President’s challenge.  Davis brought in a bill designed to complete the reorganization of the old Vindictive Coalition.  It appealed to the enemies of presidential prerogative, to all those who wanted the road to reconstruction made as hard as possible, and to the Abolitionists.  This bill, in so many words, transferred the whole matter of reconstruction from the President to Congress; it required a majority (instead of one-tenth) of all the male citizens of a Seceded State as the basis of a new government; it exacted of this majority a pledge never to pay any State debt contracted during the Confederacy, and also the perpetual prohibition of slavery in their State constitution.

Davis got his bill through the House, but his allies in the Senate laid it aside.  They understood the country too well not to see that they must wait for something to happen.  If the President made any mistake, if anything went wrong with the army—­they remembered the spring of 1862, McClellan’s failure, and how Chandler followed it up.  And at this moment no man was chafing more angrily because of what the ground was saying, no man was watching the President more keenly, than Chandler.  History is said to repeat itself, and all things are supposed to come to him who waits.  While Davis’s bill was before the House, Lincoln accepted battle with the Vindictives in a way that was entirely unostentatious, but that burned his bridges.  He pressed forward the organization of a new State government in Louisiana under Federal auspices.  He wrote to Michael Hahn, the newly chosen governor of this somewhat fictitious State:  “I congratulate you on having fixed your name in history as the first Free State governor of Louisiana."(3)

Meanwhile, the hotheads of the House again followed Davis’s lead and flung defiance in Lincoln’s face.  Napoleon, who had all along coquetted alarmingly with the Confederates, had also pushed ahead with his insolent conquest of Mexico.  Lincoln and Seward, determined to have but one war on their hands at a time, had skilfully evaded committing themselves.  The United States had neither protested against the action of Napoleon, nor in any way admitted its propriety.  Other men besides the Vindictives were biding their time.  But here the hotheads thought they saw an opportunity.  Davis brought in a resolution which amounted to a censure of the Administration for not demanding the retirement of the French from Mexico.  This was one of those times when the Democrats played politics and followed Davis.  The motion was carried unanimously.(4) It was so much of a sensation that the ’American Minister at Paris, calling on the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs, was met by the curt question, “Do you bring peace or war?”

But it was not in the power of the House to draw Lincoln’s fire until he chose to be drawn.  He ignored its action.  The Imperial Government was informed that the acts of the House of Representatives were not the acts of the President, and that in relation to France, if the President should change his policy, the imperial Government would be duly in formed.(5)