While moderate Republicans hailed the message’s substance as “wise, patriotic, and conservative,” and its style as “plain, concise and straightforward,” others deplored its brevity and its failure to mention the Trent crisis or to deal more fully with the slavery issue, both of which loomed large in the public mind. Kansas Congressman Martin F. Conway noted with disappointment that the president “in his recent message to Congress, refers only incidentally to the subject [of slavery]; and indicates no policy whatever for dealing with the momentous question.” A Democratic journalist noted that the “whole country awaited his message with breathless suspense. But the whole country turns away from it, sick with disappointment. It is silent on the very topic of all others that the nation is most anxious to have settled.” The Cincinnati Commercial also regretted that the president “evaded the rugged issue, and leaves the everlasting slavery question still adrift.” The New York Evening Post remarked that the message contained nothing which “speaks to the popular heart; nothing in it seems up to the spirit of the times; no sententious utterances of great truths are there to stir the public mind in the midst of trial and calamities.” The Post’s editor, William Cullen Bryant, wrote that Lincoln’s “evident eagerness to dispose of the slavery question without provoking any violent conclusion is honorable to his feelings of humanity,” but “it will be felt universally that he does not meet either the necessities or the difficulties of the case with sufficient determination.” Charles Eliot Norton, a Massachusetts litterateur, complained that the message was “very poor in style, manner and thought,—very wanting in pith, and exhibiting a mournful deficiency of strong feeling and of wise forecast in the President. This ‘no policy’ system in regard to the conduct of the war and the treatment of the slavery question is extremely dangerous.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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