r in two fashions. He met the arguments and appeals
of the "Copperheads" with unanswerable logic and with that lucidity of
thought and expression of which he was a master. One pronouncement of
his is worth quoting, and one wishes that it could have been reproduced
everywhere at the time of the ridiculous Stockholm project. "Suppose
refugees from the South and peace men of the North get together and
frame and proclaim a compromise embracing a restoration of the Union: in
what way can that compromise be used to keep Lee's army out of
Pennsylvania? Meade's army can keep Lee's out of Pennsylvania, and, I
think, can ultimately drive it out of existence. But no paper
compromise, to which the controllers of Lee's army are not agreed, can
at all affect that army." Reasoning could not be more conclusive; but
Lincoln did not stop at reasoning. Now was to be shown how powerful an
instrument of authority the Jacksonian revolution had created in the
popular elective Presidency. Perhaps no single man ever exercised so
much direct personal power as did Abraham Lincoln during those four
years of Civil War. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended by executive
decree, and those whose action was thought a hindrance to military
success were arrested in shoals by the orders of Stanton, the new
energetic War Secretary, a Jacksonian Democrat whom Lincoln had put in
the place of an incompetent Republican, though he had served under
Buchanan and supported Breckinridge. The constitutional justification of
these acts was widely challenged, but the people in the main supported
the Executive.

Lincoln, like Jackson, understood the populace and knew just how to
appeal to them. "Must I shoot a simple-minded boy for deserting, and
spare the wily agitator whose words induce him to desert?" Vallandingham
himself met a measure of justice characteristic of the President's
humour and almost recalling the jurisprudence of Sir W. S. Gilbert's
Mikado. Originally condemned to detention in a fortress, his sentence
was commuted by Lincoln to banishment, and he was conducted by the
President's orders across the army lines and dumped on the Confederacy!
He did not stay there long. The Southerners had doubtless some reason to
be grateful to him; but they cannot possibly have liked him. With their
own Vallandinghams they had an even shorter way.

The same sort of war-weariness was perhaps a contributory cause of an
even more serious episode--the Draft Riots of New York