a new hope.  He divined, if he did not perceive, that the Confederates were on the verge of despair.  If he had been a Vindictive, this would have borne fruit in ferocious telegrams to his generals to strike and spare not.  What Lincoln did was to lay before the Cabinet this proposal:—­that they advise Congress to offer the Confederate government the sum of four hundred million dollars, provided the war end and the States in secession acknowledge the authority of the Federal government previous to April 1, 1865.  But the Cabinet, complete as was his domination in some respects, were not ripe for such a move as this. “’You are all against me,’ said Lincoln sadly and in evident surprise at the want of statesmanlike liberality on the part of the executive council,” to quote his Secretary, “folded and laid away the draft of his message."(5) Nicolay believes that the idea continued vividly in his mind and that it may be linked with his last public utterance—­“it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South.  I am considering and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action is proper.”

It was now obvious to every one outside the Confederacy that the war would end speedily in a Northern victory.  To Lincoln, therefore, the duty of the moment, overshadowing all else, was the preparation for what should come after.  Reconstruction.  More than ever it was of first importance to decide whether the President or Congress should deal with this great matter.  And now occurred an event which bore witness at once to the beginning of Lincoln’s final struggle with the Vindictives and to that personal ascendency which was steadily widening.  One of those three original Jacobins agreed to become his spokesman in the Senate.  As the third person of the Jacobin brotherhood, Lyman Trumbull had always been out of place.  He had gone wrong not from perversity of the soul but from a mental failing, from the lack of inherent light, from intellectual conventionality.  But he was a good man.  One might apply to him Mrs. Browning’s line:  “Just a good man made a great man.”  And in his case, as in so many others, sheer goodness had not been sufficient in the midst of a revolution to save his soul.  To quote one of the greatest of the observers of human life:  “More brains, O Lord, more brains.”  Though Trumbull had the making of an Intellectual, politics had very nearly ruined him.  For all his good intentions it took him a long time to see what Hawthorne saw at first sight-that Lincoln was both a powerful character and an original mind.  Still, because Trumbull was really a good man, he found a way to recover his soul.  What his insight was not equal to perceiving in 1861, experience slowly made plain to him in the course of the next three years.  Before 1865 he had broken with the Vindictives; he had come over to Lincoln.  Trumbull still held the powerful office of Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  He now undertook to be the President’s captain in a battle on the floor of the Senate for the recognition of Louisiana.