and in creating partisans for and against other generals. We know Mr. Seward has said that he was the last member of the cabinet that gave his vote for Fremont's removal from his command, which we believe is literally true, in the sense that he was the last member of the cabinet that voted, at the meeting when his removal was finally approved; but we are not aware that he has denied that he urged or dictated the dispatch, two days before, removing him. General Fremont, for good or bad reasons, has a firmer hold on the affections of the loyal people of the country than any other man in it, and his name excites a popular enthusiasm that no other name among us will or can, and, though we interfere not with military appointments, and ask not that he be given an active command, we tell the administration that it cannot afford to alienate and discourage his friends any more than Mr. Seward can afford to dispense with the political support of General McClellan.

We have written plainly, more plainly than the times seem to warrant; but we know we have done so with a loyal heart and a loyal purpose. We want our nation saved, and we care not who saves or has the glory of saving it, if saved it be. If Mr. Seward is that man, all honor to him; but we tell him, we tell the president, we tell the country, if his policy be any longer continued, we shall have no nation to save. On all points he has been outwitted, outgeneralled, and defeated, and the nation stands disgraced at home and abroad. For a moment he may succeed in diverting the indignation of the army, sacrificed to his expectant policy, from himself to the secretary of war, or to the abolitionists; but the truth will ere long be known, and his political juggling or his jaunty airs will fail to save him. For the president personally, we have great respect, and believe that, if he could rid his administration of Mr. Seward, the "irrepressible conflict" man, and put a competent national man in his place, a man of ideas and of practical wisdom, not a mere politician, who understands nothing but rhetoric and the manipulation of party, he might yet succeed in carrying us safely through the national crisis. Perhaps all we ask will be done before what we write issues from the press, perhaps it will not, perhaps it is no longer practicable or possible.

VOL. XVII-25

THE PRESIDENT'S POLICY.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1863.]

In it,

PRESIDENT LINCOLN's message to congress, at the opening of the present session, is a plain, straight-forward, dignified, and important document, and in tone, spirit, and style, is decidedly superior to any of his previous messages. for the first time since his inauguration, he adopts and defines a policy, or proves that his government has a policy, whether a policy the country will approve, or not. The great complaint has been that he has had no decided policy, and that he has appeared to be carried along by the course of events, without attempting to control them, and shape them to his purpose.

Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, committed a great mistake in the outset, in supposing that the American people believe practically in the democratic theory, and that he must administer the government on democratic principles, and that he must follow the people instead of leading them, obey the people instead of governing them. All government, in so far as government it is, is imperative, and no people look more to their administration to shape a policy for them than the American. No matter how they talk through the jour nals, they expect the administration to take the initiative. The present administration erred from the first, in regarding itself as weak and without support in the affections and confidence of the people, and in fearing to adopt the bold and decisive measures the national crisis demanded, lest they should refuse to sustain it. It thought it must temporize. wait for the manifestation of public opinion, and labor to conciliate parties. The consequence has been that by its delays, its indecisions, its half-way measures, now doing a little to gratify this party, and now a little to appease that party, it has lost the confidence of all parties, and found its friends and supporters almost everywhere beaten, and badly beaten, in the late elections. Its supporters, and its supporters are the supporters of the national cause,--are likely to be in the minority in the next congress, and the national legislation will pass into the hands of the sympathizers with the authors of the rebellion, on whose loyalty we fear we

cannot count.

386

What the administration has regarded as prudence, and what would have been prudence in ordinary times, when there are only the ordinary struggles of political parties for power or patronage to meet, we have regarded from the first as the greatest imprudence, in fact, a blunder. The question the administration had to meet was not a political question, not a question as to what party should govern the country, distribute or share its patronage, but a question far above all party,- a question as to whether we are to have a country for any party to govern,-a question of national existence, in regard to which all loyal men, all men not traitors and rebels, were to be presumed to be of one mind. Whether they were so or not, the administration should have assumed that they were, and boldly adopted and vigorously prosecuted the measures necessary to suppress the rebellion and save the nation. Had it done so, it would have made them all of one mind, or at least have given their differences of opinion no opportunity to embarrass its action. Fear, doubt, hesitation, half-way measures,-now an advance, now a retreat, here a little and there a little,-cannot fail, in times of danger, to be most disheartening and disastrous. The wise administration adopts bold and vigorous measures, measures which confirm its friends and overawe its enemies. people demand a bold, resolute, and confident leader, who acts as if he regarded himself as invincible, and when they find such a leader, they follow him without much thought as to whither he is likely to lead them. They follow him who proves to them that he is likely to win. Mr. Lincoln had every advantage, if he had comprehended and been equal to his position. With a just cause, with men and money without stint at his command, and a power, derived from the immense patronage he had at his disposal, greater than any king, kaiser, or dictator ever wielded, he might have safely disregarded all party divisions and all differences of opinion, and could easily have carried with him the whole population of the country not in open rebellion to the government. He had no occasion to conciliate conflicting parties and to balance conflicting interests. He should by his boldness, promptness, and vigor have left no time for debate, no time for adverse parties to organize, and taken all minds and hearts by storm, not by the slow and zigzag approaches of a regular siege.

The

Unhappily, the spirit, or want of spirit, which has characterized the administration, has affected the military oper

ations of the country. Our generals have shown the same lack of enterprise, boldness, and vigor, the same timidity, over-caution, hesitation, and delays, that have marked the civil administration itself. We blame not our generals, for we had no right to ask or expect them to be superior to the administration they serve. If an administration wants its generals to be bold, prompt, and energetic, it must be so itself. The army will always partake of the feebleness and indecision, or of the boldness and vigor of the administration; and the administration may always have brave, enterprising, and successful generals at the head of its army, if it proves itself worthy of them. Our generals, in their lack of enterprise, in their failure to attack or to follow up their attacks, in uniformly giving the enemy time and opportunity, after a defeat, to recover and more than recover from its effects before renewing the attack, have only followed the example of the administration itself, and Mr. Lincoln, as the administration, is, and will be held, responsible for all our military blunders and failures, for our military inefficiency, and the rapid frittering away of our armies.

But it is of little use to dwell on these things now. If Mr. Lincoln had been a genius or a hero, or if he had listened to the men really in earnest to put down the rebellion and save the nation, and had appealed by his vigorous measures to the living, patriotic, loyal sentiment of the country, and given no heed to the advice or opinions of those whose sympathies were with the rebels, or whose disloyal conduct had involved the country in its troubles, he would have preserved the enthusiasm which broke out all over the loyal states immediately after the attack on Sumter, and restored peace to the country before this. But he let the golden opportunity pass by, and the measures which would have been effectual, if adopted in season, can now do us little good. "It is not true," said Napoleon, à propos of the 18th Brumaire, "that the troops fired blank cartridges on the people. It would have been inhuman to have done so." The instant and complete emancipation of all the slaves in the whole United States, as a war measure, immediately after the first battle of Bull Run, with the assurance of reasonable compensation to loyal owners, would have been effectual, and speedily ended the war. The proclamation of the president on the 22d of last September, threatening to emanci pate the slaves in such states and parts of states as should be in rebellion on the first day of the following January,

coming when and in the form it did, was fitted only to exasperate the South, and to give strength and expression to the pro-slavery feeling at the North. The friends of the administration could not defend it. The president could not defend the emancipation of the slaves except under the pressure of military necessity, and what sort of military necessity is that, it may be asked, which admits of a delay of a hundred days? If congress, or even the president, had proclaimed their freedom when General Fremont issued his modest proclamation, the whole population of the non-slaveholding states would have acquiesced, offered no opposition, and perhaps have really approved it. Political leaders, unless in the border states, would have made no capital out of it against the administration. The hesitation and delay of the administration, its backing and filling, gave time for discussions, for parties to form, opposition to organize, so that the proclamation, threatening a partial emancipation, when it came, created no enthusiasm among the friends of the administration, and gave new strength to its enemies; nobody was pleased with it but those few who wish the war to be prosecuted primarily for the abolition of slavery, and, if the slaves are liberated, care for little beyond. These found in it ground to hope that slavery would finally be abolished, but scarcely a man saw in it any military advantage sufficient to justify the extraordinary exercise of executive power. So it has been with nearly all the measures of the administration. They have either been half-way measures, sufficient to embolden enemies without winning friends, or they have been delayed and discussed till the time when they would amount to something had passed by.

The slavery question, just as it ceases to be the most pressing question, is apparently made the most prominent question by the administration. It is the leading topic of the president's message. We have no intention of reviving the discussion of the question in these pages. We have discussed it at full length, under its political, military, social, moral, and theological aspects, and may for the present leave it where we left it in our article on Slavery and the Church. Whether the president will issue another proclamation, giving effect to his proclamation of the 22d of last September, we have no means of knowing at the time we are writing, but the chances are that he will. But, if he does, we doubt whether the courts will sustain the freedom of the slaves he thus declares to be emancipated. We doubt not the power