uncertain sound from Lincoln's
lips. "In this purpose to save the country and its liberties no
class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the
field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it?
Who should quail while they do not?" But the mere excellence of a
vast fighting front means a certain loss of the nobler qualities in
the home front, from which so many of the staunchest are withdrawn.
And then war-weariness breeds doubts, doubts breed fears, and fears
breed the spirit of surrender.

There seemed to be more Copperheads in the conglomerate opposition
than Unionists ready to withstand them. The sinister figure of
Vallandigham loomed large in Ohio, where he openly denounced the
war in such disloyal terms that the military authorities arrested
him. An opposition committee, backed by the snakes in the grass of
the secret societies, at once wrote to Lincoln demanding release.
Lincoln thereupon offered release if the committee would sign a
declaration that, since rebellion existed, and since the armed forces
of the United States were the constitutional means of suppressing
rebellion, each member of the committee would support the war till
rebellion was put down. The committee refused to sign. More people
then began to see the self-contradictions of the opposition, and
most of those "plain people" to whom Lincoln consciously appealed
were touched to the heart by his pathetic question: "Must I shoot
the simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch
a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?"

But there was still defection on the Union side, and among many
"plain people" too; for Horace Greeley, the best-known Union editor,
lost his nerve and ran away. And Greeley was not the only Union
journalist who helped, sometimes unwittingly, to pervert public
opinion. The "writing up" of McClellan for what he was not, though
rather hysterical, was at least well meant. But the reporters who
"wrote down" General Cox, because he would not make them members
of his staff in West Virginia, disgraced their profession. The
lies about Sherman's "insanity" and Grant's "intoxication" were
shamelessly excused on the plea that they made "good stories."
Sherman's insanity, as we have seen already, existed only in the
disordered imagination of blabbing old Simon Cameron. Grant, at
the time these stories were published, was strictly temperate.

Amid all the hindrances--and encouragement