The second session of the Thirty-seventh Congress closed on the 17th of July. Its proceedings had been confused and uneasy, with a good deal of discontented and revolutionary feeling, which increased toward the close. The decisive stand which the President had taken, and which he calmly, firmly, and persistently maintained against the extreme measures of some of the most prominent Republicans in Congress, was unsatisfactory. It was insinuated that his sympathies on important measures had more of a Democratic than Republican tendency; yet the Democratic party maintained an organized and often unreasonable, if not unpatriotic, opposition. Military operations, aside from naval success at New Orleans and on the upper Mississippi, had been a succession of military reverses. Disagreement between the Secretary of War and the General-in-Chief, which the President could not reconcile, caused the latter to be superseded after the disastrous result before Richmond. Dissensions in the army and among the Republicans in Congress, the persistent opposition of Democrats to the Administration, and the general depression that prevailed were discouraging. "In my position," said the President, "I am environed with difficulties." Friends on whom he felt he ought to be able to rely were dissatisfied with his conscientious scruples and lenity, and party opponents were unrelenting against the Administration. A few days before Congress adjourned, the President made another but unsuccessful effort to dispose of the slavery question, by trying to induce the border States to take the initiative in his plan of compensated emancipation. The interview between him and the representatives of the border States, which took place on the 12th of July, convinced him that the project of voluntary emancipation by the States would not succeed. Were it commenced by one or more of the States, he had little doubt it would be followed by others, and eventuate in general emancipation by the States themselves. Failing in the voluntary plan, he was compelled, as a war necessity, to proclaim freedom to all slaves in the rebel section, if the war continued to be prosecuted after a certain date. This bold and almost revolutionary measure, which would change the industrial character of many States, could be justified on no other ground than as a war measure, the result of military necessity. It was an unexpected and startling demonstration when announced, that was welcomed by a vast majority of the people in the free States. In Congress, however, neither this nor his project of compensated emancipation was entirely acceptable to either the extreme anti-slavery or pro-slavery men. The radicals disliked the way in which emancipation was effected by the President. But, carried forward by the force of public opinion, they could not do otherwise than acquiesce in the decree, complaining, however, that it was an unauthorized assumption by the Executive of power which belonged to Congress.