Through the State and War Departments
he did this sorrowfully, but promptly.
His answer to his critics was the soundest reasoning and it justified
him in the judgment of thinking men.
"I make such arrests," he declared, "because these men are laboring to
prevent the raising of troops and encouraging desertion. Armies cannot
be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the penalty of
death.
"I will not shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, and refuse to
touch a wily agitator who induces him to commit the crime. To silence
the agitator and save the boy is not only Constitutional, but withal a
great mercy."
Volunteers were no longer to be had and a draft of five hundred thousand
men had been ordered for the summer. The Democratic leaders in solid
array were threatening to resist this draft by every means in their
power, even to riot and revolution.
The masses of the North were profoundly discouraged at the unhappy
results of the war. In thousands of patriotic loyal homes, men and women
had begun to ask themselves whether it were not cruel folly to send
their brave boys to be slaughtered.
The prestige of the Southern army was at its highest point and its
terrible power was nowhere more gravely realized than in the North,
whose thousands of mourning homes attested its valor.
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