ABRAHAM LINCOLN

THE EVOLUTION OF HIS EMANCIPATION POLICY.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Chicago Historical Society:

Next to the service rendered in maintaining the integrity of the Union founded by Washington and his compatriots, nothing stands forth more prominent in the career of Abraham Lincoln than the foresight and achievement manifested in his emancipation policy. While up to the hour of his assassination this brought upon him the vilest obloquy and denunciation ever visited upon an American statesman-surpassing even that heaped upon Washington-yet one of the most striking evidences of the revolution in sentiment wrought in the minds of his enemies by time and a more just conception of what he sought to accomplish, is furnished in the fact that, to-day, some of his most bitter assailants of forty years ago have ranged themselves on the side of his most ardent admirers and enthusiastic eulogists. It is to this phase in his career and what it illustrates-what he foresaw with such unerring sagacity, and what he accomplished with unswerving consistency and devotion to the welfare of the Nationthat the attention of the reader is invited in this address.

It was during one of the darkest of the many dark periods in the history of the war for the preservation of the Union, when Congress and the President were casting about for a policy that would be effective in suppressing the rebellion, that two distinguished leaders of their respective par

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