Of the territorial area involved he now said with equal clearness: "Physically speaking we cannot separate.'

The leaders of the rebellion perfectly understood the axiom so enunciated, and they had laid their plans accordingly.

For more than a generation they had ruled the whole country through the clumsy machinery provided for them at Washington. Their "secession" now was but a first step in a design which proposed a more absolute, more sweeping, and more arbitrary domination.

They looked forward to the control of the entire territory of the United States, then to that of the whole continent to the Isthmus, and with that the absorption of the West Indies.

Slavery was aggressive as a necessity of its existence. Its rebuff in its attempt upon Kansas and Nebraska had but precipitated the more desperate undertakings of its bloody campaign for its life. At the hour when Mr. Lincoln was speaking, armed rebel forces were already preparing to seize New Mexico and the adjacent Territories. A well-devised conspiracy was at work in the free State of California. There was a strong pro-slavery element in the city of New York, hardly deigning to disguise itself under what now seems the wild project for slicing off that commercial metropolis by itself as a free city."

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In every place, and in whatever form, the true intent and meaning of every suggestion of dismemberment was the eventual unification of the United States as a Slave Empire.

The issue thus created was met squarely by Mr. Lincoln then and afterwards, but the hour was not ripe for its elaborate presentation. He was a ruler about to assume the direction of a war in which his opponents had had nearly their own way for three months. He was a commander-in-chief with a bankrupt treasury and without either army or navy. He was himself then standing upon a platform on the steps of a building some days' march within the enemy's lines. He was addressing himself to populations listening to his words as if

almost in search of causes of offence. He was compelled to clothe his plainest enunciations in such forms of speech as should not throw away communities and States by arraying angrily against him the very elements whereof he hoped and intended to make immediate use.

Read in the light of subsequent deeds and events, Mr. Lincoln's inaugural address must be given the high praise that it was a State paper equal to the demands of an unparalleled occasion.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

WAR.

The New Era-Unification of the South-Free Speech-Copperheads-The Cabinet-The White House-Confederate Ambassadors-Traitors in Office-The Border States-The Sumter Gun-The President's Call to Arms-April, 1861.

MR. JEFFERSON DAVIS was installed as President of the Southern Confederacy on the 18th of February, 1861, and the flag of rebellion, afterwards so well known as the "Stars and Bars," was formally adopted, on the 4th of March, as the emblem of organized pro-slavery war. Around the flag and its chosen bearer were rapidly grouped and solidified the ready elements of the great peril with which Mr. Lincoln had thus far dealt with such skillful and courageous conservatism.

The forces he was thenceforth to direct were ample but were as yet chaotic and tumultuous, and his first duties were mainly those of organization.

The last Congress of the Buchanan Administration had steadily drifted out of pro-slavery control. The consecutive departures of its ultra-Southern membership left it more and more a "Republican" body, politically speaking, but its Unionloving elements were irregularly stratified and were not yet prepared to work in unison. Its closing hours were signalized by the rejection of the weak work of the so-called "Peace Congress" and of what was known as the "Crittenden Compromise."

The timely death of these twin-children of legislative timidity relieved Mr. Lincoln of any annoying guardianship of what must have proved a perpetual minority.

On the adjournment of Congress and the unobstructed inauguration, the North as a whole and the Union men of the border States breathed more freely for a few days, but the war went steadily onward. The chosen chief of the rebellion, a man of intense individuality, despotic will, and much executive ability, was rapidly invested with powers which were only in name and form less than autocratic. He and his fellow-conspirators clearly perceived the necessity of forbidding and preventing any open division of popular sentiment in the districts under their control.

The structure of Southern society gave them all facilities, and they began at once a work of suppression, continued to the end of the war, which did not hesitate in the employment of needful methods and agencies. The most searching espionage was supplemented by the most pitiless cruelty, and in due time the rebellious region was effectively unified.

No similar assault upon or destruction of personal liberty of thought or speech or action was at all possible at the North. No such tyranny was called for, nor was it ever undertaken. It would have been as foreign to the nature of Mr. Lincoln as to the genius of the free people who sustained him. Both he and they were afterwards slow to adopt the simplest and most necessary repressive measures. From the first to the last the critics of the Administration used their tongues and pens with a freedom which was by no means altogether due to the general faith in their impotence for serious mischief. Doubtless contempt had its share, however, in the leniency extended at the North to the large class of politicians of traitorous tendencies who shortly came to be known as "Copperheads," from the venomous reptile of that name.

The selection of Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet was nearly completed when he took the oath of office. The group of men he now gathered around him was eminently representative, politically and geographically. William H. Seward, of New York, was appointed Secretary of State; Simon Cameron, of Pennsyl

vania, Secretary of War; Gideon Welles, of Connecticut, Secretary of the Navy; Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury; Caleb B. Smith, of Indiana, Secretary of the Interior; Edward Bates, of Missouri, Attorney-General; and Montgomery Blair, of Maryland, Postmaster-General.

Subsequent changes need not now be noted, but it was evident from the first that it would require a man of marked intellectual and moral superiority to be the actual guiding mind, governing will, and recognized chief among such men as these whose success as leaders was already notable. Many, indeed, were ready to offer an opinion that Mr. Lincoln would either be a puppet in their hands, tossed to and fro between opposing cabals as Mr. Buchanan had been, or that, for peace and quiet, he would soon drift under the sole management of some one strong mind and subtle purpose among his constitutional advisers. That there was never the slightest peril or sign of either disaster is a testimonial of the completeness with which he had already mapped out the course he meant to pursue. At the same time it speaks for the acuteness and patriotic readiness with which the Cabinet at once stepped out upon the path upon which they were to co-operate but not to lead.

The Executive Mansion was a curious study during many days and weeks following the inauguration. Its halls and offices were literally packed with human beings. There were days when the throng of eager applicants for office filled the broad staircase to its lower steps; the corridors of the first floor; the famous East Room; the private parlors; while anxious groups and individuals paraded up and down the outer porch, the walks, and the Avenue.

The entrance of the Cabinet officers upon their duties and appointing powers drew away much of this pressure after a while, and Mr. Lincoln was at once accused of transferring too much of his prerogative to his subordinates. That he should have relief would have been a physical necessity under any circumstances, but he now had more important matters on his