against me,' said Lincoln sadly and in evident surprise at the want of
statesmanlike liberality on the part of the executive council," to
quote his Secretary, "folded and laid away the draft of his message."(5)
Nicolay believes that the idea continued vividly in his mind and that it
may be linked with his last public utterance--"it may be my duty to make
some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering and
shall not fail to act when satisfied that action is proper."

It was now obvious to every one outside the Confederacy that the war
would end speedily in a Northern victory. To Lincoln, therefore, the
duty of the moment, overshadowing all else, was the preparation for
what should come after. Reconstruction. More than ever it was of first
importance to decide whether the President or Congress should deal with
this great matter. And now occurred an event which bore witness at once
to the beginning of Lincoln's final struggle with the Vindictives and to
that personal ascendency which was steadily widening. One of those three
original Jacobins agreed to become his spokesman in the Senate. As the
third person of the Jacobin brotherhood, Lyman Trumbull had always been
out of place. He had gone wrong not from perversity of the soul but from
a mental failing, from the lack of inherent light, from intellectual
conventionality. But he was a good man. One might apply to him Mrs.
Browning's line: "Just a good man made a great man." And in his case, as
in so many others, sheer goodness had not been sufficient in the midst
of a revolution to save his soul. To quote one of the greatest of the
observers of human life: "More brains, O Lord, more brains." Though
Trumbull had the making of an Intellectual, politics had very nearly
ruined him. For all his good intentions it took him a long time to
see what Hawthorne saw at first sight-that Lincoln was both a powerful
character and an original mind. Still, because Trumbull was really a
good man, he found a way to recover his soul. What his insight was not
equal to perceiving in 1861, experience slowly made plain to him in
the course of the next three years. Before 1865 he had broken with
the Vindictives; he had come over to Lincoln. Trumbull still held the
powerful office of Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He now
undertook to be the President's captain in a battle on the floor of the
Senate for the recognition of Louisiana.

The new government in Louisiana had