wer under the Constitution to
extinguish slavery. Their call was reinforced by two or three others, of
which one came from a "People's Committee" of St. Louis, representing
Germans under the lead of B. Gratz Brown.

The movement also had the hearty approval of Wendell Phillips, who was
very bitter and sweeping in his denunciations of an administration which
he regarded "as a civil and military failure." Lincoln's reelection, he
said, "I shall consider the end of the Union in my day, or its
reconstruction on terms worse than disunion." But Mr. Phillips's
friendship ought to have been regarded by the Fremonters as ominous, for
it was his custom always to act with a very small minority. Moreover he
had long since ceased to give voice to the intelligence of his party or
even fairly to represent it. How far it had ever been proper to call the
Abolitionists a party may be doubted; before the war they had been
compressed into some solidity by encompassing hostility; but they would
not have been Abolitionists at all had they not been men of exceptional
independence both in temper and in intellect. They had often dared to
differ from each other as well as from the mass of their fellow
citizens, and they had never submitted to the domination of leaders in
the ordinary political fashion. The career of Mr. Lincoln had of course
been watched by them keenly, very critically, and with intense and
various feeling. At times they had hopefully applauded him, and at times
they had vehemently condemned what had seemed to them his halting,
half-hearted, or timid action. As the individual members of the party
had often changed their own minds about him, so also they had sometimes
and freely disagreed with each other concerning his character, his
intentions, his policies. In the winter and spring of 1864, however, it
seemed that, by slow degrees, observation, their own good sense, and the
development of events had at last won the great majority of the party to
repose a considerable measure of confidence in him, both in respect of
his capacity and of his real anti-slavery purposes. Accordingly in the
present discussions such men as Owen Lovejoy,[68] William Lloyd
Garrison, and Oliver Johnson came out fairly for him,--not, indeed,
because he was altogether satisfactory to them, but because he was in
great part so; also because they easily saw that as matter of fact his
personal triumph would probably lead to abolition, that he was the only
cand