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Lincoln's hope for an all-parties government was receiving little encouragement The Democrats were breaking into factions, while the control of their party organization was falling into the hands of a group of inferior politicians who were content to "play politics" in the most unscrupulous fashion. Both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of State had authorized arbitrary arrests.
The clue to the psychology of the moment was in the raging demand of the masses for a program of assertion, for aggressive measures. The President was trying to meet this demand with his all-parties program, with his policy of nationalism, exclusive of everything else.
They rejected the all-parties program and insisted on maintaining their separate party formation. This was a turning point in Lincoln's career. Though nearly two years were to pass before he admitted his defeat, the all-parties program was doomed from that hour.
In so doing, he anticipated the main issues that were to follow: his determination to keep nationalism from being narrowed into mere "Northernism"; his effort to create an all-parties government; his stubborn insistence that he was suppressing an insurrection, not waging external war; his doctrine that the Executive, having been chosen by the entire people, was the one expression of the sovereignty of the people, and therefore, the repository of all these exceptional "war powers" that are dormant in time of peace.
Had they possessed any great leaders, could they have refused to play politics and responded to Lincoln's all-parties policy, history might have been different. But they were not that sort. Neither did they have the courage to go to the other extreme and become a resolute opposition party, wholeheartedly and intelligently against the war.
On the thirteenth of December, through Burnside's stubborn incompetence, thousands of American soldiers flung away their lives in a holocaust of useless valor at Fredericksburg. Promptly the Jacobins acted. They set up a shriek: the incompetent President, the all-parties dreamer, the man who persists in coquetting with the Democrats, is blundering into destruction!
While the Jacobins were endeavoring to reorganize the Republican antagonism to the President, Lincoln was taking thought how he could offset still more effectually their influence. In taking up the emancipation policy he had not abandoned his other policy of an all-parties Administration, or of something similar to that. By this time it was plain that a complete union of parties was impossible.
He had added, "We must make it easy for them" to support the government "because we can't live through the case without them." This was the foundation of his attempt so obvious between the lines of the first message to create an all-parties government. This, Chandler violently opposed. Violence was always Chandler's note, so much so that a scornful opponent once called him "Xantippe in pants."
Their short-sighted astuteness in tying up emancipation with the war powers was matched by an equal astuteness equally short-sighted. The organization of the Little Men, when it refused to endorse Lincoln's all-parties program, had found itself in the absurd position of a party without an issue. It contained, to be sure, a large proportion of the Northerners who were opposed to emancipation.
Though, for a brief time while the enthusiasm after Sumter was still at its height they appeared to go along with the all-parties program, they soon revealed their true course. In the autumn of 1861, Lincoln still had sufficient hold upon all factions to make it seem likely that his all-parties program would be given a chance.
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