Lincoln." Mr. Lovejoy exclaimed, "I, too, have a niche for Abraham Lincoln, but it is in Freedom's holy fame and not in the blood besmeared temple of human bondage; not surrounded by slaves, fetters and chains, but with the symbols of freedom; not dark with bondage but radiant with the light of liberty. In that niche he shall stand proudly, nobly, gloriously, with shattered fetters and broken chains and slave whips at his feet.

"If Abraham Lincoln pursues the path evidently pointed out for him in the Providence of God, as I believe he will, then he will occupy the proud position I have indicated. That is a fame worth living for, aye, more, that is a fame worth dying for, though that death led through the blood of Gethsemane and the agony of the accursed tree. That is a fame which has glory, honor and immortality and eternal life.

"Let Abraham Lincoln make himself, as I trust he will, the Emancipator, the Liberator, as he has the opportunity of doing, and his name shall be not only enrolled in this earthly temple, but it will be traced on the living stones of the temple which rears its head amid the thrones and hierarchies of heaven, whose top stone is to be brought in with shouting of 'Grace unto it.""

Mr. Lovejoy's confidence was not in vain.

LINCOLN, "THE EMANCIPATOR.”

(1809-1865)

BY G. MERCER ADAM.*

I'

F there ever was a life consecrated from early manhood to humanity's cause, it was that of Lincoln, "the Emancipator," the revered martyred President who fell in Freedom's name. His death, sad and lamented as it was and is, was, however, a glorious and triumphal one, for it did almost as much for Freedom, and, no matter of what color the people were, for individual rights and popular liberty in this great nation, as was done by the holocaust of human life that fell in their cause, and by the colossal sums expended throughout a most critical and appalling era. His demise and the manner of it, after so strenuous, honest, and conscientious a life, influenced, if it did not actually mould, the immediate future of the nation, and gave reconstruction such a set and direction as it might hardly otherwise have had, while potently reuniting and cementing the riven Union. One far-seeing and most humane event in Lincoln's administration, while he lived, was instrumental not only in adding glory to his name, but in bringing about the close of the great conflict of his time. We refer, of course, to the edict of Emancipation and the prohibiting of slavery in the States and Territories of the Union. Emancipation, it is true,

Historian, Biographer, and Essayist, Author of a "Precis of English History." a "Continuation of Grecian History," etc., and for many years Editor of SelfCulture Magazine.-The Publishers.

was resorted to as "a war measure" in the thick of the deadly contest; but with Lincoln, long before the era of the decree and the amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery forever from the country, the vile traffic had always been held in abhorrence, and deep in his mind had lain the thought of abolishing it or seeing it abolished. The immediate effect of the measure, we know, was to drive the South to the verge of desperation; while at the North it was only partially accepted and for a time it aroused even bitter animadversion. Happily, however, a change of sentiment came ere long, when it was seen what freedom meant to the slave, and how telling were the consequences of emancipation in the issues of the war. The act, almost entirely, was Lincoln's own, and its consummation did surpassing honor to him, as well as to his administration, and, at large, to the people who endorsed and applauded it.

There is little need here to rehearse the well-known incidents in Lincoln's modest trading venture down the Mississippi, which led the great and humane President early in his career to become an abolitionist, though he was never a negrophilist. To a heart so tender as his and so open to the dictates of justice and the rights of all, the sights he witnessed in that expedition in the flatboat on the great river of manacled and whipped slaves, were sufficient to turn his mind and heart against slavery and to avow, as he expressed it, that some day he would "hit it hard," while he knew and affirmed that it could never be compromised with. His conservatism and moderation, together with his respect for law, at the outset of his career made him, not tolerant towards

the evil institution, nor timid in his attitude towards it, but careful to keep it within bounds and prevent its extension where it was not law. This it is that has led some writers to deny that Lincoln was opposed to slavery as a crime and a moral wrong, and to affirm that he assumed hostility to it only as a political manœuvre, especially after his memorable contest with Stephen A. Douglas. This, we think, unfair and ungenerous toward the great Emancipator, since few men in public life have more remarkably shown, as Lincoln throughout his career showed, a sense of moral right and a mind and heart influenced by humane motives, and prone to kindliness himself and by precept and example urged its sway and interaction upon others. In some measure, then, critics are right, and are justified by Lincoln's own written and spoken words in regard to slavery. But while it is true that Lincoln's hand was for a time stayed by the limits of the Constitution, and by his early powerlessness to root the giant evil out, and while Emancipation was resorted to as a means of saving the Union by an astute war measure, it is nevertheless also true that its author was, and had long been, opposed in his heart of hearts to the curse of slavery, believed it to be founded upon injustice and bad policy, and though he would not force abolition upon any State against the popular will and voice, he yet hated it thoroughly and looked with pain and abhorrence upon its existence in any and all sections of the Union.

It may also assuredly be said that Lincoln looked forward with confidence to the ultimate extinction of slavery, though it took, as it did, a great crisis in the history of the Nation to get rid of it. His own belief in this respect is enshrined

not only in the momentous edict that forever banned it from the Republic, in his opposition to the Dred Scott decision, on the ground that it deprived the black man of the rights and privileges of citizenship, but in those prophetic words of his which he uttered at the Springfield convention, in 1858, that nominated him for the United States Senate. In that cry for unity and singlemindedness in the Nation he affirmed his belief that the Government of the country "cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free," for, as he added, “a house divided against itself cannot stand." Once more, in 1864, he said in memorable words, "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong"-a dictum of unmistakable truth and force; while he knew that the war then going on between the North and South was a struggle on the part of the latter, not only for the right of secession, but to perpetuate slavery, the one factor that had divided the country into two hostile and irreconcilable camps, and was, materially and socially, the distinctive barrier between them. With the prescience that marked his statesmanship, he saw this fact so clearly that the Proclamation of Emancipation was the result—a measure that almost everywhere was hailed by the plaudits of mankind; while, in the wording of the Act itself and in Lincoln's own defence of it, we see the great Liberator's realization of the profound moral agitation of the era and the significance of the remedy he would apply in bringing about the abiding issue of the conflict.

We have dealt with Mr. Lincoln's moral convictions in regard to slavery, and of the righteousness of the measure he resorted to in planning and launching, at the right juncture in a critical time, the great Act of Emancipation. Of the