On the last day of the session, Lincoln was in the President’s room at the Capitol Signing bills.  The Reconstruction Bill, duly passed by both Houses, was brought to him.  Several Senators, friends of the bill and deeply anxious, had come into the President’s room hoping to see him affix his signature.  To their horror, he merely glanced at the bill and laid it aside.  Chandler, who was watching him, bluntly demanded what he meant to do.  “This bill,” said Lincoln, “has been placed before me a few minutes before Congress adjourns.  It is a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way.”

“If it is vetoed,” said Chandler, whose anger was mounting, “it will damage us fearfully in the Northwest.  The important point is that one prohibiting slavery in the Reconstructed States.”

“That is the point,” replied the President, “on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act.”

“It is no more than you have done yourself,” retorted Chandler.

Lincoln turned to him and said quietly but with finality:  “I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which can not constitutionally be done by Congress.”

Chandler angrily left the room.  To those who remained, Lincoln added:  “I do not see how any of us now can deny and contradict what we have always said, that Congress has no constitutional power over slavery in the States."(6)

In a way, he was begging the question.  The real issue was not how a State should be constitutionally reconstructed, but which, President or Congress, had a right to assume dictatorial power.  At last the true Vindictive issue, lured out of their arms by the Democrats, had escaped like a bird from a snare and was fluttering home.  Here was the old issue of the war powers in a new form that it was safe for them to press.  And the President had squarely defied them.  It was civil war inside the Union party.  And for both sides, President and Vindictives, there could now be nothing but rule or ruin.

In this crisis of factional politics, Lincoln was unmoved, self-contained, lofty, deliberate.  “If they (the Vindictives) choose to make a point on this, I do not doubt that they can do harm.  They have never been friendly to me.  At all events, I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right.  I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.”

XXXI A MENACING PAUSE

Lincoln had now reached his final stature.  In contact with the world his note was an inscrutable serenity.  The jokes which he continued to tell were but transitory glimmerings.  They crossed the surface of his mood like quick flickers of golden light on a stormy March day,—­witnesses that the sun would yet prevail,—­in a forest-among mountain shadows.  Or, they were lightning glimmers in a night sky; they revealed, they did not dispel, the dark beyond.  Over all his close associates his personal ascendency was complete.  Now that Chase was gone, the last callous spot in the Cabinet had been amputated.  Even Stanton, once so domineering, so difficult to manage, had become as clay in his hands.