These complaints, the complaints of a large party all over the North and of an able Congressional group, redoubled as the first half of 1862 passed with almost no news from Virginia but that of disasters. On July 8 the _Post_ asked three sharp questions. Why had enlistments been stopped three or four months earlier--for Stanton, believing success at hand, had foolishly halted the recruiting on April 3? Why had the militia of the loyal States never, since the war began, been reorganized, drilled, and armed? And why had no great arsenals of munitions been collected? “We have been sluggish in our preparations and timid in our execution,” the paper admonished Washington. “Let us change all this.” Such complaints were natural and useful in the dark hour when McClellan’s army recoiled after bloody fighting from its first advance on Richmond. Bryant also did well to press his attacks upon corruption in government contracts, and political favoritism in military appointments. When this month Congress authorized the use of negroes in camp service and trench digging, he reasonably found fault with the Administration for its slowness in acting upon the authorization. But Bryant’s “radicalism” was not commendable when he complained of the delay in emancipating the slaves; of the prominence of Northern Democrats, not hostile to slavery, in the army and at Washington; and of the consideration given border State sentiment. Had Lincoln acted rashly in the early months of the war, he would have forced Kentucky and Missouri into the arms of the South, and he thought (Sept. 22, 1861) that “to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” Had he made haste to emancipate the slaves, he would irretrievably have offended powerful elements in the North and the Border States which were willing to fight for the Union, but not to fight against slavery. Military historians have generally condemned Lincoln’s interference with McClellan’s plans in the early spring of 1862, an interference into which he was forced by such pressure as Bryant was exerting. The _Evening Post_ was unjust to Lincoln when it explained (July 7, 1862) why the people suspected him of indecision. “He has trusted too much to his subordinates; he has not been sufficiently peremptory with them, either with his generals or his Secretaries; and his whole Administration has been marked by a certain tone of languor and want of earnestness which has not corresponded with the wishes of the people.” It was unjust when it spoke again (July 23) of Lincoln’s “slumbers,” and of the “drowsy influence of border State opiates.”