“The reaction produced by the fall of Atlanta may be taken as an indication of what the real feelings of the people in the Northern States are.  The vast majority of them ardently desire to reconquer the lost territory.  It is only at moments when they despair of doing this that they listen to plans for recovering the territory by negotiation.  The time has not come yet when any proposal to relinquish the territory can be publicly made[1228].”

The Times, slowly convinced that Atlanta would have influence in the election, and as always clever above its contemporaries in the delicate process of face-about to save its prestige, arrived in October at the point where it could join in prediction of Lincoln’s re-election.  It did so by throwing the blame on the Democratic platform adopted at the party convention in Chicago, which, so it represented, had cast away an excellent chance of success by declaring for union first and peace afterwards.  Since the convention had met in August this was late analysis; and as a matter of fact the convention platform had called for a “cessation of bloodshed” and the calling of a convention to restore peace—­in substance, for an armistice.  But the Times[1229] now assumed temporarily a highly moral and disinterested pose and washed its hands of further responsibility; Lincoln was likely to be re-elected: 

For ourselves we have no particular reason to wish it otherwise.  We have no very serious matter of complaint that we are aware of against the present Government of America.  Allowance being made for the difficulties of their position, they are conducting the war with a fair regard to the rights of neutral nations.  The war has swept American commerce from the sea, and placed it, in great measure, in our hands; we have supplied the loss of the cotton which was suddenly withdrawn from us; the returns of our revenue and our trade are thoroughly satisfactory, and we have received an equivalent for the markets closed to us in America in the vast impulse that has been given towards the development of the prosperity of India.  We see a great nation, which has not been in times past sparing of its menaces and predictions of our ruin, apparently resolved to execute, without pause and without remorse, the most dreadful judgments of Heaven upon itself.  We see the frantic patient tearing the bandages from his wounds and thrusting aside the hand that would assuage his miseries, and every day that the war goes on we see less and less probability that the great fabric of the Union will ever be reconstructed in its original form, and more and more likelihood that the process of disintegration will extend far beyond the present division between North and South....  Were we really animated by the spirit of hostility which is always assumed to prevail among us towards America, we should view the terrible spectacle with exultation and delight, we should rejoice that the American people, untaught