Part 3

Executive Mansion, Washington, April 4, 1864.

A. G. Hodges, Esq., Frankfort, Ky.

"My Dear Sir:--You ask me to put in writing the substance of what I verbally stated the other day, in your presence, to Governor Bramlette and Senator Dixon. It was about as follows:

"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel; and yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially in this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it in my view that I might take the oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times and in many ways; and I aver that, to this day I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government, that nation, of which that Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the Constitution? By general law, life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that to the best of my ability I had even tried to preserve the Constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution altogether. When, early in the war, General Fremont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When, a little later, General Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, General Hunter attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come. When, in March and May and July, 1862, I made earnest and successive appeals to the Border States to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition; and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this I was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force--no loss by it anyhow or anywhere. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no caviling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the measure.

"And now let any Union man who complains of the measure test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking three [one?] hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he cannot face his case so stated, it is only because he cannot face the truth.

"I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale, I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years' struggle, the nation's condition is not what either party or any man desired or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new causes to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

"Yours truly,

A. Lincoln."

He struck slavery because slavery had clutched the throat of the Republic, and one of the twain must die! Mr. Lincoln said, LET IT BE SLAVERY!

Christianity, declaring the brotherhood of race, redemption and retribution answered, So be it! The Bible, sealed by slave-codes to four millions for whom its truths were designed, answered Amen! The gospel long fettered by the slave-master's will, and instead of an evangel of freedom made to proclaim a message of bondage, lifted up its voice in thanksgiving. Marriage, long dishonored, put on its robes of purity, and its ring of perpetual covenant, and answered Amen, and from above, God's strong angels and six-winged cherubim, bending earthward, shouted their response to the edict of the Great Emancipator!

IV. The next controlling idea was

PROFOUND RELIGIOUS DEPENDENCE.

As a public man, he set God before his eyes, and did reverence to the Most High. It was deeply a touching scene as he stood upon the platform of the car which was to carry him from his Springfield home, and tearfully asked his neighbors and old friends that they should remember him in their prayers. Amid tears and sobs they answered "We will pray for you." Again and again has he publicly invoked Divine aid, and asked to be remembered in the prayers of the people. His second Inaugural seems rather the tender pastoral of a white-haired bishop than a political manifesto.

What were his person relations to his God, I know not. We are not in all things able to judge him by our personal standard. How much etiquette may be demanded, how much may have been yielded to the tyranny of custom we cannot tell. In public life he was spotless in integrity and dependent upon Divine aid. He had made no public consecration to God in church covenant, but we may not enter the sanctuary of his inner life. He constantly read the holy oracles, and recognized their claim to be the inspired Scriptures.

He felt that religious responsibility when he set forth the Proclamation of Emancipation closing with the sublime sentence: "And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, on military necessity, I invoke the considerable judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God."

In one of the gloomy hours of the struggle he said to a delegation of clergymen: "My hope of success in this great and terrible struggle rests on that immutable foundation, the justice and goodness of God. And when events are very threatening, and prospects very dark, I still hope, in some way which men cannot see, all will be well in the end, because our cause is just and God is on our side."

If, as the executive officer of the nation he erred, it was in excessive tenderness in dealing with criminals. Unsuspecting and pure, he could not credit unmixed guilt in others, and with difficulty could he bring himself to suffer condign punishment to be inflicted. There were times when he was inflexible. In vain did wealth and position plead for Gardner, the slave-captain. As vainly did they for Beall and Johnson. If he was lenient it was the error of amiableness.

In reviewing the administration of Abraham Lincoln, we see in him another of those Providentially called and directed leaders who have been raised up in great crises. His name stands on the roll with those of Moses and Joshua, and William of Orange, and Washington. Not only did Providence raise him up, but it divinely vindicated his dealings with slavery. As emancipation was honored, did the pillar of flame light our hosts on to victory!

In the dawning morn of peace and Union has this leader been slain. When the nation thought it most needed him, has he been basely butchered! As the ship which had been rocking in the waves and bowing before the storm was reaching the harbor, a pirate, who sailed with the passengers, basely stole on deck and shot the pilot at the wheel!

The assassin has been held in abhorrence among all people and in all ages. Here was a foul plot to destroy at one swoop the President, the officers eligible to the succession, the Cabinet, the Lieutenant- General, and no doubt the loyal Governors of the States. That the scheme was successful only in part, God be praised. Never has an assassination produced so terrible a shock. For--

"He had borne his faculties so meek, had been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Do plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking off."

He fell, and the whole land mourns. Secession smote him in her impotent death-rage, but the State lives on! The reins which dropped from his nerveless hand another grasped, and the nation lives. No revolution comes. No war of rival dynasties! The constitutional successor is in the chief seat of power, and how much secession has taken by this new crime remains to be seen.

Fellow-citizens, there are some duties which press upon us in this hour.

1. We must anew commit ourselves to the work of suppressing rebellion and re-enthroning the majesty of the Union and Constitution. Mr. Lincoln lived until the nation's flag had waved in triumph over every important Southern city; until the proud Southern aristocracy had thrown itself at the feet of its slaves, and with frantic outcries implored salvation at their hands; had lived to walk through Richmond, and be hailed by its dusky freedmen as their deliverer; had lived until he received the report of the surrender of Lee's grand army, and then he was slain. We must complete the work. Onward, until it be wrought. We believe it will be soon, but were it a hundred years it must be accomplished!

2. We must complete the destruction of slavery. Added to its long catalogue of crimes, it has now slain the Lord's Anointed, the man whom he made strong! Now as THE ETERNAL liveth, it must die! By the agonies it has caused, by the uncoffined graves it has filled, by the tears it has wrung from pure women and little children, by our sons and brothers starved to death in its mined prisons, by our beloved Chief Magistrate murdered, by all these do we this day swear unto the LORD that slavery SHALL DIE and that he would save it shall politically die with it!

3. This day, as funeral rites are being said, and sobs are coming up from a smitten household and bereaved people, before the Lord do we solemnly demand that justice be done in the land upon evil-doers, that blood-guiltiness may be taken away, and that men shall not dare repeat such crimes.

When treason slew Abraham Lincoln, it slew the pardoning power, and by its own act placed authority in the hands of one of sterner mold and fiery soul--one deeply wronged by its atrocities. Now let it receive the reward of its own hands! This is the demand of mercy as well as justice, that after generations may see the expiation of treason is too costly for its commission. Mercy to the many demands the punishment of the guilty.

The assassin of the Chief Magistrate must be found. Though all seas must be crossed, all mountains ascended, all valleys traversed, he must be found! If he hide him under the mane of the British lion, beneath the paw of the Russian bear or among the lilies of France, he must be found and plucked thence for punishment! If there be no extradition treaty, then the strong hands of our power must make one. He was a tragedian. Had he never read--