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Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We-even we here-hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free-honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed, this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, justa way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

The question of the employment of negro troops gave concern to both armies. General Lee favored enlisting negroes in the Southern Army, and so did Jefferson Davis, but the South had reason to pause before putting uniforms on the backs of slaves and giving them guns with which to fight against soldiers of the white race. Negroes thus fighting in the Confederate Army would, of course, receive their freedom as a reward, and they would thereafter live in the South, after having been taught to shoot white men. In the North there was much disinclination to employ negroes as soldiers, but a growing conviction that there was no good reason why white men should die to make black men free and the black men be sheltered from the perils of the war. Soon after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, the enlistment of negro soldiers began. On January 20, 1863, twenty days after the proclamation became effective, Governor John A. Andrew, of Massachusetts, was authorized to enlist negro soldiers, to be formed into a separate corps. How well he did his work, and how well he was aided by George L. Stearns and others, the monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, which stands on Boston Common, fronting the state-house, attests. In August of that year, Honorable Joseph Holt, Judge Advocate

General, sent to the president an official opinion that the president was authorized to enlist slaves as soldiers, remunerating such masters as were loyal for property thus taken from them for the uses of the government in time of war.

Lincoln's desire to provide if possible a gradual method of emancipation with compensation would naturally have restrained him even longer from issuing the Proclamation of Emancipation had not existing conditions made any such provisions impossible. But Lincoln had to deal not only with conservative but with very radical elements in his own party. Through all the months of his administration he had been careful in testing out the sentiments of the country, to determine whether it would bear such a proclamation. The time had come when in some respects it was safer to issue the proclamation than not to do so. There was a growing conviction that Webster was right in his declaration that liberty and Union were one and inseparable. The divided house had not stood. Could it be reunited and rebuilt upon the foundation of liberty? This was the stone which the builders had rejected: Lincoln made it the headstone of the

corner.

CHAPTER XII

"HE SAID He was mastER"

IF LINCOLN supposed that his Emancipation Proclamation would be a popular political move, he was doomed to cruel disappointment. The proclamation succeeded in rousing the most bitter hostility of the pro-slavery element of the North, and by a singular inconsistency it seemed to give some of the extreme anti-slavery advocates a new ground for their attacks upon Lincoln.

The North contained a very strong element which had little or no sympathy with the conduct of the war. The so-called "Copperhead" movement, which later manifested itself in deliberate plans for the overthrow of the government, was in 1862 a strongly entrenched political power opposed to the president. The friends of McClellan turned against Lincoln, alleging that he had first failed to cooperate with this brilliant general, and then ruthlessly removed him from command for reasons of political jealousy. Haters of the negro professed to see in the Emancipation Proclamation the menace of negro equality and of social demoralization. Extremes met. There was a considerable element in the North composed of those who were bitterly opposed to slavery, and who blamed Lincoln severely for not freeing the slaves earlier. Indeed, there were not a few who declared that the president, with what they called his customary vacillation, would find a pretext for recalling his proclamation before January 1, 1863. These people found common ground with those who blamed him for freeing the slaves at all.

The Democratic Party declared that the Emancipation Proc

lamation had now made abolition the actual purpose of the war. No longer, they affirmed, was the preservation of the Union the paramount object; the real purpose for which white men were expected to lay down their lives was to give freedom and social equality to the black man. This distinctly was not what they had undertaken to do, nor did they propose to do it.

The congressional election in Maine occurred early in September, 1862. Then, as in subsequent elections, the results of that state were closely watched. "As goes Maine, so goes the Union," had already become a proverb. Maine usually elected a Republican governor by a majority of from 10,000 to 19,000. In 1862, Maine chose a Republican governor by a majority of only 4,000, and, for the first time since there had been a Republican Party, Maine sent one Democrat to Congress.

Ohio voted in October, and sent to the National House of Representatives fourteen Democrats and only five Republicans. The Democratic vote in that state exceeded the Republican by a majority of 7,000. In Pennsylvania, where two years before Lincoln had had a majority of 60,000, the Democratic vote exceeded the Republican by about 4,000, and the congressional delegation was divided. Indiana sent to Congress only three Republican representatives and eight Democrats. New York went Democratic by a majority of nearly 10,000, electing Horatio Seymour as governor. New Jersey, which had voted Republican in 1860, went Democratic in 1862. Michigan remained Republican, but its majority was reduced from 20,000 to 6,000. Wisconsin divided its delegation evenly. Illinois, Lincoln's own state, went Democratic by a majority of 17,000, and her congressional delegation was eleven Democrats to three Republicans. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois all failed to support Lincoln in 1862.

To their everlasting honor the New England States, and Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, California and Oregon, stood better in their support of the president. But when the returns were all in, the Democrats, who had only forty-four votes in the

House in the Thirty-seventh Congress, had seventy-five in the Thirty-eighth.

In that crisis the border states stood by the president. He had not underestimated the importance of holding them loyally within the Union, and true in their support of the administration. They in 1862 furnished a sufficient number of pro-administration members to save Congress from going over to the opposition.

But among the Republicans were not a few members so bitterly hostile to Lincoln for his cautious policy that it could hardly be said that the president had in Congress any more than a bare working majority.

The elections of 1862 were "off-year" elections. Off-years are often fatal years. The elections of 1862 were not fatal to Lincoln's hopes, but they weakened his support, and prepared the way for a bitter and painful campaign in 1864.

The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. There was a great celebration in Music Hall in Boston, and Ralph Waldo Emerson read his Boston Hymn on that occasion. In many other places there were enthusiastic meetings and warm expressions of approval. But that is not the whole story. There was much emphatic disapproval, also. On the day following the proclamation's taking effect, Senator O. H. Browning recorded:

Friday, Jany. 2, 1863. At Mr. Seward's for dinner at 6. No one else there. I asked him why the Cabinet did so useless and so mischievous a thing as to issue the proclamation which had been issued, the only effect of which was to unite and exasperate them in the South and divide and distract us in the North. He replied by telling me an anecdote of a man who after the termination of the Revolutionary War could not rest till he had a liberty pole erected in his village; when asked by his neighbors what he wanted with a pole, and whether he was not as free without it as with it, he would always answer, "What is liberty without a pole?" And what is war without a proclamation? We played whist with Mrs. Seward and Miss Fanny till 9 o'clock, and then

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