forbearing and admirable. He is not yet authorized to treat it as a maniac, and therefore addresses it as a perverse but accountable creature. So far as the Rebellion had evinced its character and intentions, just so far his plan of dealing with it was therein frankly and unmistakably announced. It undertook to vindicate its revolutionary attitude, by pretending to fear an unauthorized destruction of Slavery in the States, and the new PRESIDENT, as in duty bound, in his first official address disclaimed for himself and

his supporters any such purpose, both by a full and pointed denial, and by ample citation of the antecedent and recorded declarations of the Republican party and its Chief. In prosecution of its purposes the rebellion had already seized Forts, Navy Yards, Custom Houses, Arsenals, and had prohibited the collection of duties, and he calmly but decisively declares, that "the power confided to him will be used, to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the Government, and to collect the duties and imports." And that this

might not seem too threatening a declaration, he adds the important qualification, that "beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere." In deference to the irritation which prevailed in the insurrectionary

States, he expressly foregoes the right of appointing obnoxious strangers to Federal offices within their limits, and promises that the mails shall be furnished to all parts of the Union, until they are violently repelled.

In this brief statement, I have condensed all the foreshadowings of a policy, which this wise and unfaltering PRESIDENT Vouchsafed to the world, when consciously entering upon the most perilous era of our history, and assuming the most momentous responsibilities. While we have in it but one sentence, which even the over-sensitive chivalry could construe into a menace, we are prodigally furnished with conciliatory promises, and with such winning arguments and admonitions only, as a tender father might employ with a wayward offspring. Up to the time when he took the oath of office upon the eastern portico of the Capitol, he had pushed forbearance beyond the point where it ceases to be a virtue, and it is perfectly apparent that it had not yet dawned upon him, that his hand was soon to wield a scourge, terrible enough to chastise two God-defying centuries of crime, or that his chief mission to this earth was to conduct a nation through the jaws of death and the gates of hell, to regenerated and immortal life.

Let me now attempt to ascertain, at what precise

period he abandoned this preconceived and cherished idea of compromising the embroilment by a mere warlike demonstration, and let me also attempt to analyze the difficulties, which, a resolution in favor of uncompromising and aggressive hostilities, encounters from his conservative habits, from his peculiar emotional and intellectual organization, and reproduce, as far as I am able, the arguments, which persuaded his placable and scrupulous mind to the unhesitating and implacable purpose of exercising all the tremendous powers conferred upon him by the Rights of War, and of grasping every weapon in its terrible arsenal.

The Time, when this decided change in his purpose first appears, was more than a month after our flag was struck from Sumpter's crumbling battlements, more than a month after that bugle blast which summoned seventy-five thousand men to arms, a month at least after the bloody baptism of Massachusetts troops in the streets of Baltimore. We have his own authentic manifestoes to demonstrate, that as late as the first of May, 1861, he had not abandoned temporizing expedients, and we learn by evidence equally conclusive, that before the month had closed, he had finally resolved to turn upon the inveterate Rebellion the unbridled wrath of War. The hour, when doubt and hesitancy first yielded to

the stern command of remorseless duty, must have been the soberest, saddest, solemnest of his faithful life, not from doubt of the result, though that was sufficiently perplexing; not from fear of the conse. quences, though these were appalling enough; not from the weight of responsibility, though that might have staggered the most unyielding determination, but it was sad and solemn, because ABRAHAM LINCOLN, above and beyond all other men, loved Peace and hated War; because seiges, battles, strife, swords, bayonets, rifles, cannon, all the paraphernalia and instruments of brute force, were abhorrent to his enlightened and benevolent nature. Shall we raise the latch, and enter in to the secret chamber of that capacious and genial soul, when this fell resolve was first reached, when the frightful vision of War, in all its terrors clad, supplants there the hope of conciliation and the dream of peace? I speak, what I heard from his own lips when I say, that it was reached after sleepless nights, after a severe conflict with himself, and with extreme reluctance. By a strange and cruel freak of fate, the duty of waging the bloodiest war in history was imposed upon the most peace loving and amiable ruler in all time, upon a man whose maxim was (in the language of one of his favorite texts,) "let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the Earth"-and into whose mind, had

been thoroughly ingrained that traditional notion of our politics, that the first drop of blood, shed in a sectional strife, was the death-knell of the American Union.

Let us enter in, where that now disembodied spirit was, in the recesses of its clay tenement, in stormy debate with itself. What throes, what agony do we witness! What heart rending sobs, what heaven piercing prayers that the cup may pass from his lips! Here was that conservative mind, trained to habits of professional caution, with the strongest bias towards legality and moderation, which had uniformly steered itself by the certain lights of jurisprudence, which had invoked no remedies but the peaceful ones of the Courts, the Constitution and the Law, which had never combated Error but with reason and persuasion alone, and had abjured the ordeal of battle and the arbitrament of force, as obsolete and heathenish enormities. Here are all these mature, earnest opinions and prepossessions, all dominant from fifty years of undisputed sway, wrestling impotently with the War ideas and the overmastering War Revelation of yesterday. What an unwelcome intruder the conviction is to the serene virtues, which had hitherto exclusively occupied this holy sanctuary. Domesticated here are Justice and Mercy, ("and earthly power is likest God's when Mercy seasons Justice.")