onnected. And the outer, in his caution, in his willingness to be
instructed, in his opposition to extreme measures, made the inevitable
impression that temperance makes upon fury, caution upon rashness.

Throughout the late summer, Lincoln was the target of many attacks,
chiefly from the Abolitionists. Somehow, in the previous spring, they
had got it into their heads that at heart he was one of them, that he
waited only for a victory to declare the war a crusade of abolition.(8)
When the crisis passed and a Democrat was put at the head of the army,
while Fremont was left in the relative obscurity of St. Louis, Abolition
bitterness became voluble. The Crittenden Resolution was scoffed at as
an "ill-timed revival of the policy of conciliation." Threats against
the Administration revived, taking the old form of demands for a wholly
new Cabinet The keener-sighted Abolitionists had been alarmed by the
first message, by what seemed to them its ominous silence as to slavery.
Late in July, Emerson said in conversation, "If the Union is incapable
of securing universal freedom, its disruption were as the breaking up of
a frog-pond."(9) An outcry was raised because Federal generals did not
declare free all the slaves who in any way came into their hands.
The Abolitionists found no solace in the First Confiscation Act which
provided that an owner should lose his claim to a slave, had the slave
been used to assist the Confederate government. They were enraged by an
order, early in August, informing generals that it was the President's
desire "that all existing rights in all the States be fully respected
and maintained; in cases of fugitives from the loyal Slave States, the
enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law by the ordinary forms of judicial
proceedings must be respected by the military authorities; in
the disloyal States the Confiscation Act of Congress must be your
guide."(10) Especially, the Abolitionists were angered because of
Lincoln's care for the forms of law in those Slave States that had not
seceded. They vented their bitterness in a famous sneer--"The President
would like to have God on his side, but he must have Kentucky."

A new temper was forming throughout the land. It was not merely the old
Abolitionism. It was a blend of all those elements of violent feeling
which war inevitably releases; it was the concentration of all these
elements on the issue of Abolition as upon a terrible weapon; it was the
resurrection of