emancipation and preservation of the Union were concerned; and, in expressing it, he was preparing the way for the one, while seeking to secure the other. Yet how few comprehend the full significance of these sententious propositions! To the Chicago committee, referring to the objections he had suggested to their policy, he said: "They indicate the difficulties that have thus far prevented my action in some such way as you desire. I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement; and I assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God's will, I will do." Not less significant was his remark to some western gentlemen, as testified by Moncure D. Conway, in the Fortnightly Review of 1865: "We shall want all the anti-slavery feeling in the country and more; go home and screw the people up to it, and you may say anything you like about me, if that will help." This indicates that he was willing to be criticised, if that would aid in bringing about the grand result. And, at the very moment when uttering these sentiments, as also when writing his reply to Mr. Greeley, the first draft of the preliminary emancipation proclamation was lying in his desk, and within ten days after his interview with the Chicago committee the time for the fulfillment of his vow having arrived in the success of the Union arms at Antietam-the proclamation became an accomplished fact. The spirit of the act was shown in his response to a serenade on the second day after the document was made public: “What I did, I did after a very full deliberation and under a very heavy and solemn responsibility. I can only trust in God I have made no mistake. It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment, and, may be, take action upon it." When, less than three months before his assassination, Congress adopted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery throughout the United States, he found his act ratified and extended by the

highest legislative power in the land-"winding the whole thing up," as he expressed it as it had already been approved by the people and sustained by the army in the field.

That Lincoln's policy as to emancipation underwent modifications and changes is unquestionable; but they were founded in wisdom, while the principles actuating him were steadfast and unalterable. The one was progressive, varying with the changing conditions and demands of the time; the other fixed on the inexorable logic of facts and events. He had the courage to follow wherever his invincible logic led, yet he did not always act until his unerring sagacity enabled him to perceive that some useful result was to be attained thereby a fact illustrated in his delay of the emancipation proclamation until he believed the people were ready to accept and sustain it. While seeming to follow public sentiment, he skillfully contrived to guide and direct it. This was the secret of his hold upon the popular heart: keeping "close to the people," he made himself a part of them, and no public man in American history has been held, at once, in such exalted veneration and in such intimate and sympathetic fellowship.

Having once taken his position there was no backward step in his policy. This was shown in his course with reference alike to the emancipation question and the rights of negroes employed in the army. From his order prescribing retaliation for every colored soldier executed by the rebels in violation of the laws of war, or sold into slavery, to the instructions to Secretary Seward controlling his action at the Hampton Roads conference, in January, 1865-that there will be "no receding by the Executive of the United States on the slavery question from the position assumed thereon in the late annual message to Congress and in preceding documents"-the policy of Lincoln on this subject was uniform, as the following utterances will show: "If they (the colored soldiers) stake their lives for us, they

must be prompted by the strongest motive-even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept."— Letter read before the Union Mass Meeting at Springfield, Illinois, September 3, 1863.

“While I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress."-Annual Message, December 8, 1863.

"Having determined to use the negro as a soldier, there is no way but to give him all the protection given to any soldier."—Address at Baltimore Sanitary Fair, April 18, 1864.

"In presenting the abandonment of armed resistance to the National authority on the part of the insurgents as the only indispensable condition of peace, I retract nothing heretofore said as to slavery. I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that, while I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress. If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another and not I, must be their instrument to perform it."-Annual Message, December 6, 1864.

The celebrated letter, "To Whom It May Concern," under which Horace Greeley was authorized to confer with the so-called "Commissioners" of the Confederate Government at Niagara Falls, in July, 1864, was couched in similar terms, pledging the Government to the consideration of "any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union and the abandonment of slavery.” And, in an interview held in August, 1864, he said in regard to a proposition that had been made to him:

"There are men base enough to propose to me to return to slavery our black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee, and thus win the respect of the masters they fought. Should I do so, I should deserve to be damned in time and in eternity. Come what may, I will keep faith with the black man. No human power can subdue this rebellion without the emancipation policy. I will abide the issue."

These quotations show with what unswerving fidelity and invincible firmness Abraham Lincoln, having once taken his stand on the platform of emancipation, ever after stood by his pledge. Such examples illustrate and confirm what has been said in relation to the development of his anti

slavery policy. With characteristic modesty, he said to Mr. Hodges of Kentucky:

"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 devised 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 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 cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."

Yet what leader, with such instrumentalities and in the face of such perplexities, ever before brought forth such beneficent results? From the pathetic and marvelously touching appeal for peace and Union in his first inaugural -an appeal that has never been surpassed, if equaled, in impressiveness and power in any state paper, and which could only fail of its object because the minds of those to whom it was addressed had been blinded by prejudice and hate-down to the reverent acknowledgment to Almighty God, in his second and last, for the success of the Union arms and the recognition of His power in so controlling the struggle as to end in the destruction of slavery, all his official and private utterances breathe the same spirit of faith in the final triumph, with a more emphatic determination to protect the freed slaves in their newly acquired rights. In all there is no evidence that he ever swerved from the confidence expressed in his Springfield speech:

"We shall not fail-if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay, but sooner or later, the victory is sure to come."

That faith-first uttered in anticipation of a protracted. political struggle, firmly maintained in succeeding stages of the conflict of arms, and confirmed in the final triumph of emancipation as an incident of the war, and not its primary object--grew with every step in the progress of the contest. And when, in the closing words of his last inaugural, he declared: "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet,

if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" From that hour the world no longer had reason for doubting that Abraham Lincoln was inspired by a sublime patriotic and religious purpose, and that he had never lost sight of the result which he predicted in his great speech in the old State House at Springfield, delivered on that June evening in 1858. During all of this most tragic period of the Nation's history, although compelled to deal with problems and face emergencies such as never confronted any other occupant of the Presidential chair, he invariably rose to the demands of the occasion, whether involving questions of national or of foreign policy. While Garrison, Phillips and other anti-slavery leaders of half a century ago, aided unintentionally by their pro-slavery antagonists, were the pioneers in the agitation which aroused the people to a true conception of the enormities of American slavery, it was Lincoln that furnished and put in operation the conserving influence which finally welded radicalism and conservatism together, and made the destruction of slavery compatible with law and the preservation of the Union. In the language of Grant at the dedication of the Lincoln monument at Springfield in 1874, "In his death the Nation lost its greatest hero; in his death, the South lost its most just friend."

One who was a personal friend and admirer of Lincoln, as well as his political supporter, but who was confessedly dissatisfied with his early emancipation policy, when he saw the array of evidence presented in this study, going to prove Lincoln's consistency and fidelity to principle, wrote: "How much wiser he was then all his people!" His highest eulogy is to state what he was and what he did. In his