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Updated: June 8, 2025
This was the motive behind his prompt suppression of Fremont. It was this that inspired the Abolitionist sneer about his relative attitude toward God and Kentucky. As a compromise, to cut the ground from under the Vindictives, he had urged the loyal Slave States to endorse a program of compensated emancipation.
In a way, it was his declaration of war against the Vindictives. It is the final statement of a policy toward helpless opponents he refused to call them enemies which among the conquerors of history is hardly, if at all, to be paralleled.
If Lincoln wished to go over his head and rescind his order let him do so-and take the consequences. Lincoln quietly did so. His battle with the Vindictives was on. For a moment it seemed as if he had destroyed his cause. So loud was the outcry of the voluble people, that any one might have been excused momentarily for thinking that all the North had risen against him.
Chase; he possesses a national reputation and the confidence of the country; he is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals." In other words, though he was not at heart one of them, he stood for the moment so close to the Vindictives that they would not make an issue on his confirmation. Lincoln had scored a point in his game with the Vindictives.
He had insisted on an appointment of which the President disapproved. Exactly what moved him may be questioned. Chase never gave his complete confidence, not even to his diary. Whether he thought that the Vindictives would now take him up as a rival of Lincoln, continues doubtful. Many men were staggered by his action. Crittenden, the Registrar of the Treasury, was thrown into a panic. "Mr.
Weighty as were all these reasons for a change of policy turning the flank of the Vindictives on the war powers, committing the Abolitionists to the Administration, winning over the European Liberals there was a fourth reason which, very probably, weighed upon Lincoln most powerfully of them all. Profound gloom had settled upon the country. There was no enthusiasm for military service.
However, two groups of men in his own party were sullenly opposed to him the relentless Vindictives and certain irresponsible free lances who named themselves the "Radical Democracy." In the latter group, Fremont was the hero; Wendell Phillips, the greatest advocate. They were extremists in all things; many of them Agnostics.
And for both sides, President and Vindictives, there could now be nothing but rule or ruin. In this crisis of factional politics, Lincoln was unmoved, self-contained, lofty, deliberate. They have never been friendly to me. At all events, I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right. I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself."
They published an account of the episode, thus effecting an exposure which led to sharp attacks upon Greeley by the Northern press. In the bitterness of his mortification Greeley then went from one extreme to the other and joined the Vindictives. Less than three weeks after the conference at Niagara, the "Wade-Davis Manifesto" appeared.
And at this moment no man was chafing more angrily because of what the ground was saying, no man was watching the President more keenly, than Chandler. History is said to repeat itself, and all things are supposed to come to him who waits. While Davis's bill was before the House, Lincoln accepted battle with the Vindictives in a way that was entirely unostentatious, but that burned his bridges.
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