Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 144
The next generation will find it hard to believe that of the four men living at the outbreak of the war who had occupied the presidential chair not one tendered his support to the National cause, or offered sympathy or patriotic counsel to his overburdened successor at the head of the Government. It will be deemed almost incredible that during the whole four years of that terrible struggle not one of these men, all of whom were citizens of Northern States, made any public utterance intended to strengthen the Union cause or indeed any utterance at all upon the subject, except in one case, when compelled by public clamor to make a lame excuse for his own apathy. Already it is hard to realize that when the conflict drew to its close one of these men refused to decorate his house in honor of our final tri-victory, or display the emblems of mourning on the death of the great leader whose marvelous tact and unfailing steadfastness had brought us through those years of unmatched peril. Still more difficult will it be for posterity to understand that our ex-Presidents were simply types of a very large element of our people. These very naturally desired the war, its causes and overshadowing glories to be forgotten just as soon as possible. They made haste, therefore, to turn the public attention into other channels and to clamor for oblivion in regard to the past.
There was another and most peculiar influence tending in this direction. The political organization then having control of the country had in it two elements which looked with especial disfavor on the ascendency within itself of those whose fame rested on military renown. One of these was what was known as the "Abolition Element." These men regarded themselves as, in a sense, the possessors of an exclusive proprietary interest in the Republican party of that day, and thought that the laurels of its first administration, both civic and military, ought to relate back to them as the ultimate cause, rather than rest upon the heads of the immediate agents. Such men as Chase, Sumner, Seward, Greeley, and a host of lesser lights, felt deeply aggrieved at being overshadowed by men like Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Stanton, and other military leaders whom they regarded, if not us trespassers on their demesne, at least as men who had merely adopted their ideas and reaped advantage from their labors.
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