The success of the war, and fate of the Union, of
course dominated every other consideration; and next to this the
treatment of the slavery question became in a hundred forms almost a
direct personal interest. Mere party feeling, which had utterly vanished
for a few months in the first grand uprising of the North, had been once
more awakened by the first Bull Run defeat, and from that time onward
was heard in loud and constant criticism of Mr. Lincoln and the acts of
his supporters wherever they touched the institution of slavery. The
Democratic party, which had been allied with the Southern politicians in
the interests of that institution through so many decades, quite
naturally took up its habitual role of protest that slavery should
receive no hurt or damage from the incidents of war, where, in the
border States, it still had constitutional existence among loyal Union
men.
On the other hand, among Republicans who had elected Mr. Lincoln, and
who, as a partizan duty, indorsed and sustained his measures, Fremont's
proclamation of military emancipation in the first year of the war
excited the over-hasty zeal of antislavery extremists, and developed a
small but very active faction which harshly denounced the President when
Mr. Lincoln revoked that premature and ill-considered measure.
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