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Updated: June 8, 2025
Still, because Trumbull was really a good man, he found a way to recover his soul. What his insight was not equal to perceiving in 1861, experience slowly made plain to him in the course of the next three years. Before 1865 he had broken with the Vindictives; he had come over to Lincoln. Trumbull still held the powerful office of Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Was there any way to forestall or disarm the Vindictives? His silence gives us no clue when or how the answer occurred to him by separating the two issues; by carrying out the hint in the May proclamation; by yielding on emancipation while, in the very act, pushing the war powers of the President to their limit, declaring slaves free by an executive order.
That was pretty definitely a question of whether Abraham Lincoln or, say, Zachary Chandler, was to control its policy. A vain, weak man precipitated the inevitable struggle between these two. Fremont had been flattered to the skies. He conceived himself a genius. He was persuaded that the party of the new temper, the men who may fairly be called the Vindictives, were lords of the ascendent.
Chase, previous to this hour, may truly be called an imposing figure. As a leader of the extreme Republicans, he had earned much fame. Lincoln had given him a free hand in the Treasury and all the financial measures of the government were his. Hitherto, Vindictives of all sorts had loved him. He was a critic of the President's mildness, and a severe critic of Seward. But Chase was not candid.
Sumner had preached the idea that the Southern States by attempting to secede had committed "State suicide" and should now be treated as Territories. Stevens and the Vindictives generally, while avoiding Sumner's subtlety, called them "conquered provinces." And all these wanted to take them from under the protection of the President and place them helpless at the feet of Congress.
The Vindictives were the leaders of the moment. What if they persuaded the Senate not to confirm Lincoln's choice of Secretary. "I never saw the President," says Carpenter, "under so much excitement as on the day following this event" On the night of July first, Lincoln lay awake debating with himself the merits of various candidates. At length, he selected his man and immediately went to sleep.
The elder generals, it happened, sympathized generally with the Committee in politics, or at least did not sympathize with McClellan. The younger generals reflected the politics of their patron. And McClellan was a Democrat, a hater of the Vindictives, unsympathetic with Abolition.
He was a member of the House. In the House many young and headstrong politicians rallied about him. The Democrats at times craftily followed his lead. Despite the older and more astute Vindictives of the Senate, Chandler, Wade and the rest who knew that their time had not come, Davis, with his ardent followers, took up the President's challenge.
And if ever the Little Men deserved their label it was when they played into the hands of the terrible Vindictives, thus becoming responsible for the rejection of Lincoln's plan of reconstruction.
As the date of the "Union Convention" approached, Lincoln put aside an opportunity to gratify the Vindictives. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the recruiting offices had been opened to negroes. Thereupon the Confederate government threatened to treat black soldiers as brigands, and to refuse to their white officers the protection of the laws of war.
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