OF

THE ADMINISTRATION

OF

PRESIDENT LINCOLN:

INCLUDING HIS

SPEECHES, LETTERS, ADDRESSES, PROCLAMATIONS,

AND MESSAGES.

WITH A PRELIMINARY SKETCH OF HIS LIFE.

BY

HENRY J. RAYMOND.

NEW YORK:

J. C. DERBY & N. C. MILLER,
NO. 5 SPRUCE STREET.

1864.

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

C. A. ALVORD, STEREOTYPER AND PRINTEE.

PREFACE.

THIS Volume does not profess to be, in any exact and important sense, a History of the Administration of President LINCOLN. Such a work would require access to sources of information which cannot, from the nature of the case, be open to the public for many years to come.

Its object is merely to collect and collate the speeches, messages, proclamations, and other documents in which the President has embodied, from time to time, his sentiments on the affairs of the ountry, and set forth the motives which have prompted the successive acts of his Administration. In the narrative which accompanies these papers the writer has sought only to record the circumstances essential to an appreciation of the papers themselves, and not by any means to give a complete history of the events by which this momentous period in the career of our country has been marked.

If the public shall find in this work any important aid in forming a judgment of the policy by which President LINCOLN is seeking to carry the Nation through the crisis of a civil war, its purpose will have been accomplished.

NEW YORK, May 5, 1864.

H. J. R.