President,to present you with a bouquet!'The situation was momentarily embarrassing;and I was puzzled to know how 'His Excellency'would get out of it.With no appearance of discomposure,he stooped down,took the flowers,and,looking from them into the sparkling eyes and radiant face of the lady,said,with a gallantry I was unprepared for 'Really,madam,if you give them to me,and they are mine,I think I can not possibly make so good use of them as to present them to you,in return!'"[17]
In gaining the nomination,Lincoln had not,as yet,attained security for his plans.Grant was still to be reckoned with.
By a curious irony,the significance of his struggle with Lee during May,his steady advance by the left flank,had been misapprehended in the North.Looking at the map,the country saw that he was pushing southward,and again southward,on Virginia soil.McClellan,Pope,Burnside,Hooker,with them it had been:
"He who fights and runs away May live to fight another day."But Grant kept on.He struck Lee in the furious battle of the Wilderness,and moved to the left,farther south."Victory!"cried the Northern newspapers,"Lee isn't able to stop him."The same delusion was repeated after Spottsylvania where the soldiers,knowing more of war than did the newspapers,pinned to their coats slips of paper bearing their names;identification of the bodies might be difficult.The popular mistake continued throughout that dreadful campaign.The Convention was still under the delusion of victory.
Lincoln also appears to have stood firm until the last minute in the common error.But the report of Grant's losses,more than the whole of Lee's army,filled him with horror.During these days,Carpenter had complete freedom of the President's office and "intently studied every line and shade of expression in that furrowed face.In repose,it was the saddest face Iever knew.There were days when I could scarcely look into it without crying.During the first week of the battles of the Wilderness he scarcely slept at all.Passing through the main hall of the domestic apartment on one of these days,I met him,clad in a long,morning wrapper,pacing back and forth a narrow passage leading to one of the windows,his hands behind him,great black rings under his eyes,his head bent forward upon his breast-altogether such a picture of the effects of sorrow,care,and anxiety as would have melted the hearts of the worst of his adversaries,who so mistakenly applied to him the epithets of tyrant and usurper."[18]
Despite these sufferings,Lincoln had not the slightest thought of giving way.Not in him any likeness to the -sentimentalists,Greeley and all his crew,who were exultant martyrs when things were going right,and shrieking pacifists the moment anything went wrong.In one of the darkest moments of the year,he made a brief address at a Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia.
"Speaking of the present campaign,"said he,"General Grant is reported to have said,'I am going to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.'This war has taken three years;it was begun or accepted upon the line of restoring the national authority over the whole national domain,and for the American people,as far as my knowledge enables me to speak,I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more."[19]
He made no attempt to affect Grant's course.He had put him in supreme command and would leave everything to his judgment.
And then came the colossal blunder at Cold Harbor.Grant stood again where McClellan had stood two years before.He stood there defeated.He could think of nothing to do but just what McClellan had wanted to do--abandon the immediate enterprise,make a great detour to the Southwest,and start a new campaign on a different plan.Two years with all their terrible disasters,and this was all that had come of it!Practically no gain,and a death-roll that staggered the nation.A wail went over the North.After all,was the war hopeless?Was Lee invincible?Was the best of the Northern manhood perishing to no result?
Greeley,perhaps the most hysterical man of genius America has produced,made his paper the organ of the wail.He wrote frantic appeals to the government to cease fighting,do what could be done by negotiation,and if nothing could be done-at least,stop "these rivers of human blood."The Vindictives saw their opportunity.They would capitalize the wail.The President should be dealt with yet.