to him. No other President ever had at his disposal more than a fraction of the appointing power, for good or evil, which would be his. He could hardly have had a vision, however, of the multitudinous offices afterwards to be created and added.

/ Here was, therefore, the opportunity for an exhibition of broad and courageous statesmanship. He plainly saw that the administration soon to fall into his hands would need all the support it could by any means obtain. He saw that he could not assume the position of the paymaster of a greedy party if he would long remain the ruler of a nation. It was not many days before he was reported, and truly, to have declared his intention of appointing to official positions Democrats as well as Republicans, and of retaining faithful and capable public servants wherever possible. There was a groan of dismay and wrath among the office-seekers, but subsequent developments proved that the President-elect was prepared to stand firmly by his wise and just decision.

As a sort of corollary of this, it was also made to be understood that Mr. Lincoln regarded the federal appointments at his disposal as in the nature of a public trust, and not at all as his private property or to be apportioned among his friends, relatives, or personal adherents. There was to be little advantage to any man in the fact that he had known Mr. Lincoln for many years; or had exchanged small favors with him; or employed him in law-business; or said "Good-morning" to him, daily.

This was terribly unexpected, and there were some hundreds who could never afterwards see that he had not been ungrateful, they could hardly say for what. Not a few declared him unmindful of his most sacred obligations to themselves.

The great mass of tax-payers and other citizens, for whose uses the offices were created and their duties performed, were all the better satisfied. At the same time, the sting of defeat rankled less dangerously in the hearts of some hundreds of

thousands of people, whose good will was essential to the stability of what was, to all intents and purposes, a new govern

ment.

It was from the first manifest that Mr. Lincoln would have peculiar difficulty in the formation of his Cabinet. He was busy with that duty even before election-day. He would gladly have obtained the services of some well-known representative of the declared Union-loving element at the South, but no such man could be found. There was not one of sufficient prominence who loved the Union well enough to help an Abolition President to preserve it. Every day that came brought with it something to render the search more hopeless. It was therefore necessary to confine the selections made at first to the narrow circle of the chiefs of the Republican party. A majority of the Cabinet, when at last it was completed, were men who had received votes as candidates for nomination in the Chicago Convention. The man who called them around him had risen above all jealousies, all rivalries, all selfish considerations. The settlement of this important matter was not finished until after Mr. Lincoln's arrival in Washington, but enough had been done to assure him of the active co-operation of the strong men of his own political faith.

Perceiving how rapid was and would be the unification of the elements with which the nation was to struggle for its life, it was the part of a sound and wise statesmanship to consolidate, with all possible speed, the power which was to meet the now inevitable shock of battle. The difficulties of Mr. Lincoln's position at that time have been but little understood. The majority of those who have written about them have strangely taken it for granted that he was in a manner ignorant of the course of events. They have regarded him as being as much taken by surprise by each successive development as might be any private citizen who puzzled over the news brought to him, correctly or incorrectly, by his favorite newspaper.

On the contrary, Mr. Lincoln's preparatory education from childhood, supplemented now through a thousand channels of information, public and private, placed him beyond and above the possibility of a surprise.

There was an absorbing problem constantly before him now, and his every act and word had to be weighed with reference to the danger of an adverse, because premature, solution. It was, simply stated, whether the surely coming storm could be delayed until the new government should be placed in possession of the national capital, and that also with the nominal acquiescence of the government which was passing away; for four months had yet to elapse between November of the election and March of the inauguration, and in four months what might not happen! Considering what the former government had been in its nature, plans, purposes, and subserviencies, the best interests of the whole country were served by the fact that for the time being there was no President at Washington, and that the Disunion leaders were acting for themselves upon that well-understood hypothesis. Mr. Buchanan, the nominal President, weak, vacillating, out of date, groped blindly around among the jarring factions of his kaleidoscopic Cabinet, while its traitors and perjured conspirators were begging their more hot-headed confederates in the cotton States not to spoil their vile work for them by over-haste. At the same time, the loyal members of the same remarkable junto of "constitutional advisers" were struggling manfully to keep in hand something in the outward semblance of a "Union" to hand over to the man whom the people had selected to take the control of it. How nearly they came Mr. Lincoln, from day

to an utter failure was well known to to day. The gloom deepened around him and within him, until his best friends could but see the shadows on his face, the circles under his eyes, the intensity of the sadness in which he had been called to make his dwelling-place. He himself was aware of this external effect and saw a danger in it. Lest it

should influence unfavorably the spirits and courage of those about him, and go out through them in widening ripples of despondency, he more frequently than ever now assumed an outward air of cheerful jocularity. It served both for a convenient and useful mask and for a genuine relief. Behind it he studied the chaotic Unionism slowly forming and moving into activity at the North, and the much more rapidly developing Rebellion at the South. No other fact of necessary statesmanship was plainer than this: for the creation of a strong, steady, and permanently trustworthy public opinion at the North, the South must be permitted to put itself openly, manifestly, outrageously in the wrong with reference to the central government. There was no doubt that it would shortly do so under the fostering care of Mr. Buchanan and his Cabinet. A strong-minded man in the executive chair would surely have given the plotters of secession some ghostly shadow of an excuse for violent measures. As it was and as it continued to be, the savage brutality of their successive acts remains to be recorded as without any other palliation than the presumption of their fellowcitizens in electing a President openly hostile to the purchase and sale of human beings.

CHAPTER XXVI.

CASUS BELLI.

Secession Activities—Lincoln's Policy—In a Trying Position-South Carolina Takes the Lead-The Confederate States of America-Traitors in Congress-Capture of United States Forts and Forces-A Campaign of Statesmanship-Vain Premonitions-A Last Meeting.

THAT the more advanced and determined secessionists were prepared to regard the triumph of the Republican party and the election of Abraham Lincoln as an ample justification of anything they might choose to do, had already been openly declared in numberless unofficial utterances.

The extreme view held by so many found a more effective if not a more definite expression in a circular letter sent by Governor Gist of South Carolina to the governors of the other "cotton States" on the 5th of October, 1860. The governors of the slave States subsequently known as "border States" were not supposed to be yet prepared to return a favorable response, and were therefore not appealed to. The letter was an invitation to concerted and allied action in case the November election should result as was expected, and its language requires no explanation:

"If a single State secedes, we will follow her. If no other State takes the lead, South Carolina will secede (in my opinion) alone, if she has any assurance that she will soon be followed by another or other States; otherwise it is doubtful."

The answers, of different dates, varied in character and not all favorable, were probably all in Governor Gist's hands on or before election-day. That of the Governor of Georgia contained a very significant and important declaration. He said that, in his opinion, the people of Georgia would "wait for