al. McClellan had repudiated the
Peace Resolution, but his followers and his character were to be reckoned
with rather than his words, and indeed his honest principles committed
him deeply to some attempt to reverse Lincoln's policy as to slavery, and
he clearly must have been driven into negotiations with the South. The
confusion which must inevitably be created by attempts to satisfy the
South, when it was in no humour of moderation, and by the fury which
yielding would have provoked in half the people of the North, was well
and tersely described by Grant in a letter to a friend, which that friend
published in support of Lincoln. At a fair at Philadelphia for the help
of the wounded Lincoln said: "We accepted this war; we did not begin it.
We accepted it for an object, and when that object is accomplished the
war will end, and I hope to God that it will never end until that object
is accomplished." Whatever the real mind of McClellan and of the average
Democrat may have been, it was not this; and the posterity of Mr.
Facing-both-ways may succeed in an election, but never in war or the
making of lasting peace.

Lincoln looked forward with happiness, after he was actually re-elected,
to the quieter pursuits of private life which might await him in four
years' time. He looked forward not less happily to a period of peace
administration first, and there can be no doubt that he would have prized
as much as any man the highest honour that his countrymen could bestow, a
second election to the Presidency. But, even in a smaller man who had
passed through such an experience as he had and was not warped by power,
these personal wishes might well have been merged in concern for the
cause in hand. There is everything to indicate that they were completely
so in his case. A President cannot wisely do much directly to promote
his own re-election, but he appears to have done singularly little. At
the beginning of 1864, when the end of the war seemed near, and the
election of a Republican probable, he may well have thought that he would
be the Republican candidate, but he had faced the possible choice of
Chase very placidly, and of Grant he said, "If he takes Richmond let him
have the Presidency." It was another matter when the war again seemed
likely to drag on and a Democratic President might come in before the end
of it. An editor who visited the over-burdened President in August told
him that he needed some weeks of rest