destroy the Union armies. Finally, it seemed hardly doubtful that fatal
defections would take place in the Border States, even if they should
not formally go over to the Confederacy. No man saw the value of those
Border States as Mr. Lincoln did. To save or to lose them was probably
to save or lose the war; to lose them and the war was to establish a
powerful slave empire. Where did abolition come in among these events?
It was not there!

[Illustration: Simon Cameron]

Painfully, therefore, untiringly, with all the skill and tact in his
power, Mr. Lincoln struggled to hold those invaluable, crucial States.
His "border-state policy" soon came to be discussed as the most
interesting topic of which men could talk wherever they came together.
Savage were the maledictions which emancipationists uttered against it,
and the intensity of their feeling is indicated by the fact that, though
that policy was carried out, and though the nation, in due time,
gathered the ripe and perfect fruit of it both in the integrity of the
country and the abolition of slavery, yet even at the present day many
old opponents of President Lincoln, survivors of the Thirty-seventh
Congress, remain unshaken in the faith that his famous policy was "a
cruel and fatal mistake."

By the summer of 1862 the opinions and the action of Mr. Lincoln in all
these matters had brought him into poor standing in the estimation of
many Republicans. The great majority of the politicians of the party and
sundry newspaper editors, that is to say, those persons who chiefly make
the noise and the show before the world, were busily engaged in
condemning his policy. The headquarters of this disaffection were in
Washington. It had one convert even within the cabinet, where the