The psychological moment had passed. So slow was the response to the
call of July 1st, that another appeal was made early in August, this
time for 300,000 men to serve only nine months. But this also failed
to rouse the country. A reinforcement of only 87,000 men was raised in
response to this emergency call. The able lawyer in the War Department
had still much to learn about men and nations.

After this check, terrible incidents of war came thick and fast--the
defeat at Second Manassas, in late August; the horrible drawn battle
of Antietam-Sharpsburg, in September; Fredericksburg, that carnival of
slaughter, in December; the dearly bought victory of Murfreesboro, which
opened 1863. There were other disastrous events at least as serious.
Foreign affairs* were at their darkest. Within the political coalition
supporting Lincoln, contention was the order of the day. There was
general distrust of the President. Most alarming of all, that ebb of the
wave of enthusiasm which began in midsummer, 1861, reached in the autumn
of 1862 perhaps its lowest point. The measure of the reaction against
Lincoln was given in the Congressional election, in which, though the
Government still retained a working majority, the Democrats gained
thirty-three seats.

* See Chapter IX.

If there could be such a thing as a true psychological history of the
war, one of its most interesting pages would determine just how far
Stanton was responsible, through his strange blunder over recruiting,
for the check to enthusiasm among the Northern people. With this
speculation there is connected a still unsolved problem in statistics.
To what extent did the anti-Lincoln vote, in 1862, stand for sympathy
with the South, and how far was it the hopeless surrender of Unionists
who felt that their cause was lost? Though certainty on this point is
apparently impossible, there can be no doubt that at the opening of
1863, the Government felt it must apply pressure to the flagging spirits
of its supporters. In order to reenforce the armies and to push the war
through, there was plainly but one course to be followed--conscription.

The government leaders in Congress brought in a Conscription Act early
in the year. The hot debates upon this issue dragged through a month's
time, and now make instructive reading for the present generation
that has watched the Great War*. The Act of 1863 was not the work of
soldiers, but was literally "made in Congress." Stanton gr