It can not be said that this was the Republican pro-gram.The President's program,fully as positive as that of the Cabal,had as good a right to appropriate the party label-as events were to show,a better right.But the power of the Cabal was very great,and the following it was able to command in the country reached almost the proportions of the terrible.Afactional name is needed.For the Jacobins,their allies in Congress,their followers in the country,from the time they acquired a positive program,an accurate label is the Vindictives.
During the remainder of the session,Congress may be thought of as having-what Congress seldom has-three definite groups,Right,Left and Center.The Right was the Vindictives;the Left,the irreconcilable Democrats;the Center was composed chiefly of liberal Republicans but included a few Democrats,those who rebelled against the political chicanery of the Little Men.
The policy of the Vindictives was to force upon the Administration the double issue of emancipation and the supremacy of Congress.Therefore,their aim was to pass a bill freeing the slaves on the sole authority of a congressional act.Many resolutions,many bills,all having this end in view,were introduced.Some were buried in committees;some were remade in committees and subjected to long debate by the Houses;now and then one was passed upon.But the spring wore through and the summer came,and still the Vindictives were not certainly in control of Congress.No bill to free slaves by congressional action secured a majority vote.At the same time it was plain that the strength of the Vindictives was slowly,steadily,growing.
Outside Congress,the Abolitionists took new hope.They had organized a systematic propaganda.At Washington,weekly meetings were held in the Smithsonian Institute,where all their most conspicuous leaders,Phillips,Emerson,Brownson,Garret Smith,made addresses.Every Sunday a service was held in the chamber of the House of Representatives and the sermon was almost always a "terrific arrangement of slavery."Their watch-word was "A Free Union or Disintegration."The treatment of fugitive slaves by commanders in the field produced a clamor.Lincoln insisted on strict obedience to the two laws,the Fugitive Slave Act and the First Confiscation Act.
Abolitionists sneered at "all this gabble about the sacredness of the Constitution."[3]But Lincoln was not to be moved.When General Hunter,taking a leaf from the book of Fremont,tried to force his hand,he did not hesitate.Hunter had issued a proclamation by which the slaves in the region where he commanded were "declared forever free."This was in May when Lincoln's difficulties with McClellan were at their height;when the Committee was zealously watching to catch him in any sort of mistake;when the House was within four votes of a majority for emancipation by act of Congress;[4]
when there was no certainty whether the country was with him or with the Vindictives.Perhaps that new courage which definitely revealed itself the next month,may be first glimpsed in the proclamation overruling Hunter:
"I further make known that whether it be competent for me,as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy,to declare the slaves of any State or States free,and whether at any time,in any case,it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government to exercise such supposed power,are questions which,under my responsibility,I reserve to myself,and which I can not feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field."[5]
The revocation of Hunter's order infuriated the Abolitionists.
It deeply disappointed the growing number who,careless about slavery,wanted emancipation as a war measure,as a blow at the South.Few of either of these groups noticed the implied hint that emancipation might come by executive action.Here was the matter of the war powers in a surprising form.However,it was not unknown to Congress.Attempts had been made to induce Congress to concede the war powers to the President and to ask,not command,him to use them for the liberation of slaves in the Seceded States.Long before,in a strangely different connection,such vehement Abolitionists as Giddings and J.Q.
Adams had pictured the freeing of slaves as a natural incident of military occupation.
What induced Lincoln to throw out this hint of a possible surrender on the subject of emancipation?Again,as so often,the silence as to his motives is unbroken.However,there can be no doubt that his thinking on the subject passed through several successive stages.But all his thinking was ruled by one idea.Any policy he might accept,or any refusal of policy,would be judged in his own mind by the degree to which it helped,or hindered,the national cause.Nothing was more absurd than the sneer of the Abolitionists that he was "tender"of slavery.Browning spoke for him faithfully,"If slavery can survive the shock of war and secession,be it so.If in the conflict for liberty,the Constitution and the Union,it must necessarily perish,then let it perish."Browning refused to predict which alternative would develop.His point was that slaves must be treated like other property.But,if need be,he would sacrifice slavery as he would sacrifice anything else,to save the Union.He had no intention to "protect"slavery.[6]
