his defeat, the all-parties program was doomed from that hour.  Throughout the winter, the Democrats in Congress, though steadily ambiguous in their statements of principle, were as steadily hostile to Lincoln.  If they had any settled policy, it was no more than an attempt to hold the balance of power among the warring factions of the Republicans.  By springtime the game they were playing was obvious; also its results.  They had prevented the President from building up a strong Administration group wherewith he might have counterbalanced the Jacobins.  Thus they had released the Jacobins from the one possible restraint that might have kept them from pursuing their own devices.

The spring of 1862 saw a general realignment of factions.  It was then that the Congressional Cabal won its first significant triumph.  Hitherto, all the Republican platforms had been programs of denial.  A brilliant new member of the Senate, john Sherman, bluntly told his colleagues that the Republican party had always stood on the defensive.  That was its weakness.  “I do not know any measure on which it has taken an aggressive position."(2) The clue to the psychology of the moment was in the raging demand of the masses for a program of assertion, for aggressive measures.  The President was trying to meet this demand with his all-parties program, with his policy of nationalism, exclusive of everything else.  And recently he had added that other assertion, his insistence that the executive in certain respects was independent of the legislative.  Of his three assertions, one, the all-parties program, was already on the way to defeat Another, nationalism, as the President interpreted it, had alienated the Abolitionists.  The third, his argument for himself as tribune, was just what your crafty politician might twist, pervert, load with false meanings to his heart’s content.  Men less astute than Chandler and Wade could not have failed to see where fortune pointed.  Their opportunity lay in a combination of the two issues.  Abolition and the resistance to executive “usurpation.”  Their problem was to create an anti-Lincoln party that should also be a war party.  Their coalition of aggressive forces must accept the Abolitionists as its backbone, but it must also include all violent elements of whatever persuasion, and especially all those that could be wrought into fury on the theme of the President as a despot.  Above all, their coalition must absorb and then express the furious temper so dear to their own hearts which they fondly believed-mistakenly, they were destined to discover-was the temper of the country.

It can not be said that this was the Republican program.  The President’s program, fully as positive as that of the Cabal, had as good a right to appropriate the party label—­as events were to show, a better right.  But the power of the Cabal was very great, and the following it was able to command in the country reached almost the proportions of the terrible.  A factional name is needed.  For the Jacobins, their allies in Congress, their followers in the country, from the time they acquired a positive program, an accurate label is the Vindictives.