n are like other artists. Just as the painter or the
poet, seizing upon old subjects, uses them as outlets for his particular
temper, his particular emotion, and as the temper, the emotion are what
counts in his work, so with statesmen, with Lincoln on the one hand,
with Chandler at the opposite extreme.

The Jacobins stood first of all for the sudden reaction of bold fierce
natures from a long political repression. They had fought their way to
leadership as captains of an opposition. They were artists who had been
denied an opportunity of expression. By a sudden turn of fortune, it had
seemed to come within their grasp. Temperamentally they were fighters.
Battle for them was an end in itself. The thought of Conquest sang to
them like the morning stars. Had they been literary men, their favorite
poetry would have been the sacking of Troy town. Furthermore, they were
intensely provincial. Undoubted as was their courage, they had also the
valor of ignorance. They had the provincial's disdain for the other
side of the horizon, his unbounded confidence in his ability to whip all
creation. Chandler, scornfully brushing aside a possible foreign war,
typified their mood.

And in quiet veto of all their hopes rose against them the apparently
easy-going, the smiling, story-telling, unrevengeful, new man at
the White House. It is not to be wondered that they spent the summer
laboring to build up a party against him, that they turned eagerly to
the new session of Congress, hoping to consolidate a faction opposed to
Lincoln.

His second message (1), though without a word of obvious defiance, set
him squarely against them on all their vital contentions. The winter of
1861-1862 is the strangest period of Lincoln's career. Although the two
phases of him, the outer and the inner, were, in point of fact, moving
rapidly toward their point of fusion, apparently they were further away
than ever before. Outwardly, his most conspicuous vacillations were in
this winter and in the following spring. Never before or after did he
allow himself to be overshadowed so darkly by his advisers in all the
concerns of action. In amazing contrast, in all the concerns of thought,
he was never more entirely himself. The second message, prepared when
the country rang with what seemed to be a general frenzy against him,
did not give ground one inch. This was all the more notable because his
Secretary of War had tried to force his hand. Cameron had the reput