not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have a most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it." This speech profoundly affected the public opinion of the north; but in the excited state of sentiment that then controlled the south it naturally met only contempt and defiance in that section. A few weeks later the inevitable war began, in an attack upon Fort Sumter by the secessionists of South Carolina under Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, and after a long bombardment the fort surrendered on 13 April, 1861. The president instantly called for a force of 75,000 three-months' militiamen, and three weeks later ordered the enlistment of 64,000 soldiers and 18,000 seamen for three years. He set on foot a blockade of the southern ports, and called congress together in special session, choosing for their day of meeting the 4th of July. The remaining states of the south rapidly arrayed themselves on one side or the other; all except Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were drawn into the secession movement, and the western part of Virginia, adhering to the Union, under the name of West Virginia, separated itself from that ancient commonwealth.

The first important battle of the war took place at Bull Run, near Manassas station, Va., 21 July, 1861, and resulted in the defeat of the National troops under Gen. Irwin McDowell by a somewhat larger force of the Confederates under Gens. Joseph E. Johnston and Beauregard. Though the loss in killed and wounded was not great, and was about the same on both sides, the victory was still one of the utmost importance for the Confederates, and gave them a great increase of prestige on both sides of the Atlantic. They were not, however, able to pursue their advantage. The summer was passed in enlisting, drilling, and equipping a formidable National army on the banks of the Potomac, which was given in charge of Gen. George B. McClellan, a young officer who had distinguished himself by a successful campaign in western Virginia. In spite of the urgency of the government, which was increased by the earnestness of the people and their representatives in congress, Gen. McClellan made no advance until the spring of 1862, when Gen. Johnston, in command of the Confederate army, evacuated the position which, with about 45,000 men, he had held during the autumn and winter against the Army of the

Potomac, amounting to about 177,000 effectives. Gen. McClellan then transferred his army to the peninsula between the James and York rivers. Although there was but a force of 16,000 opposed to him when he landed, he spent a month before the works at Yorktown, and when he was prepared to open fire upon them they were evacuated, and Gen. Johnston retreated to the neighborhood of Richmond. The battle of Seven Pines, in which the Confederates, successful in their first attack, were afterward repelled, was fought on 31 May, 1862. Johnston was wounded, and the command devolved upon Gen. Robert E. Lee, who in the latter part of June moved out from his position before Richmond and attacked McClellan's right flank, under Gen. Fitz-John Porter, at Gaines's Mills, north of the Chickahominy. Porter, with one corps, resisted the Confederate army all day with great gallantry, unassisted by the main army under McClellan, but withdrew in the evening, and McClellan at once began his retreat to the James river. Several battles were fought on the way, in which the Confederates were checked; but the retreat continued until the National army reached the James. Taking position at Malvern Hill, they inflicted a severe defeat upon Gen. Lee, but were immediately after withdrawn by Gen. McClellan to Harrison's Landing. Here, as at other times during his career, McClellan labored under a strange hallucination as to the numbers of his enemy. He generally estimated them at not less than twice their actual force, and continually reproached the president for not giving him impossible re-enforcements to equal the imaginary numbers he thought opposed to him. In point of fact, his army was always in excess of that of Johnston or Lee. The continual disasters in the east were somewhat compensated by a series of brilliant successes in the west. In February, 1862, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had captured the Confederate forts. Henry and Donelson, thus laying open the great strategic lines of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and, moving southward, had fought (6 and 7 April) the battle of Shiloh, with unfavorable results on the first day, which were turned to a victory on the second with the aid of Gen. D. C. Buell and his army, a battle in which Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston was killed and the Confederate invasion of Kentucky baffled. Farragut, on 24 April, had won a brilliant naval victory, over the twin forts above the mouths of the Mississippi, which resulted in

the capture of New Orleans and the control of the lower Mississippi. After Gen. McClellan's retreat to the James, the president visited the army at Harrison's Landing (8 July), and, after careful consultations with the corps commanders, became convinced that in the actual disposition of the officers and the troops there was no reasonable expectation of a successful movement upon Richmond by McClellan. An order was therefore issued for the withdrawal of the army from the James, and, Gen. Halleck having been appointed general-in-chief, Gen. Pope was sent forward from Washington with a small force to delay the Confederate army under Gen. Lee until the Army of the Potomac could arrive and be concentrated to support him. McClellan's movements, however, were so deliberate, and there was such a want of confidence and co-operation on the part of his officers toward Gen. Pope, that the National army met with a decisive defeat on the same battle-field of Bull Run that saw their first disaster. Gen. Pope, disheartened by the lack of sympathy and support that he discerned among the most eminent officers of the Army of the Potomac, retreated upon Washington, and Gen. McClellan, who seemed to be the only officer under whom the army was at the moment willing to serve, was placed in command of it. Gen. Lee, elated with his success, crossed the Potomac, but was met by the army under McClellan at South Mountain and Antietam, and after two days of great slaughter Lee retreated into Virginia.

President Lincoln availed himself of this occasion to give effect to a resolve that had long been maturing in his mind in an act the most momentous in its significance and results that the century has witnessed. For a year and a half he had been subjected to urgent solicitations from the two great political parties of the country, the one side appealing to him to take decided measures against slavery, and the other imploring him to pursue a conservative course in regard to that institution. His deep-rooted detestation of the system of domestic servitude was no secret to any one; but his reverence for the law, his regard for vested interests, and his anxiety to do nothing that should alienate any considerable body of the supporters of the government, had thus far induced him to pursue a middle course between the two extremes. Meanwhile the power of events had compelled a steady progress in the direction of emancipation. So early as August, 1861, congress had passed

an act to confiscate the rights of slave-owners in slaves employed in a manner hostile to the Union, and Gen. Frémont had seized the occasion of the passage of this act to issue an order to confiscate and emancipate the slaves of rebels in the state of Missouri. President Lincoln, unwilling, in a matter of such transcendent importance, to leave the initiative to any subor

dinate, revoked this order, and directed Gen. Frémont to modify it so that it should conform to the confiscation act of congress. This excited violent opposition to the president among the radical antislavery men in Missouri and elsewhere, while it drew upon him the scarcely less embarassing importunities of the conservatives, who wished him to take still more decided ground against the radicals. On 6 March, 1862, he sent a special message to congress inclosing a resolution, the passage of which he recommended, to offer pecuniary aid from the general government to states that should adopt the gradual abolishment of slavery. This resolution was promptly passed by congress; but in none of the slave-states was public sentiment sufficiently advanced to permit them to avail themselves of it. The next month, however, congress passed a law emancipating slaves in the District of Columbia, with compensation to owners, and President Lincoln had the happiness of affixing his signature to a measure that he had many years before, while a representative from Illinois, fruitlessly urged upon the notice of congress. As the war went on, wherever the National armies penetrated there was a constant stream of fugitive slaves from the adjoining regions, and the commanders of each department treated the complicated questions arising from this body of "contrabands," as they came to be called, in their camps, according to their own judgment of the necessities or the expediencies of each case, a discretion which the president thought

best to tolerate. But on 9 May, 1862, Gen. David Hunter, an intimate and esteemed friend of Mr. Lincoln's, saw proper, without consultation with him, to issue a military order declaring all persons theretofore held as slaves in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina forever free. The president, as soon as he received this order, issued a proclamation declaring it void, and reserving to himself the decision of the question whether it was competent for him, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, to declare the slaves of any state or states free, and whether at any time or in any case it should have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government to exercise such supposed power, and prohibiting to commanders in the field the decision of such questions. But he added in his proclamation a significant warning and appeal to the slave-holding states, urging once more upon them the policy of emancipation by state action. "I do not argue," he said; "I beseech you to make the argument for yourselves. You cannot, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. Will you not embrace it? So much good has not been done, by one effort, in all past time, as in the providence of God it is now your high privilege to do. May the vast future not have cause to lament that you have neglected it." He had several times endeavored to bring this proposition before the members of congress from the loyal slave-holding states, and on 12 July he invited them to meet him at the executive mansion, and submitted to them a powerful and urgent appeal to induce their states to adopt the policy of compensated emancipation. He told them, without reproach or complaint, that he believed that if they had all voted for the resolution in the gradual emancipation message of the preceding March, the war would now have been substantially ended, and that the plan therein proposed was still one of the most potent and swift means of ending it. "Let the states," he said, "which are in rebellion see definitely and certainly that in no event will the states you represent ever join their proposed confederacy, and they cannot much longer maintain the contest." While urging this policy upon the conservatives, and while resolved in his own mind upon