declared.
But Butler had an answer for him, too: 'Fighting them and losing is.'
'As you will know from the invitations I sent you, I was speaking in more general terms,' Lincoln said. 'The question I wish to address is, assuming the war lost, as it seems to be, how is the Republican Party once more to recover its status with the American people?'
'By doing as it was meant to do from the outset: by championing freedom over all this continent,' Douglass said.
'In aid of that,' John Hay said, his voice light and thin after the Negro's, 'I have heard that Longstreet will formally free the Negroes in the CSA once this war ends. His allies are said to have extracted such a promise from him as the price of their aid against us.'
'One more reason for Blaine to come to terms, then,' Douglass exclaimed, his leonine features lighting with hope. A moment later, though, he spoke more cautiously: 'If it be true, of course. You, John, will be the best judge of us all as to that.'
'With my few months in Richmond before the fighting started?' Hay said with a laugh full of self-mockery. 'I believe it to be true, having heard it from sources I reckon trustworthy, but I can offer no guarantee. Nor, even if it is true, can I guess how much de facto, as opposed to de jure, freedom the Negroes in the Confederate States are to have.'
'Giving them any at all goes dead against the Confederate Constitution,' Garfield pointed out.
'That doesn't always stop us,' Butler said. 'I don't see any reason the Rebs will lose a whole lot of sleep over it.'
'Your cynicism, Mr. Butler, has truly astonishing breadth and scope,' John Hay murmured. Butler gave him an oleaginous smile, as at a compliment. Maybe he thought it was one.
Lincoln said, 'When a man has no freedom, any increase looms large, f hope you are indeed correct, John. The Negro unchained will grow in ways the men now his masters do not expect.' Frederick Douglass nodded vigorous agreement to that. Lincoln continued, 'Even as the chains may fall from the limbs of the slave in the Confederate States, so they are being fitted to those of the labourer in the United States. Standing firm against this, we can and shall become the party of the majority once more, after the misfortune of the war sinks below the surface of public recollection.'
James Garfield frowned. 'I don't see how sounding like radicals will take us anywhere we want to go.'
'Justice for the working man is not a radical notion,' Lincoln said, 'or, if it is, that stands as a judgment against the United States.'
'But what do you mean by justice, Lincoln?' Garfield demanded. 'If you call raising a Red rebellion, the way you tried to do in Montana Territory — if you call that justice, I want no part of it.'
'I make two points in response to that, sir,' Lincoln said. 'The first is that I raised no rebellion, Red or otherwise. 1 made a speech, similar to many other speeches I have made over the years. If the miners in Helena were forcefully of the opinion that it fit the circumstances under which they lived, I cannot help it. Second and more basic is the fact that the people do retain the right of revolution against a government they find tyrannical.'
'Now you do sound like a Red,' Ben Butler rumbled. His jowls shook with the weight of his disapproval.
'Without the right of revolution, we should to this day be British subjects, revering Queen Victoria,' Lincoln said. 'We might make discontented British subjects, but British subjects we should be. If we were still British colonies, we would retain the right of revolution against the Crown. How can we not retain it, then, against the government in Washington?'
'In Philadelphia, you mean,' Butler said. 'On this theory, you should have let the Confederate States go without firing a shot.'
'By no means,' Lincoln said. 'They sought to break, and, sadly, succeeded in breaking, a union; they did not aim to establish a more perfect one for the nation as a whole.'
'A subtle distinction,' said Butler, an admirer of subtle distinctions.
'My view,' Frederick Douglass said, 'is that, while Mr. Lincoln exaggerates the likenesses between the position of the Confederate slave and that of the U.S. labourer, we may, if we so desire, use such exaggerations to good effect on the stump.'
'That is what I meant to say, yes,' Lincoln said, 'save that I purpose making this principle the rock on which our platform stands, not just a net with which to sweep up votes when the next election comes.'
Hannibal Hamlin said, 'If we take this line, the Democrats will call us a pack of Communards, and that alongside all the other low things they are in the habit of calling us.'
'The Democrats lined up in support of property when that included property in Negro slaves. They have not changed since.' Lincoln did not try to hide his scorn. 'If they start flinging brickbats, they'll have to duck a good many, too.'
'How much good will any of this do, gentlemen, when we are tarred with the brush of two losing wars in the space of twenty years?' John Hay asked.
'Exactly my point,' Lincoln said. 'If we go on as we have been, we are surely ruined. If, on the other hand, we make the changes in our course I have suggested, we offer the entire nation a new birth of liberty. Otherwise, I fear, government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall perish from this earth, replaced by government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. The free men who made the United States a beacon to the nations of the world shall be reduced to gearing in the vast capitalist engine of profit.'
'I just don't see it,' Senator Garfield said. 'I wish I did, but I don't. No room for compromise in any of this. Without compromise, you can't have politics. The brickbats will be flying, all right, but they'll be real brickbats with real bricks. That's the direction whence class warfare comes.'
'Yes, it is,' Lincoln said softly. 'Do you think we can avoid it by pretending the seeds from which it springs are not already planted and growing?'
'Whether we can avoid it is one question,' Hay said. 'Whether we should embrace it is another question altogether.'
'You mean that, John.' Lincoln 's voice was full of wonder, full of grief. Hay was his protege. Hay was nearly as much his son as was Robert. As far as Lincoln could see, his own course of thought had followed over the years a perfectly logical, perfectly inevitable path. And yet, the handsome young man who was now an even more handsome middle-aged man had not gone in the same direction. For that matter, neither had Robert Lincoln.
Hay said, 'I think everyone here, with the possible exception of Mr. Douglass, feels the same as I do.' He sounded sad, too, the way a doctor sounded sad when he had to tell a family the situation for a sick man was hopeless, and that he would soon die.
Lincoln looked around the table, silently polling the men he had asked to join him in Chicago. With him, they could have swung many in the Republican Party to his views. If they were against him, reform along the lines he desired would not come, not through the Republicans. 'Gentlemen, think again, please,' he said. 'Can you not see that this country needs a new birth of freedom if it is to go on being the wonder and the envy of the world?' He knew he was pleading. The last man with whom he'd pleaded was Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States during the War of Secession.
He'd failed then. After Lee's victories in Pennsylvania, the British government had recognized the Confederate States as a nation among nations and, with France, had forced the USA to do likewise. He was failing now, too. He saw that by the way his comrades would not meet his eyes.
Garfield said, ' Lincoln, if we Republicans tried to go down your road, I think you would split the party not in two but in three. Some would go with you, and I expect you would gain a few among the Socialists and others who believe in notions even more radical than yours.'
'Thank you so much,' Lincoln murmured.
'I mean no offense. I speak the truth as I see it, as you do.' Garfield was earnest, sensible, in the middle of the road. He proved as much, continuing, 'Some would probably try to hold the party on the course it has now. I lean that way myself, truth to tell. And some would bolt to the Democrats.'
'And,' Hannibal Hamlin added, 'the devil would come down with chilblains before we won another election.'
Benjamin Butler said, 'It occurs to me that what we may need is not more freedom but a little less. Compared to any European country, this is a land full of bomb-flinging anarchists. We're so damned free, we've thrown two wars away because we did not properly prepare for either of them. Take Germany, now-nothing in