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in June and endorsed his campaign for a Constitutional amendment banning slavery, which had already passed the Senate but was sure to fail in the House. His reconstruction policy was something else again. The platform demanded for traitors “the punishment due to their crimes.”
    On July 2, Congress passed a punitive reconstruction bill coauthored by Republican senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Republican congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, both of whom held the Republican chief executive in low esteem. Senator Wade replied to a dinner invitation to the White House with the puritan streak emblematic of his kind: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.”
    When Congress adjourned on the Fourth of July, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis bill, spinning its supporters into twirling fits of rage. A few weeks later, Wade and Davis released a reply that fell just short of calling the commander in chief a traitor on the eve of his reelection campaign. Henry Raymond, the moderate founder, editor, and publisher of the New York Times and the chairman of the Republican Party, lined up with the president, which might have carried more weight had he not been running his campaign. For the Radicals, said the Times, the war was not fought to restore the Union but to pillage the South and reduce its people to peonage. John Albion Andrew, the Radical Republican governor of Massachusetts, would not have put it much differently. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation had left him ecstatic, parading around the Governor’s Council Chamber while a friend sang “Old John Brown,” but Andrew had now discovered that Abraham Lincoln was “lacking in the quality of leadership. A man of a more prophetic nature would have led the party better.”
    If the Radicals were tough on Lincoln, the Democrats were tougher. Sympathetic to the South, they were strong in several states and,counterintuitively, in Manhattan, disgruntled as she was by her lost cotton trade. Softest on secession and hardest on the war were the Peace Democrats—Copperheads, the Republicans called them. Their cousins the War Democrats were a step or two nearer the center. Neither faction was upset by the Southern choice of labor systems. If the government fell to the Democrats, the odds were good that the Union would be dissolved or restored by negotiations preserving slavery, a contingency that did not disturb the sleep of most of the Northern electorate.

    In the bloody month of July 1864, Lincoln flirted with peace talks, pushed by Horace Greeley, the most influential journalist in America, who had said he would “drive Lincoln into it.” His advice to a restless youth epitomized his style: “Go west, young man, go west! There is health in the country and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles!” Horace Greeley was a fearless crusader, a brilliant mind, and a very odd duck. Lincoln had known him since they served together in Congress in 1848. He admired him as others did, in a distasteful sort of way, with a wary respect for his power. Among the labeled pigeonholes on the president’s upright desk, full of clippings, notes, and letters, was a slot for Ulysses S. Grant and another for Horace Greeley. Everybody knew his name. Everybody who was anybody read his newspaper. Shunning libidinous scandals and bottled cancer cures, the New York Daily Tribune was respected in the North, vilified in the South, and a ripping good read. Greeleymade it ring with incisive editorials, intelligent book reviews, and more accurate news than was customary. Republican in its politics, abolitionist in its passions, the Tribune gave space to thinkers of every stripe. Karl Marx had been a correspondent. So had the Transcendentalists. Now it printed extracts from the pestilent Richmond press. Horace