Lyons were not aware of his beneficent influence—­the papers of the latter contain little reference to him beyond a kindly record of a trivial conversation, at the end of which, as the Ambassador was going for a holiday to England, the President said, “Tell the English people I mean them no harm.”  Yet it is evident that Lincoln’s supporters in America, the writer of the Biglow Papers, for instance, ascribed to him a wise, restraining power in the Trent dispute.  What is more, Lincoln later claimed this for himself.  Two or three years later, in one of the confidences with which he often startled men who were but slight acquaintances, but who generally turned out worthy of confidence, he exclaimed with emphatic self-satisfaction, “Seward knows that I am his master,” and recalled with satisfaction how he had forced Seward to yield to England in the Trent affair.  It would have been entirely unlike him to claim praise when it was wholly undue to him; we find him, for example, writing to Fox, of the Navy Department, about “a blunder which was probably in part mine, and certainly was not yours”; so that a puzzling question arises here.  It is quite possible that Lincoln, who did not press his proposal of arbitration, really manoeuvred Seward and the Cabinet into full acceptance of the British demands by making them see the consequences of any other action.  It is also, however, likely enough that, being, as he was, interested in arbitration generally, he was too inexperienced to see the inappropriateness of the proposal in this case.  If so, we may none the less credit him with having forced Seward to work for peace and friendly relations with Great Britain, and made that minister the agent, more skilful than himself, of a peaceful resolution which in its origin was his own.

5. The Great Questions of Domestic Policy.

The larger questions of civil policy which arose out of the fact of the war, and which weighed heavily on Lincoln before the end of 1861, can be related with less intricate detail if the fundamental point of difficulty is made clear.

Upon July 4 Congress met.  In an able Message which was a skilful but simple appeal not only to Congress, but to the “plain people,” the President set forth the nature of the struggle as he conceived it, putting perhaps in its most powerful form the contention that the Union was indissoluble, and declaring that the “experiment” of “our popular government” would have failed once for all if it did not prove that “when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”  He recounted the steps which he had taken since the bombardment of Fort Sumter, some of which might be held to exceed his constitutional authority as indeed they did, saying he would have been false to his trust if for fear of such illegality he had let the whole Constitution perish, and asking that, if necessary, Congress should ratify them.  He appealed to Congress