Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[557] about it. [Laughter.] General Halleck can't; he says he knows nothing about it. William H. Seward can't; he says he knows nothing about it. One of the best generals in the service, the man who held the third city in the empire in his right hand like a lamb, that man comes home to the Capital, and cannot find a man in the Cabinet who will take the responsibility of saying, “I advised his recall,” or will tell him the reason why he was recalled. [Three more cheers for Butler.] Why is he, one of the ablest of the very few able men this war has thrown to the surface,--why is he idle?

General Hamilton had the promise of the government at Washington, over and over again, that he might go and shut the back door of the rebellion, Texas, out of which the traitors mean to fly when they are beaten, and through which Vicksburg gets her strength to-day. Why has he not gone? Your own great fellow-citizen goes to Washington under the pledge of the President, too much in a hurry to allow him to leave Washington for six hours, stays for a week, and comes back without a command. Why? Because Abraham Lincoln is not President of the United States, or because he too ardently longs and plans to be so again. Either because the war is henceforth subordinate to a policy dictated by the next Presidential canvass, or because behind President Lincoln, curbing his purpose, making conditions which balk his designs, making him doubt the purpose and the strength of the North, standing round him in civil and military positions, are men who do not mean that this battle shall be bravely and gallantly fought through. The worst rebellion in the land is the rebellion of the Cabinet and Generals against common sense and justice. Cromwell never succeeded until the Long Parliament sloughed off every man who believed in the House of Lords, and left nothing but democrats behind. We shall never succeed until we slough off every