Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life, Especially of its Springs of Action as Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of WarStephenson, Nathaniel W. (Nathaniel Wright)
History
Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life, Especially of its Springs of Action as Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War
Stephenson, Nathaniel W. (Nathaniel Wright)
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865; Presidents -- United States -- Biography
He raised the timid politicians to his own level, inspired them with new
courage. Two days later a struggle began in the House for carrying
out Lincoln's purpose. On the last day of the session along with the
offensive Reconstruction Bill, he received the new Enrollment Act which
provided that "no payment of money shall be accepted or received by the
Government as commutation to release any enrolled or drafted man from
personal obligation to per-form military service."
Against this inflexible determination to fight to a finish, this
indifference to the political consequences of his determination, Lincoln
beheld arising like a portentous specter, a fury of pacifism. It found
expression in Greeley. Always the swift victim of his own affrighted
hope, Greeley had persuaded himself that both North and South had lost
heart for the war; that there was needed only a moving appeal, and they
would throw down their arms and the millennium would come. Furthermore,
on the flimsiest sort of evidence, he had fallen into a trap designed
to place the Northern government in the attitude of suing for peace. He
wrote to Lincoln demanding that he send an agent to confer with certain
Confederate officials who were reported to be then in Canada; he also
suggested terms of peace.(4) Greeley's terms were entirely acceptable
to Lincoln; but he had no faith in the Canadian mare's nest. However,
he decided to give Greeley the utmost benefit of the doubt, and also
to teach him a lesson. He commissioned Greeley himself to proceed
to Canada, there to discover "if there is or is not anything in the
affair." He wrote to him, "I not only intend a sincere effort for peace,
but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made."(5)
Greeley, who did not want to have any responsibility for anything that
might ensue, whose joy was to storm and to find fault, accepted the duty
he could not well refuse, and set out in a bad humor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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