occasional failures of tact had sometimes a noble side to them; he even thought now of writing to Chase and telling him with simple seriousness where he felt his temptation lay, and he with difficulty came to see that this attempt at brotherly frankness would be misconstrued by a suspicious and jealous man.  Charles Sumner, Chase’s advocate on this occasion, was all this time the most weighty and the most pronounced of those Radicals who were beginning to press for unrestricted negro suffrage in the South and in general for a hard and inelastic scheme of “reconstruction,” which they would have imposed on the conquered South without an attempt to conciliate the feeling of the vanquished or to invite their co-operation in building up the new order.  He was thus the chief opponent of that more tentative, but as is now seen, more liberal and more practical policy which lay very close to Lincoln’s heart; enough has been said of him to suggest too that this grave person, bereft of any glimmering of fun, was in one sense no congenial companion for Lincoln.  But he was stainlessly unselfish and sincere, and he was the politician above all others in Washington with whom Lincoln most gladly and most successfully maintained easy social intercourse.  And, to please him in little ways, Lincoln would disentangle his long frame from the “grotesque position of comfort” into which he had twisted it in talk with some other friend, and would assume in an instant a courtly demeanour when Sumner was about to enter his room.

On January 31, 1865, the resolution earlier passed by the Senate for a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit slavery was passed by the House of Representatives, as Lincoln had eagerly desired, so that the requisite voting of three quarters of the States in its favour could now begin.  Before that time the Confederate Congress had, on March 13, 1865, closed its last, most anxious and distracted session by passing an Act for the enlistment of negro volunteers, who were to become free on enlistment.  As a military measure it was belated and inoperative, but nothing could more eloquently have marked the practical extinction of slavery which the war had wrought than the consent of Southern legislators to convert the remaining slaves into soldiers.

The military operations of 1865 had proceeded but a very little way when the sense of what they portended was felt among the Southern leaders in Richmond.  The fall of that capital itself might be hastened or be delayed; Lee’s army if it escaped from Richmond might prolong resistance for a shorter or for a longer time, but Sherman’s march to the sea, and the far harder achievements of the same kind which he was now beginning, made the South feel, as he knew it would feel, that not a port, not an arsenal, not a railway, not a corn district of the South lay any longer beyond the striking range of the North.  Congressmen and public officials in Richmond knew that the people of the South now longed for peace