gress, provided that a full and general amnesty should permit them to do so.

The trap was neither so well set nor so well baited as it seemed to be, and Mr. Lincoln was not drawn into any blunder. He quietly replied, on the 12th of December, the day before the battle of Fredericksburg, and while he was obviously not superintending, by telegraph or otherwise, the precise movements of the Army. He paid but moderate attention to any part of Mr. Wood's letter, except that which declared his quasi-diplomatic position and authority. Of this, he said: "I strongly suspect your information will prove to be groundless; nevertheless I thank you for communicating it to me. Understanding the phrase in the paragraph above quoted [from Mr. Wood's letter], "the Southern States will send representatives to the next Congress,' to be substantially the same as that the people of the Southern States would cease resistance, and would re-inaugurate, submit to, and maintain, the national authority, within the limits of such States; under the Constitution of the United States,' I say that in such case the war would cease on the part of the United States; and if, within a reasonable time, a full and general amnesty were necessary to such an end, it would not be withheld."

Mr. Wood strove hard to carry the matter further, and to obtain some kind of authority from the Administration for acting as a go-between and proslavery-Democratic angel of peace; but Mr. Lincoln could not be induced to trust him with the honor of the nation in such a delicate matter. Had he done so, neither the rebels in arms, nor the Union armies, nor the people of the South, nor any part of the people of the North, nor any foreign power on earth, would have failed to conclude and say: "The disasters have done their work. His courage has failed him. He is suing for peace. He has even employed a well-known enemy as an ambassador."

It is true that there was always a large "peace element" at the South; but at no time was it in even momentary power,

and Mr. Lincoln was only too well advised of the increasing rigidity of the military despotism exercised by the Davis government at Richmond. He was now watching it with all the greater solicitude for the reason that he foresaw a necessity for tightening the pressure of the governmental machinery under his own hands.

The disloyal elements in the free States, especially of the populations nearest the army lines, had for some time been taking on a form of which the general public knew but little. Under several names, secret affiliations of "orders," and lodges and memberships, honeycombed the whole country, in communication with corresponding organizations at the South.

To counteract these agencies in some measure, as well as to afford an effective framework to the political forces which were sustaining the Administration and the armies in the field, Mr. Lincoln had silently favored the creation of what was soon known as "The Union League." Secret associations of Union men, both white and black, already existed at the South; but no one of these had succeeded in becoming general. The black men are supposed to have attained a common and general method of mutual recognition and confidence, much more nearly than had the whites. Even as to the former, however, and surely as to the latter, the more effective "Union secret societies" of the South were geographically restricted and localized. It was needful that those of the North should be united under one organization, and that the centre of its control should be at the seat of government.

In the summer of 1862 the nucleus of the League was formed, at Washington, by the selection, rather than the election, of a "Grand Council" of twelve members. By this committee of control agents were sent out in every direction and with great rapidity. Local "councils" were organized in every city and town and village of the North. The most complete political machine ever known took form in the very

heat and pressure of the fall elections, and spread its ramifications further and deeper through all the winter months.

It was not easy for any critic to say that Mr. Lincoln had anything to do with it; but there were those who remarked upon the suspicious fact that the Grand Council was made up of his personal friends and official subordinates, even to the extent that one of his private secretaries was Grand Corresponding Secretary of the entire League.

In this way, and otherwise, every available measure was taken to organize the patriotism of the nation and to maintain its activity. But the President was learning yet another lesson from the Confederacy. The Southern leaders, almost from the beginning, had made the burden of their pitiless exactions fall most heavily upon the parts of their populations which they believed to be least in sympathy with them. The National Government had touched its disaffected citizens only through the equal bearing of taxes payable in money. The awful tax which was payable in human flesh and blood had been borne by the patriots only, of whatever political name or party affiliation.

The men who loved their country most unselfishly were in the army to so great an extent that the consequences were already dangerously manifested at the polls. Should the process go on uncorrected, it might yet affect the balance of power in State governments and in Congress. There were large districts in which the upholders of the government were weak, not only from numerical depletion, but because their best and ablest leaders were in the field with their constituents. Day by day their enemies grew more annoying and defiant. The Union League was a strong arm, indeed; but the situation demanded another weapon, and Mr. Lincoln had planned, and now laid before Congress, a new and strenuously energetic "policy."

CHAPTER XLV.

EXECUTION.

Efforts for Compensation to Owners of Slaves-Dreams of ColonizationThe Future of the African in America-The Final Proclamation-The Slave-Owner a Southern Sympathizer.

WHEN Congress assembled in December, 1862, the issuing of the final Proclamation of Emancipation on the approaching New-Year's Day was an already assured result.

Its future effect, so far as the nominally seceded States were concerned, would depend much upon the success of current military operations. The people, however, of the border slaveStates, occupied in part or in whole by Union armies, were rapidly becoming aware that the "peculiar institution," among themselves, had received its death-blow. All discontent was deepened and all loyal sentiment was weakened in the minds of the slave-owners of Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and all in other States that sympathized with them and respected the Constitutional legality of their human property. By no fault of their own they were losing that which had come to them in strict accordance with the laws of their States and country, and these they were still obeying. They had vested rights which even the hand of revolution and reformation was bound to respect as far as possible. It was true that the proclamation did not include them in its sweeping blow, but there now remained no effective or operative power to keep in bondage any slave, anywhere, who should make an effort for freedom. It was a sense of justice, therefore, quite as much as policy, which led Mr. Lincoln to

urge upon Congress the adoption of a system of compensated emancipation for these areas and for the reimbursement of loyal owners of the prices of slaves set free by the operations of the war. Even at the North such legislation was regarded, very generally, as both wise and just. But the measures proposed were permitted to die.

From an early day, as a follower of Henry Clay, Mr. Lincoln had vaguely entertained the ideas of that statesman with reference to the colonization of the colored population. So long as the mass of it seemed to be doomed to perpetual servitude, the yearly shipment of a few hundreds, or even many thousands, to any other part of the world was little more than a philanthropic experiment, with but moderate possibilities of good or evil. Now, however, in the very act and hour of giving wholesale freedom to millions of the marked race, the problem of their future well-being pressed with increasing force upon the heart and brain of the man who set them free. It was yet a question in his mind whether they could safely be intrusted with the powers and responsibilities of citizenship. He openly stated, even to delegations of black men standing before him in the Executive Mansion, his belief that the black and white races, living in contact, were a mutual detriment to each other. It would not be easy to disprove the correctness of such an opinion from the records of the African in America up to the year 1863, and it could even be fairly well defended from the annals of after-years. In his perplexity, at the time, Mr. Lincoln turned to his old dream of colonization. Fantastic as it was, he clung to it for a while, and until the better conviction forced itself upon him that the Africans had come to America to stay and must be made men of, here and now.

His message to Congress, at this session, did little more than set forth the difficulties he had already discovered in the way of his idea. It is not impossible that he learned something from writing and reading his own statement that the black man refused to go to Liberia or to Hayti, and that there seemed