was no actual secession, no dismembering of
the Union, no change in the Constitution and Government; the relative
position of the States and the Federal Government were unchanged; the
organic, fundamental laws of neither were altered by the sectional
conspiracy; the whole people, North and South, were American citizens;
each person was responsible for his own acts and amenable to law; and he
was also entitled to the protection of the law, and the rights and
privileges secured by the Constitution. The confiscation and
emancipation schemes concerning which there was so much excitement in
Congress were of secondary consideration to the all-absorbing one of
preserving the Union.

The second session of the Thirty-seventh Congress closed on the 17th of
July. Its proceedings had been confused and uneasy, with a good deal of
discontented and revolutionary feeling, which increased toward the
close. The decisive stand which the President had taken, and which he
calmly, firmly, and persistently maintained against the extreme measures
of some of the most prominent Republicans in Congress, was
unsatisfactory. It was insinuated that his sympathies on important
measures had more of a Democratic than Republican tendency; yet the
Democratic party maintained an organized and often unreasonable, if not
unpatriotic, opposition.

Military operations, aside from naval success at New Orleans and on the
upper Mississippi, had been a succession of military reverses.
Disagreement between the Secretary of War and the General-in-Chief,
which the President could not reconcile, caused the latter to be
superseded after the disastrous result before Richmond. Dissensions in
the army and among the Republicans in Congress, the persistent
opposition of Democrats to the Administration, and the general
depression that prevailed were discouraging. "In my position," said the
President, "I am environed with difficulties." Friends on whom he felt
he ought to be able to rely were dissatisfied with his conscientious
scruples and lenity, and party opponents were unrelenting against the
Administration.

A few days before Congress adjourned, the President made another but
unsuccessful effort to dispose of the slavery question, by trying to
induce the border States to take the initiative in his plan of
compensated emancipation. The interview between him and the
representatives of the border States, which took place on the 12th of
July, convinced him that the pro