now to do its part, and especially he appealed for such prompt and adequate provision of money and men as would enable the war to be speedily brought to a close.  Congress, with but a few dissentient voices, chiefly from the border States, approved all that he had done, and voted the supplies that he had asked.  Then, by a resolution of both Houses, it defined the object of the war; the war was not for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or of “overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions” of the Southern States; it was solely “to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired.”

In this resolution may be found the clue to the supreme political problem with which, side by side with the conduct of the war, Lincoln was called upon to grapple unceasingly for the rest of his life.  That problem lay in the inevitable change, as the war dragged on, of the political object involved in it.  The North as yet was not making war upon the institutions of Southern States, in other words upon slavery, and it would have been wrong to do so.  It was simply asserting the supremacy of law by putting down what every man in the North regarded as rebellion.  That rebellion, it seemed likely, would completely subside after a decisive defeat or two of the Southern forces.  The law and the Union would then have been restored as before.  A great victory would in fact have been won over slavery, for the policy of restricting its further spread would have prevailed, but the constitutional right of each Southern State to retain slavery within its borders was not to be denied by those who were fighting, as they claimed, for the Constitution.

Such at first was the position taken up by an unanimous Congress.  It was obviously in accord with those political principles of Lincoln which have been examined in a former chapter.  More than that, it was the position which, as he thought, his official duty as President imposed on him.  It is exceedingly difficult for any Englishman to follow his course as the political situation developed.  He was neither a dictator, nor an English Prime Minister.  He was first and foremost an elected officer with powers and duties prescribed by a fixed Constitution which he had sworn to obey.  His oath was continually present to his mind.

He was there to uphold the Union and the laws, with just so much infraction of the letter of the law, and no more, as might be obviously necessary if the Union and the whole fabric of law were not to perish.

The mere duration of the war altered of necessity the policy of the North and of the President.  Their task had presented itself as in theory the “suppression of an unlawful combination” within their country; it became in manifest fact the reabsorption of a country now hostile, with which reunion was possible only if slavery, the fundamental cause of difference, was uprooted.