Before, however, he had quite abandoned this hope he had already begun to see his way in case it failed.  His last appeal to the border States was made on July 12, 1862, while McClellan’s army still lay at Harrison’s Landing.  On the following day he privately told Seward and Bates that he had “about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity, absolutely essential to the salvation of the nation, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”  On July 22 he read to his Cabinet the first draft of his Proclamation of Emancipation; telling them before he consulted them that substantially his mind was made up.  Various members of the Cabinet raised points on which he had already thought and had come to a conclusion, but, as he afterwards told a friend, Seward raised a point which had never struck him before.  He said that, if issued at that time of depression, just after the failure in the Peninsula, the Proclamation would seem like “a cry of distress”; and that it would have a much better effect if it were issued after some military success.

Seward was certainly right.  The danger of division in the North would have been increased and the prospect of a good effect abroad would have been diminished if the Proclamation had been issued at a time of depression and manifest failure.  Lincoln, who had been set on issuing it, instantly felt the force of this objection.  He put aside his draft, and resolved not to issue the Proclamation till the right moment, and apparently resolved to keep the whole question open in his own mind till the time for action came.

Accordingly the two months which followed were not only full of anxiety about the war; they were full for him of a suspense painfully maintained.  It troubled him perhaps comparatively little that he was driven into a position of greater aloofness from the support and sympathy of any party or school.  He must now expect an opposition from the Democrats of the North, for they had declared themselves strongly against the Resolution which he had induced Congress to pass.  And the strong Republicans for their part had acquiesced in it coldly, some of them contemptuously.  In May of this year he had been forced for a second time publicly to repress a keen Republican general who tried to take this question of great policy into his own hands.  General Hunter, commanding a small expedition which had seized Port Royal in South Carolina and some adjacent islands rich in cotton, had in a grand manner assumed to declare free all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.  This, of course, could not be let pass.  Congress, too, had been occupied in the summer with a new measure for confiscating rebel property; some Republicans in the West set great store on such confiscation; other Republicans saw in it the incidental advantage that more slaves might be liberated under it.  It was learnt that the President might put his veto upon it.  It seemed to purport, contrary to the