Congress. Therefore,
their aim was to pass a bill freeing the slaves on the sole authority of
a congressional act. Many resolutions, many bills, all having this end
in view, were introduced. Some were buried in committees; some were
remade in committees and subjected to long debate by the Houses; now
and then one was passed upon. But the spring wore through and the
summer came, and still the Vindictives were not certainly in control
of Congress. No bill to free slaves by congressional action secured a
majority vote. At the same time it was plain that the strength of the
Vindictives was slowly, steadily, growing.

Outside Congress, the Abolitionists took new hope. They had organized a
systematic propaganda. At Washington, weekly meetings were held in
the Smithsonian Institute, where all their most conspicuous leaders,
Phillips, Emerson, Brownson, Garret Smith, made addresses. Every Sunday
a service was held in the chamber of the House of Representatives and
the sermon was almost always a "terrific arrangement of slavery."
Their watch-word was "A Free Union or Disintegration." The treatment of
fugitive slaves by commanders in the field produced a clamor. Lincoln
insisted on strict obedience to the two laws, the Fugitive Slave Act and
the First Confiscation Act. Abolitionists sneered at "all this gabble
about the sacredness of the Constitution."(3) But Lincoln was not to
be moved. When General Hunter, taking a leaf from the book of Fremont,
tried to force his hand, he did not hesitate. Hunter had issued a
proclamation by which the slaves in the region where he commanded were
"declared forever free."

This was in May when Lincoln's difficulties with McClellan were at their
height; when the Committee was zealously watching to catch him in any
sort of mistake; when the House was within four votes of a majority for
emancipation by act of Congress;(4) when there was no certainty whether
the country was with him or with the Vindictives. Perhaps that new
courage which definitely revealed itself the next month, may be first
glimpsed in the proclamation overruling Hunter:

"I further make known that whether it be competent for me, as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any
State or States free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall
have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the
government to exercise such supposed power, are questions which,
under my responsibility, I reser