Carolina,
aggravated the growing impatience of the people. On the ninth day
of June I submitted a resolution instructing the judiciary committee
to report a bill repealing the Fugitive Slave Act, which was laid
on the table by a vote of sixty-six to fifty-one, sixteen Republicans
voting in the affirmative. On the second of July I called to see
the President, and had a familiar talk about the war. He looked
thin and haggard, but seemed cheerful. Although our forces were
then engaged in a terrific conflict with the enemy near Richmond,
and everybody was anxious as to the result, he was quite as placid
as usual, and could not resist his "ruling passion" for anecdotes.
If I had judged him by appearances I should have pronounced him
incapable of any deep earnestness of feeling; but his manner was
so kindly, and so free from the ordinary crookedness of the politician
and the vanity and self-importance of official position, that
nothing but good-will was inspired by his presence. He was still
holding fast his faith in General McClellan, and this was steadily
widening the breach between him and Congress, and periling the
success of the war. The general gloom in Washington increased till
the adjournment, but Mr. Sumner still had faith in the President,
and prophesied good things as to his final action.

The Confiscation Act of this session, which was approved by the
President on the seventeenth day of July, providing that slaves of
rebels coming into our lines should be made free, and that the
property of their owners, both real and personal, should be
confiscated, would have given great and wide-spread satisfaction;
but the President refused to sign the bill without a modification
first made exempting the fee of rebel land-owners from its operation,
thus powerfully aiding them in their deadly struggle against us.
This action was inexpressibly provoking; but Congress was obliged
to make the modification required, as the only means of securing
the important advantages of other features of the measure. This
anti-republican discrimination between real and personal property
when the nation was struggling for its life against a rebellious
aristocracy founded on the monopoly of land and the ownership of
negroes, roused a popular opposition which thus far was altogether
unprecedented. The feeling in Congress, however, was far more
intense than throughout the country. No one at a distance could
have formed any adequate concep