their discussion and direction, and who brought with him the potent influences of a clean, high heart, and a record for all that was worthy and honorable in one aspiring to usefulness and patriotic duty in public life."

But let us here return to the meeting at Chicago, in Nov. 1860, of the National Republican Convention, where the practical step was taken in the nomination of a president, in succession to Mr. Buchanan, a nomination that ranged the forces of slavery and freedom into deadly conflict in the struggle for supremacy in the government of the nation. To the attitude and decision of the Convention the eyes of the whole country were naturally at the period turned to the prairie State, and keen was the interest felt by all when, after the third ballot, Lincoln was found to be the unanimous choice of the body for the presidency, with Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, for the office of Vice-president. The election presently followed, the popular vote resulting in these figures. Lincoln, 1,866,462; Douglas, 1,375,157; Breckinridge, 847,953; Bell, 590,631. The electoral vote showed the following results: Lincoln, 180; Douglas, 12; Breckinridge, 72; and Bell, 39. The sequel to this triumph of the Northern anti-slavery platform was, as all know, the secession of South Carolina and the Gulf States, followed some few months later by that of the border Slave States, and the outbreak of the Civil War. For the next four years, the life of Abraham Lincoln becomes merged in that of the nation, and is inseparable from the tragic story of the fratricidal conflict which ensued, with the terrible period of strain through which both President and nation passed in its dire happenings. In March, 1861, Mr. Lincoln was quietly though impressively installed in office, on which occasion he made an earnest plea for peace and union, at the same time deprecating Southern apprehension of menace or danger arising from the accession of a Republican Administration. Addressing the South and its sympathizers particularly, Presi

dent Lincoln closed his address with these cautionary though friendly words: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government; while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies: though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." With such wise restraint and extreme tenderness, did Lincoln appeal to the erring South at this critical juncture of affairs, the unhappy answer to which, only five weeks later, was the firing upon and capture by the Southern forces in the field of Fort Sumter. Meanwhile, other United States forts and arsenals had been seized by the seceders, and a Confederate Government had been created, with Jefferson Davis as President, and the States of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had joined South Carolina in passing ordinances of secession. Later on, the States of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee joined the new-pledged Confederacy and took themselves out of the Union.

While these momentous events were happening, the machinery of the Washington Government was organized, Mr. Lincoln calling to his Cabinet a number of able and experienced men, some of whom had been his rivals in the contest for the Presidency. Of these notable men called to the councils of the nation, Mr. Seward accepted the post of Secretary of State; Salmon P. Chase, who had been a senator and governor of Ohio, was made

Secretary of the Treasury; Gideon Welles became Secretary of the Navy; Montgomery Blair, PostmasterGeneral; Edward Bates, of Missouri, Attorney-General; Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior; while the Secretary of War was Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania, later on succeeded by Edwin M. Stanton. Of these statesmen, strong and able though they severally were, the master hand in the rule of the nation was Lincoln himself, as we see in his effective though quiet rebuke to Seward, who had showed a disposition shortly after the President's installation, if not to take the direction of affairs into his own hand, to assert his own individuality as chief minister of the State. Not to be borne was this impatience of Mr. Seward, for Mr. Lincoln's capacity was undoubted to manage both affairs and men under him, while doing no violence constitutionally by any arbitrary proceedings of his own, or in vital matters overriding the wise, legitimate counsels of his Cabinet.

The aggressive act of the Confederacy in its attack on Fort Sumter, while it startled the North and inflamed its people with a righteous indignation, was promptly and vigorously met by President Lincoln, by an instant call, as commander-in-chief, for 75.000 men of the Union. militia a call that was immediately and enthusiastically responded to. With its issue as a retort to the Southern challenge to battle, Mr. Lincoln commanded the seceding States in arms to disperse and return peacefully to their homes within twenty days, while he at the same time appealed "to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid the effort to maintain the honor, the integrity and existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government." This was followed by placing the Southern ports under blockade, and by calls for larger levies of troops to cope with the crisis, which, on and after the battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861) assumed menacing and destructive proportions. So grave was the emergency, and so protracted as well as disastrous at

first to the Northern arms was the struggle, that the cares and responsibilities of his exalted office bore heavily on the President and put a most serious and constant strain upon him and his Administration. Especially onerous were the duties and depressing the effects upon Mr. Lincoln when a year even had elapsed with no decisive results, although at this time 200,000 men had been put in the field and experiment after experiment had been tried with the generals who had been successively appointed to chief command in the War. Amid the perplexities of the time, and the many discouragements and saddening military reverses that marked his four years' incumbency of office, only a resolute, patriotic purpose and an undaunted, invincible spirit could have sustained Mr. Lincoln in his duties until light at length, happily, broke through the gloom and the North emerged triumphant from the conflict.

The details of the mighty struggle, we need hardly say, it is foreign to the motif of the present volume here to relate; nor is there need obviously of this, with the many histories of the war and biographies of its several chief commanders available to the reader. Our purpose

rather is to follow, in as brief compass as possible, the main incidents in the career of President Lincoln, as an introduction to his chief Speeches and Addresses, and to throw light upon the mental and moral character of the man and on his equipment as an orator and debater of the first eminence among great American Statesmen. As we have said, the conflict, with its repeated disasters and dismays throughout the dark days of its early conduct, told heavily upon the President; and great was the tax upon his energies and anxieties in directing and managing affairs and in keeping the nation in heart to pursue the war to a successful close. Nor was the task made easier with dissension in the Cabinet, and criticisms from the outside, including all manner of misrepresentations and sometimes ridiculings and malignings, uncomplain

ingly borne, with the sturdiness and chivalry of his kindly, inoffensive nature. Obviously, moreover, the matter of selecting and appointing the generals-in-chief placed a heavy responsibility upon the President's shoulders, and often, unfortunately, was he called to this duty, in consequence of the successive failures or tardiness in movement of those in chief command. The restraint he placed upon himself in the matter of emancipating the slaves was a further trial to Lincoln, since, however anxious he was to resort to the measure, which finally led to the discomfiture of the South and brought the War to a close, he was long deterred from putting the liberating edict in force until it became indispensable (as well as justifiable) as a means "to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation." At length, the time came when the peremptory decree of Emancipation could with reason and certain effectiveness be launched; and this was done Jan. 1, 1863, with obvious and fortunate results. Almost instantly thereafter there were signs of breaking day, in the events that followedin the siege and capture of Vicksburg and the clearing and opening of the Mississippi; in the military movements that led to the cutting of the Confederate States in twain; and in the operations, later on, such as the great battle of Chattanooga, Sheridan's driving the enemy from the Valley of the Shenandoah, the capture of Mobile, and the movements of Grant on his onward march upon Richmond, with Lee's rout and surrender at Appomattox and the finale of the war. The conflict, on both sides, had its appalling losses of both life and treasure; but the end, forecast even before his passing tragically from the scene, was to cheer Lincoln's heart and gladden his soul, despite all the sacrifices, on the Northern side, entailed to preserve the Union.

Though the war in many quarters had its numberless active and noisy opponents, and though many, more reasonably, grumbled at the entailed alarming deprecia