asses for a program of assertion, for
aggressive measures. The President was trying to meet this demand with
his all-parties program, with his policy of nationalism, exclusive of
everything else. And recently he had added that other assertion, his
insistence that the executive in certain respects was independent of the
legislative. Of his three assertions, one, the all-parties program,
was already on the way to defeat Another, nationalism, as the President
interpreted it, had alienated the Abolitionists. The third, his argument
for himself as tribune, was just what your crafty politician might
twist, pervert, load with false meanings to his heart's content. Men
less astute than Chandler and Wade could not have failed to see where
fortune pointed. Their opportunity lay in a combination of the two
issues. Abolition and the resistance to executive "usurpation." Their
problem was to create an anti-Lincoln party that should also be a
war party. Their coalition of aggressive forces must accept the
Abolitionists as its backbone, but it must also include all violent
elements of whatever persuasion, and especially all those that could be
wrought into fury on the theme of the President as a despot. Above all,
their coalition must absorb and then express the furious temper so dear
to their own hearts which they fondly believed-mistakenly, they were
destined to discover-was the temper of the country.

It can not be said that this was the Republican program. The
President's program, fully as positive as that of the Cabal, had as good
a right to appropriate the party label--as events were to show, a better
right. But the power of the Cabal was very great, and the following it
was able to command in the country reached almost the proportions of the
terrible. A factional name is needed. For the Jacobins, their allies in
Congress, their followers in the country, from the time they acquired a
positive program, an accurate label is the Vindictives.

During the remainder of the session, Congress may be thought of as
having--what Congress seldom has--three definite groups, Right, Left and
Center. The Right was the Vindictives; the Left, the irreconcilable
Democrats; the Center was composed chiefly of liberal Republicans but
included a few Democrats, those who rebelled against the political
chicanery of the Little Men.

The policy of the Vindictives was to force upon the Administration the
double issue of emancipation and the supremacy of