152 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



eion for the most anxious apprehension. A President 

 known to be infected with the political heresies, and 

 suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the Southern 

 conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not 

 say of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as 

 the representative of a party whose leaders, with long 

 training in opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs ; 

 an empty treasury was called on to supply resources 

 beyond precedent in the history of finance ; the trees 

 were yet growing and the iron unmined with which a 

 navy was to be built and armored ; officers without dis- 

 cipline were to make a mob into an army ; and, above 

 all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced 

 with every vague hint and every specious argument of 

 despondency by a powerful faction at home, was either 

 contemptuously sceptical or actively hostile. It would 

 be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter element 

 of disintegration and discouragement among a people 

 where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the 

 field, is a reader of newspapers. The pedlers of rumor 

 in the North were the most effective allies of the re- 

 bellion. A nation can be liable to no more insidious 

 treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its 

 electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the 

 community, till the excited imagination makes every 

 real danger loom heightened with its unreal double. 



And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, 

 the problem to be solved by our civil war was so vast, 

 both in its immediate relations and its future conse- 

 quences ; the conditions of its solution were so intricate 

 and so greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrol- 

 lable contingencies ; so many of the data, whether for 

 hope or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of 

 arrangement under any of the categories of historical 

 precedent, that there were moments of crisis when the 



