During the remainder of the session, Congress may be thought of as having—­what Congress seldom has—­three definite groups, Right, Left and Center.  The Right was the Vindictives; the Left, the irreconcilable Democrats; the Center was composed chiefly of liberal Republicans but included a few Democrats, those who rebelled against the political chicanery of the Little Men.

The policy of the Vindictives was to force upon the Administration the double issue of emancipation and the supremacy of Congress.  Therefore, their aim was to pass a bill freeing the slaves on the sole authority of a congressional act.  Many resolutions, many bills, all having this end in view, were introduced.  Some were buried in committees; some were remade in committees and subjected to long debate by the Houses; now and then one was passed upon.  But the spring wore through and the summer came, and still the Vindictives were not certainly in control of Congress.  No bill to free slaves by congressional action secured a majority vote.  At the same time it was plain that the strength of the Vindictives was slowly, steadily, growing.

Outside Congress, the Abolitionists took new hope.  They had organized a systematic propaganda.  At Washington, weekly meetings were held in the Smithsonian Institute, where all their most conspicuous leaders, Phillips, Emerson, Brownson, Garret Smith, made addresses.  Every Sunday a service was held in the chamber of the House of Representatives and the sermon was almost always a “terrific arrangement of slavery.”  Their watch-word was “A Free Union or Disintegration.”  The treatment of fugitive slaves by commanders in the field produced a clamor.  Lincoln insisted on strict obedience to the two laws, the Fugitive Slave Act and the First Confiscation Act.  Abolitionists sneered at “all this gabble about the sacredness of the Constitution."(3) But Lincoln was not to be moved.  When General Hunter, taking a leaf from the book of Fremont, tried to force his hand, he did not hesitate.  Hunter had issued a proclamation by which the slaves in the region where he commanded were “declared forever free.”

This was in May when Lincoln’s difficulties with McClellan were at their height; when the Committee was zealously watching to catch him in any sort of mistake; when the House was within four votes of a majority for emancipation by act of Congress;(4) when there was no certainty whether the country was with him or with the Vindictives.  Perhaps that new courage which definitely revealed itself the next month, may be first glimpsed in the proclamation overruling Hunter: 

“I further make known that whether it be competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any State or States free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government to exercise such supposed power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I can not feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field."(5)