While Lincoln was slowly struggling out of his last eclipse,giving most of his attention to the army,the Congressional Cabal was laboring assiduously to force the issue upon slavery.
The keen politicians who composed it saw with unerring vision where,for the moment,lay their opportunity.They could not beat the President on any one issue then before the country.
No one faction was strong enough to be their stand-by.Only by a combination of issues and a coalition of factions could they build up an anti-Lincoln party,check-mate the Administration,and get control of the government.They were greatly assisted by the fatuousness of the Democrats.That party was in a peculiar situation.Its most positive characters,naturally,had taken sides for or against the government.The powerful Southerners who had been its chief leaders were mainly in the Confederacy.Such Northerners as Douglas and Stanton,and many more,had gone over to the Republicans.Suddenly the control of the party organization had fallen into the hands of second-rate men.As by the stroke of an enchanter's wand,men of small caliber who,had the old conditions remained,would have lived and died of little consequence saw opening before them the role of leadership.It was too much for their mental poise.Again the subjective element in politics!The Democratic party for the duration of the war became the organization of Little Men.Had they possessed any great leaders,could they have refused to play politics and responded to Lincoln's all-parties policy,history might have been different.But they were not that sort.Neither did they have the courage to go to the other extreme and become a resolute opposition party,wholeheartedly and intelligently against the war.They equivocated,they obstructed,they professed loyalty and they practised-it would be hard to say what!So short-sighted was their political game that its effect continually was to play into the hands of their most relentless enemies,the grim Jacobins.
Though,for a brief time while the enthusiasm after Sumter was still at its height they appeared to go along with the all-parties program,they soon revealed their true course.In the autumn of 1861,Lincoln still had sufficient hold upon all factions to make it seem likely that his all-parties.program would be given a chance.The Republicans generally made overtures to the Democratic managers,offering to combine in a coalition party with no platform but the support of the war and the restoration of the Union.Here was the test of the organization of the Little Men.The insignificant new managers,intoxicated by the suddenness of their opportunity,rang false.They rejected the all-parties program and insisted on maintaining their separate party formation.[1]This was a turning point in Lincoln's career.Though nearly two years were to pass before he admitted his defeat,the all-parties program was doomed from that hour.Throughout the winter,the Democrats in Congress,though steadily ambiguous in their statements of principle,were as steadily hostile to Lincoln.
If they had any settled policy,it was no more than an attempt to hold the balance of power among the warring factions of the Republicans.By springtime the game they were playing was obvious;also its results.They had prevented the President from building up a strong Administration group wherewith he might have counterbalanced the Jacobins.Thus they had released the Jacobins from the one possible restraint that might have kept them from pursuing their own devices.
The spring of 1862saw a general realignment of factions.It was then that the Congressional Cabal won its first significant triumph.Hitherto,all the Republican platforms had been programs of denial.A brilliant new member of the Senate,john Sherman,bluntly told his colleagues that the Republican party had always stood on the defensive.That was its weakness."Ido not know any measure on which it has taken an aggressive position."[2]The clue to the psychology of the moment was in the raging demand of the masses for a program of assertion,for aggressive measures.The President was trying to meet this demand with his all-parties program,with his policy of nationalism,exclusive of everything else.And recently he had added that other assertion,his insistence that the executive in certain respects was independent of the legislative.Of his three assertions,one,the all-parties program,was already on the way to defeat Another,nationalism,as the President interpreted it,had alienated the Abolitionists.The third,his argument for himself as tribune,was just what your crafty politician might twist,pervert,load with false meanings to his heart's content.Men less astute than Chandler and Wade could not have failed to see where fortune pointed.Their opportunity lay in a combination of the two issues.Abolition and the resistance to executive "usurpation."Their problem was to create an anti-Lincoln party that should also be a war party.Their coalition of aggressive forces must accept the Abolitionists as its backbone,but it must also include all violent elements of whatever persuasion,and especially all those that could be wrought into fury on the theme of the President as a despot.Above all,their coalition must absorb and then express the furious temper so dear to their own hearts which they fondly believed-mistakenly,they were destined to discover-was the temper of the country.
