to the sad story which had previously concluded at Malvern Hill.

During nearly the whole course of this fighting, which included the second battle of Bull Run, General McClellan was at or near Washington. He was not exactly in disgrace or "removed," but he was in the position of a man temporarily out of work, for he was a general without an army. Mr. Lincoln had carefully avoided open collision with him, and had treated him in a friendly manner, personally, but the general himself and the whole country well understood the situation.

The all but instantaneous political result justified the forecast of Mr. Lincoln's sagacity, for the Democratic party of the North, destitute of great names and leaders, at once took up the cause of McClellan as their own. They had no other, and it offered them a rallying-cry. When, therefore, at the close of General Pope's summer campaign, General McClellan reassumed command of the forces in the field, he did so as a "political idol" as well as a military leader. It was two years yet to the next Presidential election, but he was already the Democratic candidate. It was altogether a new Democratic party, and not the old, which was then in process of organization. It was sweeping into its embraces all disappointment, all discontent and sourness, and every element hostile to Mr. Lincoln personally and to the manifestly increasing antislavery tendencies of the Republican party and the Administration.

If the results of the hard fighting done by the army under Pope had been less unfavorable, a different course might have been possible, but the close of the month of August left the President with no choice whatever. Loud voices were heard in all the camps and columns of the army. Not those of any considerable majority, doubtless, but likely to be joined by others if things should continue to go wrong. It was necessary to heed them and to act at once, for the victorious rebels, in spite of the severe losses they had suffered, were about to pour across the upper Potomac and carry the war into the Northern States.

Mr. Lincoln, as has been seen, had no doubt at all of General McClellan's capacity for the kind of work now to be required of him. It was not exactly a forward movement. There was no need to issue any formal order reinstating an officer who had never been publicly or formally removed and who still retained his full rank in the army. Indeed, so little had been done to interfere with the personal cordialities existing between all the parties concerned, in spite of the tremendous war of words between their respective admirers and defenders, that Mr. Lincoln himself, accompanied by General Halleck, actually called at McClellan's house, in Washington, on the morning of the 2d of September, 1862, instead of sending for him to come to the War Office or the Executive Mansion.

The whole affair, as it is related by General McClellan, sounds wonderfully like Abraham Lincoln's lifelong way of doing things. He had nothing to say about the past and was in no wise disturbed by any part of his own previous action. He had, however, a good deal to say about the present state of affairs in the army. He said it briefly, and then, relates the general: "He instructed me to take steps at once to stop and collect the stragglers; to place the works in a proper state of defense, and to go out and meet and take command of the army, when it approached the vicinity of the works, then to place the troops in the best position,-committing everything to my hands."

General Pope was not "removed," any more than General McClellan had been. He was still in command of the Army of Virginia, but was thus subordinated to General McClellan. Within two weeks, the Army of the Potomac had quietly swallowed the very organization by which its own separate corps and divisions and brigades had previously been absorbed, as fast as they arrived from the Peninsula. This result was strictly logical, for the greater must contain the less, but a good half of the troops now under McClellan were men who had not been with him before Richmond and were by no

means his admirers. They were "his men" only because of orders from headquarters, and the spell of his power had been broken.

As to the restoration of the old name to the consolidated mass, Mr. Lincoln had no objection. "The boys" would fight as well, or better, and that was the main thing, for they had sharp work cut out for them.

Only a small part of the army under Pope had been "disorganized," in any correct use of that term. The great mass of them was in good condition. The men had fought well and were proud of it, and had not lost confidence in their immediate commanders. They had fought so well, indeed, that the forces under General Lee were seriously diminished in numbers and efficiency. Not all the glory of their barren victories could make up to them the loss of so many of their best soldiers, both officers and men.

Had the condition of the troops been at all as some have misrepresented it, active operations at once, with those very men, under McClellan, would have been absurdly impossible. As it really was, he had no manner of difficulty in getting them well in hand as he marched. He performed no miracle, and their fighting condition was forcibly exemplified, in a very few days, at the battles of South Mountain and the Antietam.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

MILITARY POLITICS.

Reconstruction-Jarring Counsels-Gen. John C. Frémont-A Premature Proclamation-A Modification-Another Subordinate laying down the Law to the President-A New Secretary of War-A Human Library.

THE shattered aggregate of rusty political machinery which fell into Mr. Lincoln's hands, at the close of the Buchanan Administration, was not a "government."

The tumultuous mass of factions and local organisms under his nominal chief magistracy was not a "nation."

What he would make of the one and what would become of the other were open questions in the minds of all men, of all parties, in this and other countries, and 'they were very freely debated in public and in private.

The post to which Abraham Lincoln was really elected, and the position he proceeded to occupy and fill, was that of an expression of the deeply rooted and tenacious popular will that there should be a government, and a strong one, and that this government should organize and perpetuate a nation.

His whole life had prepared him for the task. The causes which prepared the task for him had been subjects of his study from boyhood. He met all difficulties, as they arose, in a manner which testified what familiar acquaintances they were and how much he had been thinking that they might visit him some day.

As has been seen, the new government took form rapidly, and the solid ground of the new nation began to arise with a very permanent look, through and above the turbulent political flood.

It was not as yet easy to designate or limit the powers of the government in "war time," but the ideas of other men as to the extent and nature of these powers were more vague than were those of the ruler himself. He saw that he had, as President, and acting as Dictator in many relations, the power to do anything which the people could be made to see it was needful or best that he should do. He had no more, because that and no other is always the limit of the power of a revolutionary autocrat. The people had many ways of expressing their approval, and their faithful servant had little need to regard the vagaries of individuals, so long as he was devotedly doing his duty.

It was essential to the performance of Mr. Lincoln's task that no element of substantial power should be permitted to slip away from him or from either branch of the central government which he represented. Congress and the Judiciary and the Executive were bound together as a unit. It was natural, however, and was a difficulty which came early and never departed, that the President should find himself in continual collision with the political views, the aspirations and ambitions, of the able men around him. That these all had views, aspirations, and ambitions, is to be mentioned in their praise and not in blame.

The difficulty arising from this source was aggravated by the fact that every general in the army, whether he would or no, was also in some degree a political general and possible leader. It was of course that many of even the best should be aware of this and should cultivate "doctrinal views" of their own, and by these should at times be influenced, more or less, in their uses of the powers they derived from the central authority at Washington. Almost the first military officers to whom high commands were assigned at once began to administer those commands in accordance with their political leanings and lookings forward. It was safe to prophesy that the country would select its party idols and rulers, for a gen