of pure moralists. They
worried the President, condemned his policy, divided the counsels of the
government, and introduced injurious personal enmities and partisanship
with reckless disregard of probable consequences. To a considerable
extent they had the same practical effect as if they had been avowed
opponents of the Republican President. They wished immediately to place
the war upon the footing of a crusade for the abolition of slavery.
Among them were old-time Abolitionists, with whom this purpose was a
religion, men who had hoped to see Seward the Republican President, and
who said that Lincoln's friends in the nominating convention had
represented a "superficial and only half-hearted Republicanism." Beside
these men, though actuated by very different and much less honorable
motives, stood many recruits, some even from the Democracy, who were so
vindictive against the South that they desired to inflict abolition as a
punishment.

All these critics and dissatisfied persons soon began to speak with
severity, and sometimes with contempt, against the President. He had
said that the war was for the Union; but they scornfully retorted that
this was to reduce it to "a mere sectional strife for ascendency;" that
"a Union, with slavery spared and reinstated, would not be worth the
cost of saving it." It was true that to save the Union, without also
removing the cause of disunion, might not be worth a very great price;
yet both Union and abolition were in serious danger of being thrown away
forever by these impetuous men who desired to pluck the fruit before it
was ripe, or rather declared it to be ripe because they so wanted to
pluck it.

It is not, here and now, a question of the merits and the usefulness of
these men; undoubtedly their uncompromising ardor could not have been
dispensed with in the great anti-slavery struggle; it was what the steam
is to the engine, and if the motive power had been absent no one can say
how long the United States might have lain dormant as a slave-country.
But the question is of their present attitude and of its influence and
effect in the immediate affairs of the government. Their demand was for
an instant and sweeping proclamation of emancipation; and they were
angry and denunciatory against the President because he would not give
it to them. Of course, by their ceaseless assaults they hampered him and
weakened his hands very seriously. It was as an exercise of the
President's war-po