Part 2

We have been through the Red Sea of war, and across the weary, desert marches of griefs and bereavements, but heretofore we have felt that our leader was with us, and believed that surely as Moses was led by the pillar of cloud and of fire, so did God lead him.

But now that leader is not. Slain, slain by the hand of the assassin, murdered beside his wife! The costliest blood has been shed, the clearest eye is closed, the strongest arm is nerveless--the Chief Magistrate is no more. "The mighty man cries bitterly; the day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness."

It is no mere official mourning which hangs its sad drapery everywhere. It is not alone that a President of the Republic is, for the first time, assassinated. No; there is a tender grief that characterizes the bereavement of a loved friend, which shows there was something in this man which grappled him to men's hearts as with hooks of steel.

But mourning the death of the Chief Magistrate, it becomes us to review the elements of his career as a ruler, which have so endeared him to loyal hearts.

If I were to sketch the model statesman, I would say he must have mental breadth and clearness, incorruptible integrity, strength of will, tireless patience, humanity, preserved from demoralizing weakness by conscientious reverence for law, ardent love of country, and, regulating all, a commanding sense of responsibility to God, the Judge of all. These, though wrapped in seeming rustic garb, were found in Abraham Lincoln. He had mental breadth and clearness. In spite of a defective early education, he became a self-taught thinker, and later in life he read widely and meditated profoundly, until he acquired a thorough mental discipline. He possessed the power to comprehend a subject at once in the aggregate and in its details. His eye swept a wide horizon and descried clearly all within its circumference. He was a keen logician, whose apt manner of "putting things" made him more than a match for practiced diplomatists and wily marplots. These were men of might about his council-board, scholars and statesmen, but none arose to his altitude, much less was either his master.

That very facetiousness sometimes critcised, kept him from becoming morbid, and gave healthfulness to his opinions, free alike from fever and paralysis. That his was incorruptible integrity, no man dare question. He was not merely above reproach, but eminently above suspicion. Purity is receptive. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," is as profound in philosophy as comprehensive in theology. Purity in the realm of moral decision and motive, is a skylight to the soul, through which truth comes direct. Abraham Lincoln was so pure in motive and purpose, looked so intensely after the right that he might pursue it, that he saw clearly where many walked in mist.

Without developing the characteristics of the ideal statesman analytically, let us see how they were manifest in his administration.

It began amid the rockings of rebellion. A servile predecessor, deplorably weak, if not criminal, had permitted treason to be freely mouthed in the national capitol, treasonable action to be taken by State authorities, and armed treason to resist and defy federal authority, and environ with bristling works the forts and flag of the Union. At such a juncture, Mr. Lincoln, then barely escaping assassination, was inaugurated. As was right, he made all proper efforts for conciliation, tendered the olive-branch, proposed such changes as existing laws, and even of the Constitution, as should secure Southern rights from the adverse legislation of a sectional majority. All was refused, and traitors said, "We will not live with you. Though you sign a blank sheet and leave us to fill it with our own conditions, we will not abide with you."

Refusing peace, war was commenced, not by the President, but by secessionists. War has been waged on a scale of astounding vastness for four years, and Mr. Lincoln falls as the day of victory dawns.

His claim to the character of a great statesman is to be estimated in view of the fiery ordeal which tried him, and not by the gauge of peaceful days. In addition to the most powerful armed rebellion ever organized, he was confronted by a skillful, able, persistent, well compacted partisan opposition. He was to harmonize sectional feelings as antagonistic as Massachusetts and Kentucky, and to rally to one flag generals as widely apart in sentiment and policy as Phelps and Fitz John Porter. That under such difficulties he sometimes erred in judgment and occasionally failed in execution, is not strange, for he was a man, but that he erred so seldom, and that he so admirably retrieved his mistakes, shows that he was more by far than an ordinary man; more by far than an average statesman. Standing where we do today, we feel that he was divinely appointed for the crisis; that he was chosen to be the Moses of our pilgrimage, albeit, he was to die at Pisgah and be buried against Beth-Peor, while a Joshua should be commissioned to lead us into the land of promise.

In studying the administration of these four eventful years, it seems to me there were four grand landmarks of principle governing him, ever visible to the eye of the President, by which he steadily made his way.

I. THE UNION IS INCAPABLE OF DIVISION.

In his first Inaugural, he said: "I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual." In his reply to Fernando Wood, then Mayor of New York, he said, "There is nothing that could ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of the Union." By this rule he walked. The Union was one for all time, and there was no authority for its division lodged anywhere. He would use no force, would exercise no authority not needed for this purpose. But what force was needed, whether moral or physical, should be employed. Hence the call for troops. Hence the marching armies of the Republic, and the thunder of cannon at the gates of Vicksburg, Charleston and Richmond. Hence the suspension of the habeas corpus, the seizure and occasional imprisonment of treason-shriekers and sympathizers, for which he has been denounced as a tyrant by journals, which, slandering him while living, have the effrontery to put on the semblance of grief and throw lying emblems of mourning to the wind! For the exercise of that authority, he went for trial to the American people, and they triumphantly sustained him.

II. The second grand regulating idea of his administration may be best stated in his own words: "GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE." He conceded the people to be the Government. Their will was above the opinion of secretaries and generals. He recognized their right to dictate the policy of the administration. Their majesty was ever before him as an actual presence. On the 11th of February, 1861, he said, in Indianapolis, "Of the people when they rise in mass in behalf of the Union and the liberties of their country, it may be said, 'The gates of hell shall not prevail against them,'" and again, "I appeal to you to constantly bear in mind that with you, and not with politicians, not with the President, not with office-seekers, but with you rests the question, Shall the Union and shall the liberties of this country be preserved to the latest generation?" Again, on that memorable journey to Washington, he said, "It is with you, the people, to advance the great cause of the Union and the Constitution." "I am sure I bring a true heart to the work. For the ability to perform it, I must trust in that Supreme Being who has never foresaken this favored land, through the instrumentality of this great and intelligent people." In his first Inaugural he said: "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it." "The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people." "Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or any equal hope in the world?"

These sentences were utterances of a faith within him. In the people he had faith. He saw them only lower than the King of kings, and they were to be trusted and obeyed.

Yet this man who thus trusted and honored the people, who so reverenced their authority, and bowed before their majesty, has been called "tyrant," "usurper," by men who now would make the world forget their infamy by putting on badges of woe, and who seek to wash out the record of their slander by such tears as crocodiles shed! Out upon the miserable dissemblers!

When the people had spoken, he bowed to their mandate. When it became necessary to anticipate their decision, he did so, calmly trusting their integrity and intelligence. He considered their wishes in the constitution of his cabinet, in the choice of military commanders, in the appointment of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and in the measures he recommended to Congress.

The people proved worthy of the trust. They promptly took every loan asked for the relief of the treasury and sustained the national credit. They answered all his calls for men. They sprang into the ranks, shouting

"We are coming, Father Abraham."

They cheerfully laid down life at his word. So far from this conflict proving a republic unfit to make war, or that for its prosecution there must be intensely centralized authority, it has demonstrated that a democracy trusted, is mightier than a dictatorship.

III. His third towering landmark was THE RIGHT OF ALL MEN TO FREEDOM. And here with his practical sense and acute vision he rose to a higher, and I think a healthier, elevation than that of many heroic antislavery leaders. They were anti-slavery. Their lives were spent in attack. They sought to destroy a system; they told its wrongs and categoried its iniquities.

He knew that light, let in, will cast out darkness, and that kindled warmth will drive out cold. He knew that freedom was better than slavery, and that when men see that it is so, they will decree freedom instead of slavery. He therefore entered the lists FOR FREEDOM. He spoke of its inestimable blessings, and then unrolling the immortal Declaration of Independence claimed that, with all its dignity and all its endowments, liberty is the birthright of ALL MEN. He taught the American people that the inalienable right of all men to liberty was the first utterance of the young Republic, and that her voice must be stifled so long as slavery lives. In his Ottawa speech he said: "Henry Clay--my beau-ideal of a statesman--the man for whom I fought all my humble life, once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us, they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate there the love of liberty, and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country."

He laid his spear in rest and went forth with armor on, the champion of freedom. He claimed she should walk the world everywhere, untrammeled and free to bless the lowest as well as the highest. It was not right and never could be made right, to forbid working lawfully that all men might be free. Slavery debased--freedom lifted up. Slavery corrupted, freedom purified. Freedom might be abused, but slavery was itself a colossal abuse.

He was no dreaming visionary, but stated with commanding clearness the doctrine of equality before the law, or political equality, distinguishing it from social equality. In old Independence Hall, in 1861, he said of the Colonies: "I have often enquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the mother land, but the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but I hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight should be lifted from the shoulders of all men." He held that instrument to teach that "nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, degraded and imbruted by its fellows."

We search vainly for a clearer and terser statement of the true theory of equality than he gave last autumn in an address to a Western regiment. "We have, as all will agree, a free government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man." Has a right to be! Take the fetters from his limbs, take the load of disability from his shoulders, give him room in the arena, and then if he cannot succeed with others, the failure is his. But he has the right TO TRY. You have no right to forbid the trial. If he will try for wealth, fame, political position, he has the right. Let him exercise it and enjoy what he lawfully wins.

With such views he came to the presidency. Here he was an executive officer, bound by the Constitution, and charged with its maintenance and defense. He was to take the nation as the people placed it in his hands, rule it under the Constitution and surrender it unbroken to his successor. Accordingly he made to the Southern States all conceivable propositions for peace. Slavery should be left without federal interference. They madly rejected all. War came. He saw at the outset that slavery was our bane. It confronted each regiment, perplexed each commander. It was the Southern commisariat, dug Southern trenches and piled Southern breastworks.

But certain Border States maintained a quasi loyalty and clung to slavery. They were in sympathy with rebellion, but wore the semblance of allegiance and with consequential airs assumed to dictate the policy of the President. He was greatly embarrassed. He made them every kind and conciliatory offer, but all was refused. Slavery on the gulf and on the border, in Charleston and in Louisville, was the same intolerant, incurable enemy of the Union. He struck it at last. The Proclamation of Emancipation came, followed in due time by the recommendation that the Constitution be so amended as forever to render slavery impossible in State or Territory. For these acts, he was arraigned before the American people on the 8th of last November, and received their emphatic approval.

In a letter written to a citizen of Kentucky, the President gave an exposition of his policy so transparent, that I reproduce it in this place. It is his sufficient explanation and vindication.