esident had no right to introduce a bill into Congress!
Dictator Lincoln was trying in a new way to put Congress under his
thumb.(15)

In the last week of the session, Lincoln's new boldness brought the old
relation between himself and Congress to a dramatic close. The Second
Confiscation Bill had long been under discussion. Lincoln believed that
some of its provisions were inconsistent with the spirit at least of
our fundamental law. Though its passage was certain, he prepared a veto
message. He then permitted the congressional leaders to know what he
intended to do when the bill should reach him. Gall and wormwood are
weak terms for the bitterness that may be tasted in the speeches of the
Vindictives. When, in order to save the bill, a resolution was appended
purging it of the interpretation which Lincoln condemned, Trumbull
passionately declared that Congress was being "coerced" by the
President. "No one at a distance," is the deliberate conclusion of
Julian who was present, "could have formed any adequate conception of
the hostility of the Republican members toward Lincoln at the final
adjournment, while it was the belief of many that our last session of
Congress had been held in Washington. Mr. Wade said the country was
going to hell, and that the scenes witnessed in the French Revolution
were nothing in comparison with what we should see here."(16)

Lincoln endured the rage of Congress in unwavering serenity. On the
last day of the session, Congress surrendered and sent to him both the
Confiscation Act and the explanatory resolution. Thereupon, he indulged
in what must have seemed to those fierce hysterical enemies of his a
wanton stroke of irony. He sent them along with his approval of the bill
the text of the veto message he would have sent had they refused to
do what he wanted.(17) There could be no concealing the fact that the
President had matched his will against the will of Congress, and that
the President had had his way.

Out of this strange period of intolerable confusion, a gigantic figure
had at last emerged. The outer and the inner Lincoln had fused. He was
now a coherent personality, masterful in spite of his gentleness, with
his own peculiar fashion of self-reliance, having a policy of his own
devising, his colors nailed upon the masthead.

XXIII. THE MYSTICAL STATESMAN

Lincoln's final emergence was a deeper thing than merely the
consolidation of a character, the transformation of a drea