and his appreciation of the larger bearings of every question might have been expected to set Stanton right, unless, indeed, the thing was done suddenly behind his back.  In any case, this must be added to the indications seen in an earlier chapter, that Lincoln’s calm strength and sure judgment had at that time not yet reached their full development.  As for Stanton, a man of much narrower mind, but acute, devoted, and morally fearless, kept in the War Department as a sort of tame tiger to prey on abuses, negligences, pretensions, and political influences, this was one among a hundred smaller erratic doings, which his critics have never thought of as outweighing his peculiar usefulness.  His departmental point of view can easily be understood.  Recruits, embarrassingly, presented themselves much faster than they could be organised or equipped, and an overdriven office did not pause to think out some scheme of enlistment for deferred service.  Waste had been terrific, and Stanton did not dislike a petty economy which might shock people in Washington.  McClellan clamoured for more men—­let him do something with what he had got; Stanton, indeed, very readily became sanguine that McClellan, once in motion, would crush the Confederacy.  Events conspired to make the mistake disastrous.  In these very days the Confederacy was about to pass its own Conscription Act.  McClellan, instead of pressing on to Richmond, sat down before Yorktown and let the Confederate conscripts come up.  Halleck was crawling southward, when a rapid advance might have robbed the South of a large recruiting area.  The reopening of enlistment came on the top of the huge disappointment at McClellan’s failure in the peninsula.  There was a creditable response to the call which was then made for volunteers.  But the disappointment of the war continued throughout 1862; the second Bull Run; the inconclusive sequel to Antietam; Fredericksburg; and, side by side with these events, the long-drawn failure of Buell’s and Rosecrans’ operations.  The spirit of voluntary service seems to have revived vigorously enough wherever and whenever the danger of Southern invasion became pressing, but under this protracted depressing influence it no longer rose to the task of subduing the South.  It must be added that wages in civil employment were very high.  Lincoln, it is evident, felt this apparent failure of patriotism sadly, but in calm retrospect it cannot seem surprising.

In the latter part of 1862 attempts were made to use the powers of compulsion which the several States possessed, under the antiquated laws as to militia which existed in all of them, in order to supplement recruiting.  The number of men raised for short periods in this way is so small that the description of the Northern armies at this time as purely volunteer armies hardly needs qualification.  It would probably be worth no one’s while to investigate the makeshift system with which the Government, very properly, then