He has no right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness."(5) Here was that purpose to narrowing nationalism into Northernism, even to radicalism, and to make the war an outlet for a sectional ferocity, which Lincoln was so firmly determined to prevent.  All things considered, the fact that on the day following Bull Run he did not summon the Republican hero to Washington, that he did summon a Democrat, was significant.  It opened his long duel with the extremists.

The vindictive Spirit of the extremists had been rebuffed by Lincoln in another way.  Shortly after Bull Run, Wade and Chandler appealed to Lincoln to call out negro soldiers.  Chandler said that he did not care whether or no this would produce a servile insurrection in the South.  Lincoln’s refusal made another count in the score of the extremists against him.(6)

During the late summer of 1861, Chandler, Wade, Trumbull, were all busily organizing their forces for an attack on the Administration.  Trumbull, indeed, seemed out of place in that terrible company.  In time, he found that he was out of place.  At a crucial moment he came over to Lincoln.  But not until he had done yeoman service with Lincoln’s bitterest enemies.  The clue to his earlier course was an honest conviction that Lincoln, though well-intentioned, was weak.(7) Was this the nemesis of Lincoln’s pliability in action during the first stage of his Presidency?  It may be.  The firm inner Lincoln, the unyielding thinker of the first message, was not appreciated even by well-meaning men like Trumbull.  The inner and the outer Lincoln were still disconnected.  And the outer, in his caution, in his willingness to be instructed, in his opposition to extreme measures, made the inevitable impression that temperance makes upon fury, caution upon rashness.

Throughout the late summer, Lincoln was the target of many attacks, chiefly from the Abolitionists.  Somehow, in the previous spring, they had got it into their heads that at heart he was one of them, that he waited only for a victory to declare the war a crusade of abolition.(8) When the crisis passed and a Democrat was put at the head of the army, while Fremont was left in the relative obscurity of St. Louis, Abolition bitterness became voluble.  The Crittenden Resolution was scoffed at as an “ill-timed revival of the policy of conciliation.”  Threats against the Administration revived, taking the old form of demands for a wholly new Cabinet The keener-sighted Abolitionists had been alarmed by the first message, by what seemed to them its ominous silence as to slavery.  Late in July, Emerson said in conversation, “If the Union is incapable of securing universal freedom, its disruption were as the breaking up of a frog-pond."(9) An outcry was raised because Federal generals did not declare free all the slaves who in any way came into their hands.  The Abolitionists found no solace in the First Confiscation Act which provided that an owner should lose his claim to a slave, had the