eserved the nation, as though the nation itself
had arisen with new plumage from the stress and struggle of its crisis.
The realities of history, however, which are ever different from the
facts seen by the participant, are in this period further from the
tradition of the survivor than in any other stage of the development of
the United States. As the Civil War is viewed from the years that
followed it, the actualities that must be faced are the facts that the
dominant party saved neither the nation nor itself except by changing
its identity; that economic and industrial progress continued through
the war with unabated speed, and that out of the needs of a new economic
life arose the new nation.

The Republican party, whose older spokesmen had been trained as Whigs or
Democrats, had by 1861 seasoned its younger leaders in two national
campaigns. It had lost the first flush of the new enthusiasm which gave
it birth as a party opposed to the extension of slavery. The signs of
the times had been so clear between 1856 and 1860 that many politicians
had turned their coats less from a moral principle than from a desire to
win. When Lincoln took up the organization of his Administration, these
clamored for their rewards. There was nothing in the political ethics of
the sixties that discountenanced the use of the spoils of office, and
Lincoln himself, though he resented the drain of office-seeking upon his
time, appears not to have seen that the spoils system was at variance
with the fundamentals of good government.

It was a Republican partisan administration that bore the first brunt of
the Civil War, but the struggle was still young when Lincoln realized
that the Union could not stand on the legs of any single party. To
develop a general Union sentiment became an early aim of his policy and
is a key to his period. He was forced to consider and reconcile the
claims of all shades of Republican opinion, from that of the most
violent abolitionist to that of the mere unionist. In the Democracy,
opinion ranged from that of the strong war Democrat to that of the
Copperhead whose real sympathies were with the Confederacy.

To conciliate a working majority of the voters of the Union States, a
majority which must embrace many Union Democrats, Lincoln steadily
loosened the partisan bonds. The congressional elections of 1862 showed
that he was still far from success. His overtures to the Democrats of
the border States fell into line w