rseback
as their leader.

It was for precisely this reason that McClellan could not be considered
again for command. His party had fallen under the complete control of
its Copperhead leaders who demanded the ending of the war at once and at
any sacrifice of principle or of the Union.

The only way the President could stop desertions and prevent the actual
secession of the great Northern States of the Middle West, now under the
control of these men, was to use his arbitrary power to suspend the
civil law and put them in prison. Through the State and War Departments
he did this sorrowfully, but promptly.

His answer to his critics was the soundest reasoning and it justified
him in the judgment of thinking men.

"I make such arrests," he declared, "because these men are laboring to
prevent the raising of troops and encouraging desertion. Armies cannot
be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the penalty of
death.

"I will not shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, and refuse to
touch a wily agitator who induces him to commit the crime. To silence
the agitator and save the boy is not only Constitutional, but withal a
great mercy."

Volunteers were no longer to be had and a draft of five hundred thousand
men had been ordered for the summer. The Democratic leaders in solid
array were threatening to resist this draft by every means in their
power, even to riot and revolution.

The masses of the North were profoundly discouraged at the unhappy
results of the war. In thousands of patriotic loyal homes, men and women
had begun to ask themselves whether it were not cruel folly to send
their brave boys to be slaughtered.

The prestige of the Southern army was at its highest point and its
terrible power was nowhere more gravely realized than in the North,
whose thousands of mourning homes attested its valor.

Europe at last seemed ready to spring on the throat of America. Distinct
reports were in circulation in the Old World that the Emperor of France,
Napoleon III, intended to interfere in our affairs. On the 9th of
January, the French Government denied this. The Emperor himself,
however, sent to the President an offer of mediation so blunt and
surprising it could not be doubted that it was a veiled hint of his
purpose to intervene. Beyond a doubt he expected the Union to be
dismembered and he proposed to form an alliance between the Latin Empire
which he was founding in Mexico and the triumphant Conf