Springfield Weekly Republican

Watering the President.

The opposition newspapers are preaching long discourses upon the text furnished them by Wendell Phillips in his late lecture: "I've watered him." This was said to account for the president's supposed growth in anti-slavery opinions and measures. The object of both copperheads and radicals seems to be to bring the president to contempt; to make it appear that he has no opinions of his own as to slavery, no fixed policy as to the prosecution of the war, and no sense of the immense responsibilities of his position, but is so weak and purposeless as to be at the mercy of every changing influence; that he can only be kept to any definite course by constant pressure from delegations and committees—self-constituted conscience-keepers—that, according to the vulgar phrase, "the last man has him."

If there is any general contempt, and nothing can save him from it, but it is not true. There is not the first element of truth in it. The radicals have originated the falsehood in order to arrogate to themselves credit to which they are not entitled, and the copperheads echo it to bring disgrace and defeat upon the administration. And so these wide extremes meet and clasp hands in the common work of defamation, both alike reckless of truth and of the character of those they assail. Indeed the radicals do not profess to speak the truth at all. The times are too earnest, they say, for anything like justice or candor in speech: what is wanted is stirring words, telling points, no matter whether fair or not, fierce denunciation, no matter who is scathed by it.

These men affect to believe that all who do not follow them are behind the times. The fact is that they themselves are behind, altogether and most stupidly so. The time for inflammatory words has long since passed. The slavery question has been for now almost three years taken out of the arena of debate, and submitted to the terrible arbitrament of war; and yet these men do not see it; they rave on, as if tremendous resolutions and wild denunciations were the most approved instruments of warfare. It is because the president trusts in cannon and muskets, and the hard-handed men that use them, for the destruction of the rebellion and slavery, and not in the startling paradoxes of dilettante reformers and sensational speech-makers, that these men abuse and vilify him.

So far from being a vacillating man, without opinion or will of his own, the whole course of the president shows that he has had a consistent purpose throughout, and that he has endeavored to use the wisest means to accomplish the end sought. His first and controlling aim has been coincident with his official duty—the suppression of the rebellion. There has never been a moment when he has shown a disposition to preserve slavery, or to spare it, or to shirk any action towards it that should tend to promote the success of the war. One or two newspapers and the politicians connected with them arrogated to themselves the credit of having forced from the president the emancipation proclamation by their persistent "pressure." So far from the truth is this, that we have the best assurance that this pressure was not commenced until after the proclamation had been fully determined upon and outlined by the president, and the pressure was then got up by those who had received private information of the fact, for the purpose of securing to themselves the credit of the measure. When the secret history of these times comes to be truly written, the vehemence of the clamor for a proclamation by those who knew that it had already been resolved upon will make them ridiculous enough. They should be made infamous for their readiness to belittle and disgrace the president for their own selfish purposes.

It is true that Wendell Phillips and such as he have "watered" the president, and infinite credit does the president deserve for his patience and courtesy towards men whom he knew would not hesitate to go from his presence to make false and ridiculous accusations against him in public which he would not demean himself to deny. We have said the president did not hesitate to use any means against slavery that should promote the success of the war. It is equally evident that he has all along desired and intended the destruction of slavery by the war, and that he has been ready to go to the extreme limit of his rightful authority to promote that end. But he has also seen, what men who have trusted in words could not see, that nothing but successful fighting could do any real damage to slavery. The progress of the war has settled this fact, and none are so blind as those who will not see it. To those who have gone into the war, or have sent sons and brothers to fight our battles, the whole thing has been plain. They have not wanted to spare slavery, and they have found that the only way to damage it is to defeat and scatter the rebel armies. They are doing the work: they are the real emancipators. The foam that rides on the topmost wave may think itself the source of power, but the billows beneath know that the strength and motion are in themselves. And this rant and pother and self-sufficiency of the mere talkers, seems all the more ludicrous now that the rest of us have settled down to the prosecution of the war as a serious, business affair, to be carried to complete success only by common sense and main strength not helped at all by fuss or fustian.