Turning from Vallandigham, partly in amusement, partly in contempt, Lincoln grappled with the problem of reinforcing the army.  Since the Spring of 1863 the wastage of the army had been replaced by conscription.  But the system had not worked well.  It contained a fatal provision.  A drafted man might escape service by paying three hundred dollars.  Both the Secretary of War and the Provost Marshal had urged the abolition of this detail.  Lincoln had communicated their arguments to Congress with his approval and a new law had been drawn up accordingly.  Nevertheless, late in June, the House amended it by restoring the privilege of commuting service for money.(2) Lincoln bestirred himself.  The next day he called together the Republican members of the House.  “With a sad, mysterious light in his melancholy eyes, as if they were familiar with things hidden from mortals” he urged the Congressmen to reconsider their action.  The time of three hundred eighty thousand soldiers would expire in October.  He must have half a million to take their places.  A Congressman objected that elections were approaching; that the rigorous law he proposed would be intensely unpopular; that it might mean the defeat, at the polls, of many Republican Representatives; it might even mean the President’s defeat.  He replied that he had thought of all that.

“My election is not necessary; I must put down the rebellion; I must have five hundred thousand more men."(3)

He raised the timid politicians to his own level, inspired them with new courage.  Two days later a struggle began in the House for carrying out Lincoln’s purpose.  On the last day of the session along with the offensive Reconstruction Bill, he received the new Enrollment Act which provided that “no payment of money shall be accepted or received by the Government as commutation to release any enrolled or drafted man from personal obligation to per-form military service.”

Against this inflexible determination to fight to a finish, this indifference to the political consequences of his determination, Lincoln beheld arising like a portentous specter, a fury of pacifism.  It found expression in Greeley.  Always the swift victim of his own affrighted hope, Greeley had persuaded himself that both North and South had lost heart for the war; that there was needed only a moving appeal, and they would throw down their arms and the millennium would come.  Furthermore, on the flimsiest sort of evidence, he had fallen into a trap designed to place the Northern government in the attitude of suing for peace.  He wrote to Lincoln demanding that he send an agent to confer with certain Confederate officials who were reported to be then in Canada; he also suggested terms of peace.(4) Greeley’s terms were entirely acceptable to Lincoln; but he had no faith in the Canadian mare’s nest.  However, he decided to give Greeley the utmost benefit of the doubt, and also to teach him a lesson.  He commissioned Greeley himself to proceed to Canada, there to discover “if there is or is not anything in the affair.”  He wrote to him, “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made."(5)