arrayed the Republican party, which also was disturbed by the ill-will
of those who should have been its allies; for while the moderate
Abolitionists generally sustained the President, though only imperfectly
satisfied with him, the extreme Abolitionists refused to be so
reasonable. They were a very provoking body of pure moralists. They
worried the President, condemned his policy, divided the counsels of the
government, and introduced injurious personal enmities and partisanship
with reckless disregard of probable consequences. To a considerable
extent they had the same practical effect as if they had been avowed
opponents of the Republican President. They wished immediately to place
the war upon the footing of a crusade for the abolition of slavery.
Among them were old-time Abolitionists, with whom this purpose was a
religion, men who had hoped to see Seward the Republican President, and
who said that Lincoln's friends in the nominating convention had
represented a "superficial and only half-hearted Republicanism." Beside
these men, though actuated by very different and much less honorable
motives, stood many recruits, some even from the Democracy, who were so
vindictive against the South that they desired to inflict abolition as a
punishment.

All these critics and dissatisfied persons soon began to speak with
severity, and sometimes with contempt, against the President. He had
said that the war was for the Union; but they scornfully retorted that
this was to reduce it to "a mere sectional strife for ascendency;" that
"a Union, with slavery spared and reinstated, would not be worth the
cost of saving it." It was true that to save the Union, without also
removing the cause of disunion, might not be worth a very great price;
yet both Union and abolition were in serious danger of being thrown away
forever by these impetuous men who desired to pluck the fruit before it
was ripe, or rather declared it to be ripe because they so wanted to