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White House.
Where, then, is my post, especially under an administration that avowedly sits waiting, begging to be told what to do?
I must educate, arouse, and mature a public opinion which shall compel the administration to adopt and support it in pursuing the policy I can aid. This I do by frankly and candidly criticising its present policy, civil and military.
However “inapt and objectionable” you may think my “means,” they are exactly described in your own words: “The good citizen may owe his government counsel, entreaty, admonition, to abandon a mistaken policy, as well as force to sustain it in the discharge of its great responsibilities.”
No administration can demand of a citizen to sacrifice his conscience, and the limits within which he is bound to sacrifice his opinion are soon reached.
If the press had not systematically eulogized a general, whom none knew, and few really trusted, we should have saved twelve months, five hundred millions of dollars, and a hundred thousand lives.
In my opinion, had the Tribune continued, last August, to do its duty and demand vigor of the government, you would have changed or controlled the Cabinet in another month, and saved us millions of dollars, thousands of lives, and untold disgrace.
Such criticism is always every thinking man's duty.
War excuses no man from this duty: least of all now, when a change of public sentiment, to lead the administration to and support it in a new policy, is our only hope of saving the Union.
The Union belongs to me as much as to Abraham Lincoln.
What right has he or any official-our servants — to claim that I shall cease criticising his mistakes, when they are dragging the Union to ruin?
I find grave faults in President Lincoln; but I do not believe he makes any such claim.
I said on the 1st of August, that, had I been in the Senate, I should have refused the administration a dollar or a man until it adopted a right policy.
That I repeat.
Lee and Shepard, 1891.
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