and for a few days or weeks after it had actually taken place that the panic of the Republicans lasted.  But during that time the alarm among them was very great, whether it was wholly due to the discouragement of the people about the war or originated among the leaders and was communicated to their flock.  Sagacious party men reported from their own neighbourhoods that there was no chance of winning the election.  In one quarter or another there was talk of setting aside Lincoln and compelling Grant to be a candidate.  About August 12 Lincoln was told by Thurlow Weed, the greatest of party managers, that his election was hopeless.  Ten days later he received the same assurance from the central Republican Committee through their chairman, Raymond, together with the advice that he should make overtures for peace.

Supposing that in the following November McClellan should have been elected, and that in the following March he should have come into office with the war unfinished, it seems now hardly credible that he would have returned to slavery, or at least disbanded without protection the 150,000 negroes who were now serving the North.  Lincoln, however, seriously believed that this was the course to which McClellan’s principles and those of his party committed him, and that (policy and honour apart) this would have been for military reasons fatal.  McClellan had repudiated the Peace Resolution, but his followers and his character were to be reckoned with rather than his words, and indeed his honest principles committed him deeply to some attempt to reverse Lincoln’s policy as to slavery, and he clearly must have been driven into negotiations with the South.  The confusion which must inevitably be created by attempts to satisfy the South, when it was in no humour of moderation, and by the fury which yielding would have provoked in half the people of the North, was well and tersely described by Grant in a letter to a friend, which that friend published in support of Lincoln.  At a fair at Philadelphia for the help of the wounded Lincoln said:  “We accepted this war; we did not begin it.  We accepted it for an object, and when that object is accomplished the war will end, and I hope to God that it will never end until that object is accomplished.”  Whatever the real mind of McClellan and of the average Democrat may have been, it was not this; and the posterity of Mr. Facing-both-ways may succeed in an election, but never in war or the making of lasting peace.

Lincoln looked forward with happiness, after he was actually re-elected, to the quieter pursuits of private life which might await him in four years’ time.  He looked forward not less happily to a period of peace administration first, and there can be no doubt that he would have prized as much as any man the highest honour that his countrymen could bestow, a second election to the Presidency.  But, even in a smaller man who had passed through such an experience as he