"I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward"

Abstract

INCOLN sits cross-legged, or swings both legs over the side of his chair; his face is more woebegone than usual. He sighs ^ from time to time, quite unmindful of his office staff that comes and goes, placing papers before him to which he pays no heed. This bleak New Year's Day of '63 is not so different from that "fatal day of January," in '41. But his present conflict is not a personal one; it is far more pressing, more ominous: a national disaster pending, battles lost, the Union in danger of being dissevered, and those engaged in working for its preservation facing failure.Holiday revellers call on friends, imbibe large potions of varied liquors, and with boisterous welcomes bustle about with little thought that this first day of the new year is one of the most terrible Washington has ever known. Lincoln is drawn out of his brown study by the necessity of attending to official duties. He must attend divine service and hold the customary social levees for the diplomatic corps. How can he publicly show a brave, much less smiling, countenance, when everything is in such turmoil?Lincoln lets his mind linger on the incidents that have been taking place in the West and the Southwest. There are the bright spots of Forts Henry and Donelson. Shiloh, however, is not so strikingly a victory. The "unconditional surrender" Grant is a general after Lincoln's own heart, but can he open the Mississippi, capture Vicksburg, and break the back of the Confederacy? Perhaps. He may also be able to disembowel the secessionist behemoth by moving through the middle southern cotton States; but all this is still far in the future.It seems so unworthy for administration officials to be making this holiday one of cheer and jollification, when death and heroic suffering are being faced elsewhere that the heart of the Union may be safe. Yet Lincoln must carry on. At any rate, some of the bloodletting is checked for a few days.Having heard from staff officers that Burnside is planning another campaign without the sanction of the high command, the President wires his general not to "make a general movement of the army"