resignation, which this time was accepted.  For, as Mr. Lincoln said:  “You and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation, which it seems cannot be overcome or longer sustained consistently with the public service.”  This occurrence, taking place on June 29-30, at the beginning of the difficult political campaign of that anxious summer, alienated from the President’s cause some friends in a crisis when all the friends whom he could muster seemed hardly sufficient.

The place of Mr. Chase was not easy to fill.  Mr. Lincoln first nominated David Tod of Ohio.  This was very ill received; but fortunately the difficulty which might have been caused by it was escaped, because Governor Tod promptly declined.  The President then named William Pitt Fessenden, senator from Maine, and actually forced the office upon him against that gentleman’s sincere wish to escape the honor.  A better choice could not have been made.  Mr. Fessenden was chairman of the Committee on Finance, and had filled the position with conspicuous ability; every one esteemed him highly; the Senate instantly confirmed him, and during his incumbency in office he fully justified these flattering opinions.

There were other opponents of the President who were not so easily diverted from their purpose as the politicians had been.  In Missouri an old feud was based upon his displacement of Fremont; the State had ever since been rent by fierce factional quarrels, and amid them this grievance had never been forgotten or forgiven.  Emancipation by state action had been chief among the causes which had divided the Union citizens into Conservatives and Radicals.  Their quarrel was bitter, and in vain did Mr. Lincoln repeatedly endeavor to reconcile them.  The Radicals claimed his countenance as a matter of right, and Mr. Lincoln often privately admitted that between him and them there was close coincidence of feeling.  Yet he found their specific demands inadmissible; especially he could not consent to please them by removing General Schofield.  So they, being extremists, and therefore of the type of men who will have every one against them who is not for them, turned vindictively against him.  They found sympathizers elsewhere in the country, sporadic instances of disaffection rather than indications of an epidemic; but in their frame of mind they easily gained faith in the existence of a popular feeling which was, in fact, the phantasm of their own heated fancy.  As spring drew on they cast out lines of affiliation.  Their purpose was not only negatively against Lincoln, but positively for Fremont.  Therefore they made connection with the Central Fremont Club, a small organization in New York, and issued a call for a mass convention at Cleveland on May 31.  They expressed their disgust for the “imbecile and vacillating policy” of Mr. Lincoln, and desired the “immediate extinction of slavery ... by congressional action,” contemning the fact that Congress had no power under the Constitution to extinguish slavery.  Their call was reinforced by two or three others, of which one came from a “People’s Committee” of St. Louis, representing Germans under the lead of B. Gratz Brown.