The movement also had the hearty approval of Wendell Phillips, who was very bitter and sweeping in his denunciations of an administration which he regarded “as a civil and military failure.”  Lincoln’s reelection, he said, “I shall consider the end of the Union in my day, or its reconstruction on terms worse than disunion.”  But Mr. Phillips’s friendship ought to have been regarded by the Fremonters as ominous, for it was his custom always to act with a very small minority.  Moreover he had long since ceased to give voice to the intelligence of his party or even fairly to represent it.  How far it had ever been proper to call the Abolitionists a party may be doubted; before the war they had been compressed into some solidity by encompassing hostility; but they would not have been Abolitionists at all had they not been men of exceptional independence both in temper and in intellect.  They had often dared to differ from each other as well as from the mass of their fellow citizens, and they had never submitted to the domination of leaders in the ordinary political fashion.  The career of Mr. Lincoln had of course been watched by them keenly, very critically, and with intense and various feeling.  At times they had hopefully applauded him, and at times they had vehemently condemned what had seemed to them his halting, half-hearted, or timid action.  As the individual members of the party had often changed their own minds about him, so also they had sometimes and freely disagreed with each other concerning his character, his intentions, his policies.  In the winter and spring of 1864, however, it seemed that, by slow degrees, observation, their own good sense, and the development of events had at last won the great majority of the party to repose a considerable measure of confidence in him, both in respect of his capacity and of his real anti-slavery purposes.  Accordingly in the present discussions such men as Owen Lovejoy,[68] William Lloyd Garrison, and Oliver Johnson came out fairly for him,—­not, indeed, because he was altogether satisfactory to them, but because he was in great part so; also because they easily saw that as matter of fact his personal triumph would probably lead to abolition, that he was the only candidate by whom the Democracy could be beaten, and that if the Democracy should not be beaten, abolition would be postponed beyond human vision.  Lovejoy said that, to his personal knowledge, the President had “been just as radical as any of his cabinet,” and in view of what the Abolitionists thought of Chase, this was a strong indorsement.  The old-time charge of being impractical could not properly be renewed against these men, now that they saw that events which they could help to bring about were likely to bring their purpose to the point of real achievement in a near future.  In this condition of things they were found entirely willing to recognize and accept the best practical means, and their belief was clear that the best practical means lay in the