w these points are less likely to escape your attention than they
would be mine. If there is anything wanting which is within my power
to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now, with a brave army and a
just cause, may God sustain you."(7)

XXIX. CATASTROPHE

If the politicians needed a definite warning, in addition to what the
ground was saying, it was given by an incident that centered upon Chase.
A few bold men whose sense of the crowd was not so acute as it might
have been, attempted to work up a Chase boom. At the instance of Senator
Pomeroy, a secret paper known to-day as the Pomeroy Circular, was
started on its travels. The Circular aimed to make Chase the Vindictive
candidate. Like all the other anti-Lincoln moves of the early part
of 1864, it was premature. The shrewd old Senators who were silently
marshaling the Vindictive forces, let it alone.

Chase's ambition was fully understood at the White House. During the
previous year, his irritable self-consciousness had led to quarrels
with the President, generally over patronage, and more than once he had
offered his resignation. On one occasion, Lincoln went to his house and
begged him to reconsider. Alone among the Cabinet, Chase had failed
to take the measure of Lincoln and still considered him a second-rate
person, much his inferior. He rated very high the services to his
country of the Secretary of the Treasury whom he considered the logical
successor to the Presidency.

Lincoln refused to see what Chase was after. "I have determined," he
told Hay, "to shut my eyes as far as possible to everything of the sort.
Mr. Chase makes a good secretary and I shall keep him where he is."(1)
In lighter vein, he said that Chase's presidential ambition was like a
"chin fly" pestering a horse; it led to his putting all the energy he
had into his work.(2)

When a copy of the Circular found its way to the White House, Lincoln
refused to read it.(3) Soon afterward it fell into the hands of an
unsympathetic or indiscreet editor and was printed. There was a hubbub.
Chase offered to resign. Lincoln wrote to him in reply:

"My knowledge of Mr. Pomeroy's letter having been made public came to
me only the day you wrote but I had, in Spite of myself, known of its
existence several days before. I have not yet read it, and I think
I shall not. I was not shocked or surprised by the appearance of the
letter because I had had knowledge of Mr. Pomeroy's committee, and of
s