o detect
personal prejudice, for or against any one; and his account is so clear
and convincing that it must be accepted, whether one likes his
conclusions or not.
[30] _Own Story_, 466.
[31] Pope retained for a few days command of the army in camp outside
the defenses.
[32] McClure says: "I saw Lincoln many times during the campaign of
1864, when McClellan was his competitor for the presidency. I never
heard him speak of McClellan in any other than terms of the highest
personal respect and kindness." _Lincoln and Men of War-Times_, 207.
CHAPTER IV
THE AUTUMN ELECTIONS OF 1862, AND THE PROCLAMATION OF EMANCIPATION
The chapter which has been written on "Emancipation and Politics" shows
that while loyalty to the Union operated as a bond to hold together the
people of the North, slavery entered as a wedge to force them asunder.
It was not long before the wedge proved a more powerful force than the
bond, for the wedge was driven home by human nature; and it was
inevitable that the men of conservative temperament and the men of
progressive temperament should erelong be easily restored to their
instinctive antagonism. Of those who had been stigmatized as "Northern
men with Southern principles," many soon found their Southern
proclivities reviving. These men, christened "Copperheads," became more
odious to loyal Northerners than were the avowed Secessionists. In
return for their venomous nickname and the contempt and hatred with
which they were treated, they themselves grew steadily more rancorous,
more extreme in their feelings. They denounced and opposed every measure
of the government, harangued vehemently against the war and against all
that was done to prosecute it, reviled with scurrilous and passionate
abuse every prominent Republican, filled the air with disheartening
forecasts of defeat, ruin, and woe, and triumphed whenever the miserable
prophecies seemed in the way of fulfillment. General Grant truly
described them as auxiliaries to the Confederate army, and said that the
North would have been much better off with a hundred thousand of these
men in the Southern ranks, and the rest of their kind at home thoroughly
subdued, as the Unionists were at the South, than was the case as the
struggle was actually conducted. In time the administration found itself
forced, though reluctantly, to arrest and imprison many of the
ringleaders in this Northern disaffection. Yet all the while the
Copperheads res
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