which to make a point.  A disregard of technicalities of procedure was magnified into a serious breach of constitutional privilege.  Reviving the question of compensated emancipation, Lincoln had sent a special message to both Houses, submitting the text of a compensation bill which he urged them to consider.  His enemies raised an uproar.  The President had no right to introduce a bill into Congress!  Dictator Lincoln was trying in a new way to put Congress under his thumb.(15)

In the last week of the session, Lincoln’s new boldness brought the old relation between himself and Congress to a dramatic close.  The Second Confiscation Bill had long been under discussion.  Lincoln believed that some of its provisions were inconsistent with the spirit at least of our fundamental law.  Though its passage was certain, he prepared a veto message.  He then permitted the congressional leaders to know what he intended to do when the bill should reach him.  Gall and wormwood are weak terms for the bitterness that may be tasted in the speeches of the Vindictives.  When, in order to save the bill, a resolution was appended purging it of the interpretation which Lincoln condemned, Trumbull passionately declared that Congress was being “coerced” by the President.  “No one at a distance,” is the deliberate conclusion of Julian who was present, “could have formed any adequate conception of the hostility of the Republican members toward Lincoln at the final adjournment, while it was the belief of many that our last session of Congress had been held in Washington.  Mr. Wade said the country was going to hell, and that the scenes witnessed in the French Revolution were nothing in comparison with what we should see here."(16)

Lincoln endured the rage of Congress in unwavering serenity.  On the last day of the session, Congress surrendered and sent to him both the Confiscation Act and the explanatory resolution.  Thereupon, he indulged in what must have seemed to those fierce hysterical enemies of his a wanton stroke of irony.  He sent them along with his approval of the bill the text of the veto message he would have sent had they refused to do what he wanted.(17) There could be no concealing the fact that the President had matched his will against the will of Congress, and that the President had had his way.

Out of this strange period of intolerable confusion, a gigantic figure had at last emerged.  The outer and the inner Lincoln had fused.  He was now a coherent personality, masterful in spite of his gentleness, with his own peculiar fashion of self-reliance, having a policy of his own devising, his colors nailed upon the masthead.

XXIII.  THE MYSTICAL STATESMAN

Lincoln’s final emergence was a deeper thing than merely the consolidation of a character, the transformation of a dreamer into a man of action.  The fusion of the outer and the inner person was the result of a profound interior change.  Those elements of mysticism which were in him from the first, which had gleamed darkly through such deep overshadowing, were at last established in their permanent form.  The political tension had been matched by a spiritual tension with personal sorrow as the connecting link.  In a word, he had found his religion.