Lincoln turned to him and said quietly but with finality: "I conceive
that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which can not
constitutionally be done by Congress."

Chandler angrily left the room. To those who remained, Lincoln added: "I
do not see how any of us now can deny and contradict what we have always
said, that Congress has no constitutional power over slavery in the
States."(6)

In a way, he was begging the question. The real issue was not how a
State should be constitutionally reconstructed, but which, President
or Congress, had a right to assume dictatorial power. At last the true
Vindictive issue, lured out of their arms by the Democrats, had escaped
like a bird from a snare and was fluttering home. Here was the old issue
of the war powers in a new form that it was safe for them to press.
And the President had squarely defied them. It was civil war inside the
Union party. And for both sides, President and Vindictives, there could
now be nothing but rule or ruin.

In this crisis of factional politics, Lincoln was unmoved,
self-contained, lofty, deliberate. "If they (the Vindictives) choose to
make a point on this, I do not doubt that they can do harm. They have
never been friendly to me. At all events, I must keep some consciousness
of being somewhere near right. I must keep some standard of principle
fixed within myself."

XXXI A MENACING PAUSE

Lincoln had now reached his final stature. In contact with the world his
note was an inscrutable serenity. The jokes which he continued to tell
were but transitory glimmerings. They crossed the surface of his mood
like quick flickers of golden light on a stormy March day,--witnesses
that the sun would yet prevail,--in a forest-among mountain shadows. Or,
they were lightning glimmers in a night sky; they revealed, they did
not dispel, the dark beyond. Over all his close associates his personal
ascendency was complete. Now that Chase was gone, the last callous spot
in the Cabinet had been amputated. Even Stanton, once so domineering, so
difficult to manage, had become as clay in his hands.

But Lincoln never used power for its own sake, never abused his
ascendency. Always he got his end if he could without evoking the
note of command. He would go to surprising lengths to avoid appearing
peremptory. A typical remark was his smiling reply to a Congressman whom
he had armed with a note to the Secretary, who had returned aghast,
the Secretary