in the hope of making the war a short one, should place at the disposal of the government four hundred thousand men and four hundred millions of dollars.

These were large figures, and they almost took away the breath of some who heard them; but the members of the body to whom the message was addressed had been doing the requisite amount of thinking, during the eighty days which had passed since the President's proclamation summoned them together. They did what they would surely not have done if they had been gathered too hastily. They voted half a million of men and five hundred millions of dollars, in a burst of eager patriotism.

Even Mr. Lincoln had almost a hope, at first, that this might prove sufficient. It might well have been so if the half million of men had at that hour been soldiers, and if these had been under officers, great and small, such as the course of the war, with Mr. Lincoln's watchful help, afterwards selected from among the long list of then untried, unknown, altogether undiscovered and undeveloped heroes.

The message concluded with an exhaustive analysis of the stupidities and absurdities of the old doctrine of "State rights" as now applied to the war purposes of the Rebellion. Such an argument was timely, both for home and foreign reading. It was intended for both, as was also much of the earlier matter of the message.

Congress passed the necessary acts to legalize whatever Mr. Lincoln had seen fit to do. Its leadership was in the hands of strong, hard-headed, resolute men, fresh from hearing the voices of their angry constituents, male and female, and not a little very martial music of other descriptions. The protests of the disloyal members were loud and bitter, but small attention was paid them. The minority vote against the measures sustaining the government contained the names of several men who afterwards accepted commissions in the Rebel army, and of one, Vallandigham of Ohio, who was afterwards contemptu

ously sent across the lines into the Confederacy, "because he belonged there."

Into such a body as this Congress, busily engaged in so good a work and in the discussion of its details, the news of the defeat at Bull Run fell like a bursting bombshell. It was an explosion which put an end to useless debate and blew to atoms the last vestige of hesitation as to the necessities of the case. All remaining business was finished in exactly two weeks, furnishing perhaps the most remarkable instance on record of legislation condensed under pressure. Congress adjourned and went home, leaving Mr. Lincoln at Washington as sole dictator, endowed for the first time with full forms of law for the carrying on of the war.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE BLOCKADE.

Recognition-Accepting the Situation-The Neutrality Mask-Rejected Information-War Correspondence not History-The Fetters of Etiquette not Worn.

MR. LINCOLN carefully abstained from coming into open collision with any State government acting as such. In public and in private he recognized the assailants of the national integrity only as criminal individuals. He treated the Confederacy simply as the same men acting together in an organized body for the same essentially criminal purposes. He insisted that, as no power existed anywhere for the dissolution. of the Union without the assent of all concerned or a majority of them, it had not been dissolved. A different view was conveniently taken for political purposes on the other side of the Atlantic. England and France did not even wait for the complete formation of the Confederacy before they made haste to recognize it as a "belligerent" and to treat it as in some sort one of the nations of the earth. "The South," as they commonly called it, had yet no navy, but its admirers hoped and believed that the deficiency would soon be supplied.

The North, they were yet more sure, was unable to send to sea a fleet capable of coping with any one of their cruising squadrons. It had neither ships nor money nor credit, and it was so far disorganized that it was not likely to obtain either at an early day. It was to their minds merely a question of time, indeed, into how many fragments, of what shapes, the offensive republic should fall.

The motion towards recognition was met by a prompt and

vigorous protest. The attitude and purpose of the United States, expressed through the courageous and skillful diplomacy of Mr. Seward, induced the most precious hesitation abroad as to what precise step in favor of the South had better next be taken.

One of Mr. Lincoln's first and most difficult duties, after declaring a blockade of Southern ports, had been to deprive foreign nations of all pretext for denying its practical efficiency. A mere "paper blockade" would have invited certain ruin, and so one was enforced which was quickly found to stand the most expensive tests. The work of shutting up the blockaded ports was performed by a navy of hastily gathered and somewhat miscellaneous material, but one that proved amply efficient.

Finding that the Union cruisers were vigilant and numerous, and that the blockade could neither be avoided nor denied, the powers most directly interested were compelled to meet the question whether they should forcibly break through or surrender all hope of getting regular supplies of Southern cotton till the end of the war.

They at first very nearly reached the conclusion to break the blockade by force, deliberately calculating that the United States, already struggling under terrible difficulties, would at once be cowed by the prospect of a war with England and France and the open addition of their powers to those of the Confederacy. They were not at all acquainted with Mr. Lincoln, and but slightly so with the great people who sustained him. Both had been sadly misrepresented to them by interested parties.

Nothing could well be plainer to the mind of the President than that the United States had little to lose and everything to gain by braving the worst at once. Cowardice was the road to sure and swift destruction. The only hope was in utterly unflinching courage. Our commerce was already fast disappearing from the seas, and there was every reason to believe that

in any event it would shortly vanish altogether. It did so vanish, strictly in accordance with this expectation. In more than twenty years following the issue of Mr. Davis's privateering proclamation it has not recovered the ground it that day began to lose. So perceiving and so expecting, Mr. Lincoln declared in good set terms that if France and England should so determine on their own behalf, their commerce also should follow into disaster that which we were inevitably losing. They were to estimate for themselves the relative values of their general commerce, on the one hand, and the prospective cotton-crops and friendship of the Confederacy, on the other.

For several months the two powers looked the problem in the face without coming to any definite conclusion. The form in which it was laid before them from time to time can best be understood by quotations from the written instructions given by Mr. Seward to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on the latter's departure to his duties as Minister to England.

"If, as the President does not at all apprehend, you shall find Her Majesty's government tolerating the application of the so-called seceding States or wavering about it, you will not leave them to suppose for a moment that they can grant that application and remain the friends of the United States. You may even assure them promptly, in that case, that if they determine to recognize, they may at the same time prepare to enter into an alliance with the enemies of this republic."

There was more to the same effect; and a similar message was carried to France. It was by no means kindly received by either power, but its expression of unflinching determination prevented the threatened disaster.

Through the following three months the two governments beyond seas continued to wrestle with the difficulty before them.

There, along the whole Confederate seaboard, was still the effective blockade, and behind it lay stores of cotton with endless crops yet to come, and with a young nation ready to raise