Three of those picnickers who missed their guess on Bull Run Sunday, Wade, Chandler and Trumbull, were destined to important parts in the stern years that were to come.  Before the close of the year 1861 the three made a second visit to the army; and this time they kept together.  To that second visit momentous happenings may be traced.  How it came about must be fully understood.

Two of the three, Wade and Chandler, were temperamentally incapable of understanding Lincoln.  Both were men of fierce souls; each had but a very limited experience.  Wade had been a country lawyer in Ohio; Chandler, a prosperous manufacturer in Michigan.  They were party men by instinct, blind to the faults of their own side, blind to the virtues of their enemies.  They were rabid for the control of the government by their own organized machine.

Of Chandler, in Michigan, it was said that he “carried the Republican organization in his breeches pocket”; partly through control of the Federal patronage, which Lincoln frankly conceded to him, partly through a “judicious use of money."(3) Chandler’s first clash with Lincoln was upon the place that the Republican machine was to hold in the conduct of the war.

From the beginning Lincoln was resolved that the war should not be merely a party struggle.  Even before he was inaugurated, he said that he meant to hold the Democrats “close to the Administration on the naked Union issue."(4) He had added, “We must make it easy for them” to support the government “because we can’t live through the case without them.”  This was the foundation of his attempt—­so obvious between the lines of the first message—­to create an all-parties government.  This, Chandler violently opposed.  Violence was always Chandler’s note, so much so that a scornful opponent once called him “Xantippe in pants.”

Lincoln had given Chandler a cause of offense in McClellan’s elevation to the head of the army.* McClellan was a Democrat.  There can be little doubt that Lincoln took the fact into account in selecting him.  Shortly before, Lincoln had aimed to placate the Republicans by showing high honor to their popular hero, Fremont.

     * Strictly speaking he did not become head of the army until
     the retirement of Scott in November.  Practically, he was
     supreme almost from the moment of his arrival in Washington.

When the catastrophe occurred at Bull Run, Fremont was a major-general commanding the Western Department with headquarters at St. Louis.  He was one of the same violent root-and-branch wing of the Republicans—­the Radicals of a latter day—­of which Chandler was a leader.  The temper of that wing had already been revealed by Senator Baker in his startling pronouncement:  “We of the North control the Union, and we are going to govern our own Union in our own way.”  Chandler was soon to express it still more exactly, saying, “A rebel has sacrificed all his rights.