functionary, in his general orders to his troops, in his instructions to the generals acting under him, he steadily and consistently adhered to those objects and reasserted these limitations.

Since his removal from duty with the army, he has again and again taken various suitable occasions to reiterate his conviction that "while the war is fighting, all citizens should see that the war is prosecuted for the preservation of the Union and the Constitution, for their nationality and their rights as citizens."*

Holding these convictions as to the politics of the war, General McClellan, as we have seen, was actively engaged in the military conduct of the war from the summer of 1861 to the fall of 1862. During that time he conducted only two campaigns in a comparative freedom from the practical interference of the administration with his plans.

* Speech at Trenton, N. J., Nov. 13, 1862.