Williamk 
 
 Eulogy o^bhe life and public service 
 Abraham Lincoln
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 EULOGY 
 
 LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICES 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 
 
 LATE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 
 
 DELIVERED BY PUBLIC REQUEST, IN 
 
 CHRIST M. E. CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, 
 
 THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 1865. 
 
 BY 
 
 HON. THOMAS WILLIAMS. 
 
 PITTSBURGH: 
 
 PRINTED BY W. S. HAVEN, CORNER OP WOOD AND THIRD STREETS. 
 
 1865.
 
 EULOGY 
 
 ON THE 
 
 LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICES 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 
 
 LATE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 
 
 DELIVERED BY PUBLIC REQUEST, IN 
 
 CHRIST M. E. CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, 
 
 THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 1865. 
 
 BY 
 
 HON. THOMAS WILLIAMS. 
 
 PITTSBUKGH: 
 
 PRINTED BY W. 8. HAVEN, CORNER OF WOOD AND THIRD STREETS. 
 
 1865.
 
 * * V 
 
 * : .
 
 WILUAM VYUB* UBBAftt 
 
 SANTA BARBARA, OOU&Qt 
 
 ^67^, 
 
 MAYOR'S OFFICE, 
 PITTSBURGH, June 2, 1865. 
 
 To the Hox. THOMAS WILLIAMS: 
 
 Dear Sir At a recent meeting, held by a 
 
 large number of the leading and influential citizens of Pittsburgh and vicin- 
 ity, a resolution was unanimously passed, requesting me, as Chairman, to 
 procure from you a copy of your eloquent and truthful Eulogy of the late 
 President Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 Your compliance with this request will greatly oblige 
 
 Your most obedient servant, 
 
 JAMES LOWRY, JR. 
 
 PITTSBURGH, June 2, 1865. 
 HON. JAMBS LOWRY, JR. 
 
 Dear Sir In accordance with the request of the 
 
 meeting of which you have been made the organ, I hand you for publication 
 a copy of the Eulogy which I had the honor to pronounce at Christ M. E. 
 Church, on the evening of the 1st instant. 
 
 I am sorry that the performance is not more worthy of the theme and the 
 occasion. 
 
 Thanking you, however, for the nattering terms in which you have been 
 pleased to speak of it, 
 
 I am, very truly, Yours, 
 
 THOMAS WILLIAMS. 
 
 79059'
 
 EULOGY 
 
 WE meet in*gloom. But yesterday our streets were jubilant, and 
 the very heavens ablaze with the bright pomp of a rejoicing multi- 
 tude. But yesterday our temples were vocal with songs of raptur- 
 ous thanksgiving for the great victories that had been vouchsafed 
 to our arms. To-day no jubilee solicits us. No loud huzzas no 
 "aves vehement" no hurrying feet no hymns of triumph salute 
 our ears. It is the hour of darkness, as these sad emblems indicate. 
 A nation mourns. A mighty people throngs its wide-spread sanctu- 
 aries, to lament its martyred Chief, but just returned from the 
 overthrow of the armed array that menaced its own life, to die in 
 the very hour of his triumph in the fancied security of its own 
 capital under the blaze of a thousand lights, and a thousand ad- 
 miring eyes and in the midst of the brave hearts that belted him 
 around, and would have spilled their life's best blood to shelter him 
 from harm and to die, oh God of Justice ! by the stealthy and 
 felonious blow of an assassin. In such a presence, and with such 
 surroundings, the chosen Ruler of this great Republic the kind, 
 the generous, the parental magistrate, who knew no resentments, 
 and had never done aught to deserve an enemy has bowed his 
 venerable head upon his bosom, and laid down the high commission 
 with which he had been so lately reinvested by the popular acclaim. 
 "Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope the temple of the Lord's 
 anointed, and stolen out the life of the building." The pulse of 
 the world has stood almost suspended by the earthquake jar that 
 shook its continents and isles, as no event of modern times has 
 done. A multitudinous people "in numbers numberless" almost 
 as the stars of heaven thrilled with horror, and smitten dumb 
 by the fearful atrocity which flashed upon them, unheralded by
 
 any note of warning, over the electric -wires, have uncovered their 
 heads and wept, as no people ever wept before, as the funeral cor- 
 tege swept by, with its precious but unconscious burthen, over moun- 
 tain and plain, and along the rivers and the lakes, in its long and 
 melancholy journey to the far Western home which he was to see 
 in the body no more. The earth has opened to receive all that the 
 nation could give back to that now desolated home, and we are 
 here to-day, by the appointment of his successor, to bow in reveren- 
 tial submission and acknowledgment before the Hand that has 
 smitten us, and to draw such consolations as are possible, from the 
 consideration that the chastisements of God are sometimes mercies 
 in disguise, while we water with our tears the fresh grave of the 
 heroic martyr, who has crowned his great work by the offering of 
 his own life upon the same altar where the blood of so many vic- 
 tims had already smoked to heaven. 
 
 Yes ! ABRAHAM LINCOLN is no more. All that could die of him 
 who has defended and rebuilt the tottering structure of our fathers, 
 has passed from earthly view, by a transition as abrupt as his who 
 laid the foundations of the Eternal City, and then, according to the 
 legendary epic of the Roman State, was wrapt from mortal vision 
 in a chariot of fire. The shadow of the destroyer has mounted 
 behind the trooper, and the grim spectre of the grisly king followed 
 close upon the pageant of the avenue. The wise and prudent ruler 
 who was commissioned of God to lead this people through the fiery 
 trials from which they have just emerged the chief who had just 
 been lifted on their bucklers for a second time to the supreme com- 
 mand the idol of the popular heart, who had so recently been 
 crowned anew at the Capitol with the symbols of a nation's power, 
 the insignia of a nation's trust, and the rewards of a nation's 
 gratitude, amidst the thundering salvos of artillery, and the re- 
 sponsive voices of an innumerable throng, has ceased to listen to 
 the applauding shout, and passed from the regards of men, into 
 the serener light of an abode beyond the stars, where the banner 
 of war is furled, and the hoarse summons of the trumpet, and the 
 roll of the stirring drum, no longer awaken either to the battle or 
 the triumph. 
 
 On two occasions only in our brief but eventful history, the hand 
 of death has fallen upon the head of this great Republic. On 
 both, however, it descended in a period of public tranquility, by
 
 the quiet and gentle ministration of nature, without shock and 
 without disturbance. The fruit fell when it was ripe, and the nation 
 grieved, but not as those who are without hope. It paused but 
 for a moment to cast its tribute of affection on the tomb, and then 
 hurried onward in its high and prosperous career. For the first 
 time now, in the very hurricane of civil strife, a bloody tragedy, of 
 fearful aspect, and more than mediaeval horror, forestalling the dis- 
 solving processes that are interwoven with the law of life, has 
 snatched away the man who, above all others, was most dear to us, 
 almost in the twinkling of an eye, in high health, and in the very 
 crisis of his great work, when the regards of the world were most 
 intently fixed upon him, and the destinies of a nation were trembling 
 in his hands. It is as though an apparition had stalked, in the 
 midst of our rejoicings, into the very presence of the festal board, 
 and it is under the projecting shadow with which that ghastly 
 shape has darkened the whole land as with a general eclipse, that 
 I am asked to discourse to you of the merits and services of the 
 extraordinary man, who has thus disappeared from amongst us 
 after having enacted so large a part in the greatest and most im- 
 portant era of the world's history. It is a task which is never 
 easy in the performance, and cannot be faithfully executed until 
 the lapse of years shall withdraw the observer from a proximity 
 that is always unfavorable to the clearest vision, and the work is 
 consigned to the pen of impartial history. It is one, however, 
 which I have not felt at liberty to decline. 
 
 Of Abraham Lincoln there is little to be said, until the voice of 
 the people called him from the comparative obscurity of a provincial 
 town in the remote West, to preside over the destinies of this Re- 
 public. The story of his life, antecedent to his appearance on that 
 broader stage, where he was destined to command more of the 
 observation of the world than any other man either of ancient or 
 modern times, is soon told. Born in a frontier settlement in Ken- 
 tucky, of humble parentage, and with no prospective inheritance 
 but that of the coarsest toil, it was not his hard fate to wear out 
 his life in the hopeless struggle for success, to which that nativity 
 would have consigned him. At the age of six years, his parents, 
 warned by no vision, but by the stern necessities of life, removed 
 from the house of bondage, taking the young child with them, to 
 grow up in the freer air of that great Territory, whose fundamental
 
 8 
 
 ordinance had insured the respectability of labor, by forbidding any 
 bondsman from ever setting his foot upon its soil. There, in the 
 vigorous young State of Indiana, "without even the aid of a mother's 
 care beyond his infant years, he shot up we know not how into 
 the lofty stature and robust manhood which have since become so 
 familiar to us all, diversifying his labors, and indulging that spirit 
 of adventure that is so common to the pioneer, by embarking, at 
 the age of nineteen years, as a working hand, at the scanty wages 
 of ten dollars a month, on one of those primitive flat-boats on which 
 the western farmer of those times was wont to launch his produce 
 on the bosom of the Ohio, to find its only market at New Orleans. 
 At the age of twenty-one years, without any better prospects in 
 life, and inheriting apparently the migratory instincts of his father, 
 who had perhaps grown weary of his Indiana home, he plunged 
 with him into the further West, and sought and found a new settle- 
 ment on an unreclaimed quarter-section of the public lands in 
 Central Illinois. That he must have shared the humble labors of 
 that parent in winning his new acquisition from a state of nature 
 into a habitable abode for man, is obvious from the fact that so 
 limited an area, on the extremest frontier of civilization, could 
 have afforded no great scope for employment but with the axe or 
 plow, and no means whatever for mental culture or development, 
 except those powers of thought and observation, which the solitudes 
 of nature, and the communion of the forest and the field, have 
 sometimes awakened in those gifted spirits that seem to be im- 
 mediately inspired of God. Within a year or two, however, the 
 occurrence of what was called the "Black Hawk War," drew him 
 from a seclusion which must have been extremely irksome to a 
 youth of lively temperament, and overflowing health, by offering 
 the temptation which the pursuit of arms almost invariably pre- 
 sents to the young and ambitious spirits of the land. He enlisted 
 in a company of volunteers, who forthwith selected him as their 
 captain, but his aspirations for military renown were soon cut short 
 by the unexpected termination of the war. His next appearance 
 is as a candidate for the Legislature of the State, to which he was 
 repeatedly elected, and about the same time he turned his attention 
 to the study of the law, and was duly admitted to the Bar. What 
 preparation he may have made for this transition to another and a 
 higher field of labor, is unknown to us. He has the credit of con-
 
 fessing, with that simplicity which drew from him the acknowledg- 
 ment that he had never read the works of the great master of the 
 drama, that he had enjoyed the advantage of but six months' 
 schooling in the whole course of his life. That he had read such 
 books as were accessible to him, is not to be doubted. Report says 
 that he had picked up in some way a little knowledge of surveying, 
 which may have served to train and discipline his reasoning faculty, 
 and was, as will be remembered, the youthful employment of the 
 great Washington himself. Beyond this, however, little was re- 
 quired in the infant condition of a frontier settlement, which would 
 have few attractions for men of such acquirements as only an old 
 community could afford; although it is not to be questioned that 
 some of the robustest intellects in the land have been nurtured in 
 those primitive and truly republican schools, where no hot-bed cul- 
 ture was admissible, and every sickly plant was doomed to die. 
 Whether he succeeded in attaining any great distinction in his new 
 profession, where success is dependent generally on a peculiarity 
 of taste or mental structure, and where industry is so often an 
 over-match for talent, is by no means clear. We do know, how- 
 ever, .that his abilities and worth were duly recognized at home by 
 his triumphant election in 1846 to the Congress of the United 
 States where he served, however, but for a single term as well 
 as by the award to him, by common consent, of the championship 
 of the Free State party, on the occasion of the controversy which 
 grew out of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. In 1856 he was presented 
 by his State, and supported largely, as a candidate for the office of 
 Vice President on the Republican ticket of that year ; and in the 
 canvass of 1858, as the accepted candidate for Senator, he discussed 
 before the people of Illinois the question of the extension of slavery 
 into the Territories, in a series of debates which riveted the atten- 
 tion of the nation, by the clearness of their statements, and the 
 immense logical power which they displayed. It was perhaps to 
 the publicity of these efforts that he was mainly indebted for the 
 great distinction conferred on him by the Convention of 1860, in 
 singling him out, above all competitors, as the standard-bearer of 
 the army of freedom in that memorable campaign. 
 
 And this brief narrative compiled from unauthentic sources, 
 and making no pretension to the accuracy of biography is a sum- 
 mary of his career until called by Providence to enact a part that
 
 10 
 
 has been assigned to few men in history. How he performed his 
 duty is perhaps best evidenced by the difficulties he had to meet, 
 and the final result of the war which pervaded his whole adminis- 
 tration. He bargained only for a peaceful rule, like that of his 
 predecessors. If he could have foreseen the magnitude of the task 
 that was before him, he might well have shrunk from the trial. 
 He would have been a bold man, who, with such fore-knowledge, 
 would willingly have taken the helm in such a storm as howled 
 around him on his advent, and strained the timbers of the ship of 
 state for so many long and weary years. To him the place, how- 
 ever exalted and honorable, was one of anxious and unsleeping 
 care. No man can tell how much of agony it cost a heart like his. 
 It is to that point of his career, however, that our inquiries are to 
 be directed, if we would know the man. The history of the great 
 rebellion, comprehending all or nearly all of his public life, is em- 
 phatically his history. It began and ended with his administration 
 of the government. He succeeded to a divided sceptre. He lived 
 just long enough to re-unite the broken fragments to re-plant the 
 starry banner of our fathers on the battlements whence treason had 
 expelled it to see the arch-apostate who had seduced a third .part 
 of the States from their allegiance, a wanderer and a fugitive 
 and to leave to his successor a once more undivided Union. 
 
 "With this slender preparation, however, and with no previous 
 training in the mysteries of government, he was translated to the 
 Federal capital in the most eventful crisis of our history, to take 
 upon his shoulders such a burthen of responsibility as no President 
 had ever been called upon to bear. The assassin lurked upon his 
 path. Already the Southern horizon was red with the fires of in- 
 cipient rebellion. Already State after State, encouraged either by 
 the premeditated treason, or the helpless pusillanimity of the miser- 
 able imbecile who stood pale and trembling at the capital, had shot 
 madly from its orbit. The strongholds of the Union, constructed 
 at great expense for the protection of the South, had been either 
 seized by violence, or basely surrendered by their garrisons. The 
 seat of our National Government was reeking with disloyalty. 
 While tieason was the badge of respectability there, Republicanism 
 was tabooed as something that was only vulgar and vile. The 
 Bureaus of the several Departments were swarming with malig- 
 nants, who were looking anxiously in the direction of the South for
 
 11 
 
 an irruption of the rebel hordes, and ready to surrender the keys 
 of their offices on the first summons of the public enemy. There 
 wr s no direction in which the President could turn for support, in 
 the contingency of any concerted movement to prevent his inaugu- 
 ration. The army, inconsiderable in itself, had been detached to 
 distant cantonments, where it could afford no aid, and was sure to 
 become an easy prey. Its officers the eleves of our military 
 school the most of Southern birth, but some of Northern origin, 
 debauched by their associations, or with naturally slavish instincts 
 and unbounded admiration for Southern institutions and Southern 
 men, were generally disaffected to the Union, Avhoss bread they 
 ate, and whose flag they were sworn to defend. Not a ship of war 
 was to be found upon our coast ; not a soldier at the capital to de- 
 fend the person of the Chief Magistrate of the country, except, 
 perhaps, a slender escort, of more than doubtful loyalty, improvised 
 for the occasion by the Lieutenant General, upon the urgent im- 
 portunity of men who realized the danger of a coup d'etat, as the 
 new President himself did not. There was nothing, in fact, but 
 the mere prestige of the office, the habitual respect for the person 
 of the Chief Magistrate, and the probable re-action that would 
 ensue upon any demonstration of violence, and, above all, the well- 
 understood determination of the thousands of brave men who were 
 assembled there from the free States, secretly armed and ready for 
 such an emergency, to prevent or punish any attempt that might 
 be made on the life of the President. And yet he did not shrink 
 from the ordeal, but there, on the steps of the capitol, under the 
 blazing sunlight, in the presence of all that innumerable concourse, 
 and in the hearing of a listening world, in terms of kindness, and 
 not of menace, but with a seriousness and solemnity that were not 
 to be mistaken, he proclaimed IT'S firm and unalterable determina- 
 tion to employ all the powers vested in him by the Constitution in 
 maintaining the integrity and inviolability of the Union, from sea 
 to sea, and from the lakes to the gulf, and restoring to its authority 
 every State and fortress that had been wrested from it by the 
 hands of treason. Rebellion, already organized and armed, and 
 confident of its superior prowess, received the announcement with 
 derisive laughter, as but an idle vaunt on the part of a President 
 who was without a soldier or a ship to batter down the very feeblest 
 of its strongholds. He knew that there was an army in the fields
 
 12 
 
 and workshops of the North, which only awaited his call to do this 
 work. A million of stalwart men sprung to their arms upon his 
 summons, and the pledge was redeemed. The boastful chivalry 
 went down before the sturdy arms and stormy valor of the men 
 they had so foolishly despised; and where are they now who 
 laughed to scorn the admonitions of that day, and arrogantly pro- 
 claimed to their deluded followers that the capital of the nation, 
 and the rich spoils of the opulent and crowded cities of the North, 
 should be given to their victorious arms ? They have found only a 
 grave, where they meditated an easy conquest. But Abraham 
 Lincoln lived to see his pledge fulfilled. His work was done, and 
 he too sleeps with his fathers. It had cost many priceless lives to 
 do that work. It was to be consummated by the sacrifice of his 
 own the most priceless, perhaps, of all. The demon which he 
 exorcised was to collect all his remaining strength into one expiring 
 blow at the head of his destroyer, as he fled howling, and in de- 
 spair, from the seat of his long cherished but now forever lost 
 dominion upon earth. The final catastrophe was in precise keeping 
 with the whole spirit of the bloody drama which it concluded. 
 Beginning in treason, with perjury, and robbery, and starvation, 
 and murder, as its handmaids, it could not have ended more fitting- 
 ly than in the cruel, and cowardly, and revengeful assassination of 
 the heroic leader who had stricken down the sacrilegious hand that 
 was lifted against the nation's life. Miserable and short-sighted 
 revenge ! The blow which prostrated our honored chief, while it 
 made no interregnum, and paralyzed no nerve of the government, 
 has been his apotheosis. The hand of the assassin is already cold. 
 A swift retribution has overtaken the miscreant who was put upon 
 this work, while the hands of justice are already laid upon the 
 highest of its guilty authors, and the avenger of blood is tracking 
 his accomplices to their last retreat. But they, too, will not 
 altogether die. The obscurity that they might well pray for, is not 
 for such as them. There can be no oblivion for such a parricide. 
 The flash of that fatal pistol in the theatre at Washington, which 
 sent its leaden contents crashing through the brain of our honored 
 magistrate, will blaze around them like the gleam of the assassins' 
 daggers that sought the great hearts of Henry of Navarre and the 
 heroic Prince of Orange, and light their memories down, from age 
 to age, through the long corridors of history.
 
 13 
 
 It was a disadvantage, too, of no small moment to an untried 
 man, to find himself surrounded by counselors of fair repute, who 
 had either nothing to propose, or doubted the power or rightfulness 
 of coercion in a government like this, or thought that even separa- 
 tion itself was better than war, or hoped to patch up an ignoble 
 truce, by compromising the questions in dispute, and furnishing 
 additional and perpetual guarantees to the insatiable interest which 
 had come to despise even the privilege of ruling this nation, as it had 
 done before. It will scarcely be believed in future times, how many 
 there were, enjoying the reputations of statesmen, who were com- 
 mitted to one or other of these opinions. But Avhile the question 
 hung suspended between these conflicting views, although every 
 concession had been proposed, and every effort toward compromise 
 had failed, and while the nation was sweating in mortal agony, 
 with seven States defying its authority, and formidable batteries 
 rising from day to day under the shadow of our own guns, around 
 our fortresses in Charleston harbor, the knot was happily untied 
 by the impatient hands of the conspirators themselves. To secure 
 the co-operation of the States that still stood hesitating, it was 
 deemed necessary "to fire the Southern heart" by some stupendous 
 act of violence, that should dig an impassable gulf between them 
 and us; and their guns were accordingly trained, amid the sounds 
 of revelry and the exultant huzzas of an intoxicated populace, 
 upon the old flag that was still floating over the feeble garrison of 
 Sumter. It was a gay tourney for fair ladies and gallant knights 
 an easy victory, but a short lived triumph. The walls of Sumter 
 crumbled under the terrific storm that burst upon them from the 
 hundred iron throats that girdled them around as with a cataract 
 of fire, and its garrison succumbed. But the echoes of those guns 
 lighted up a flame in the colder North, that melted down all party 
 ties with more than furnace heat, and was only to be extinguished 
 in the blood of the fools and madmen who had been taught by their 
 Northern auxiliaries to look for no such answer to their defiant 
 challenge. The President could hesitate no longer. Menace and 
 insult had developed into open war, and the time had now come to 
 redeem the pledge that he had made, by summoning the freemen 
 of America to defend their flag. He called, and such an answer 
 was returned as no people had ever before given to the summons of 
 its chief. From town and country, from the lumbermen of the
 
 14 
 
 pine woods of the Madawaska to the trappers of the upper Mis- 
 souri, and the gold hunters of the more distant sierras, as the 
 reverberations of that trumpet-blast leaped from mountain to 
 mountain, and pealed over the great plains and along the mighty 
 rivers of the land, the old, the middle-aged, and the young, with 
 one common impulse, and without distinction of party or of creed, 
 with but a hurried farewell to wife, and children, and home, were 
 seen thronging the iron highways to their respective capitals, and 
 begging for the privilege of enrolling themselves among the de- 
 fenders of their country, and dying, if need be, under the shadow 
 of its flag. It was no monarch's battle. It was their own honored 
 and glorious banner, the symbol alike of their power and their 
 privileges, that had been insulted and defied. Away with the 
 idea of caution and slow resolve, when such huge interests are 
 at stake. That is for diplomatists and strategists. Men do not 
 stop to calculate the odds, the chances, or the dangers, when it is 
 a question of resenting contumely, or defending the object of their 
 love. They did not wait to be schooled to a sense of their in- 
 terests, or duties, or the necessities of the times, any more than to 
 the knowledge of the use of arms. To affirm, as has not been un- 
 usual in high places, that they require to be educated by their 
 rulers up to the level of such an occasion, is to ignore the whole 
 experience of that memorable day, whose manifestations took the 
 doubting by surprise, and so utterly confounded all the calculations 
 of the few amongst ourselves who looked for, and had promised a 
 divided North. The call itself was but a response to the popular 
 desire, which had anticipated it. The answer was an assurance to 
 the Government that it would be sustained in every measure of 
 severity that the crisis might demand. 
 
 But it was a still greater disadvantage to the new Executive, 
 that the full import of this rebellion was not even comprehended 
 by many of those to whom he was expected to look for advice, in a 
 crisis where the ordinary responsibilities of the office were so much 
 enlarged. Although its causes, its history, and its objects were 
 obviously such as to render a compromise impossible although the 
 leaders of the revolt had voluntarily abdicated their places in the 
 government, and gone out from us, when they might have dictated 
 their own terms and although they had contemptuously spurned 
 every overture for negotiation, and affected no concealment of their
 
 15 
 
 deep-seated and implacable hatred not only of ourselves, but of our 
 very form of government there were still sanguine and credulous 
 men in eminent positions, who believed that the rebellion could be 
 suppressed in ninety days not by war, but by diplomacy not by 
 striking at its causes, but by ignoring them not by punishing its 
 authors, but by indulging them not by a change of measures, but 
 by a persistence in the very policy that had brought it on. In the 
 view of men like these, every forward step was fraught with danger. 
 Even the simple and obvious proposition to repeal the law that 
 made the capital of a free nation the home and market of the slave, 
 and the fruitful nursery of the rebellion itself, was represented as 
 so full of mischief, at such a time, that the President himself was 
 almost staggered by the shadowy forms of terror that were evoked 
 to stay his hand. If he had yielded to them, we should not have 
 reached the great measure of the proclamation for at least another 
 year, if ever. It met the same resistance as the other, but the 
 practical good sense of the President, backed up and fortified by 
 the high courage and unanswerable logic of at least one member of 
 his Cabinet, at length overmastered all these influences, and the 
 great charter of the black man was produced before them as a 
 measure upon which he had already privately determined, upon his 
 own responsibility to the nation. It is due to the just fame of 
 Abraham Lincoln, that the world, instead of dividing the honor of 
 the act with other possible claimants in future times, should know 
 how little he was aided in the task how much of opposition he was 
 called upon to meet and how much of moral heroism that act in- ' 
 volved. It was no trifling disadvantage, certainly, to a new and 
 unpracticed statesman, in a position of such unusual responsibility, 
 to be surrounded with men of weak nerves, who had not the cour- 
 age to face the exigency which their own counsels had precipitated. 
 The occasion called for intrepid statesmen, as well as generals, 
 who, with a just confidence in the people, instead of stopping to 
 calculate the possible odds, and betraying a hesitation that at least 
 resembled fear, and thereby throwing away all the advantages 
 which the possession of the government gave them, would have 
 struck at once, and with lightning-like rapidity, at the very heart 
 of the rebellion. The sublime response which the people had 
 already made, was an assurance that they could be trusted. It 
 was a sore trial, too, for them to see their fiery legions condemned
 
 16 
 
 to stagnate in inglorious repose, until, in some instances, their terms 
 of service were about expiring, while their very capital was be- 
 leaguered by an insolent banditti, whom they could have swept like 
 chaff before them. No government in the world could have sur- 
 vived it but our own, and it is no marvel, therefore, that some of 
 the most enlightened statesmen of Europe, educated in the tra- 
 ditional notion that the democratic idea was a delusion, and that 
 a government like ours, though formidable in external war, was 
 helpless for self-conservation, and must fall a prey to the first in- 
 testine convulsion, and reasoning from the abject condition and 
 low intelligence of the people around them, should have hurried to 
 recognize the rebels as belligerents, and staked their reputations 
 on the opinion that the great American Republic, the wonder and 
 terror of the world, and the standing reproach of all its monarchies, 
 was rent irreparably in twain. I do not speak of this now as a 
 thing to be regretted. It seems as though, in the providence of 
 God, it had been intended not only to cleanse this land of its great 
 sin, but to confound the unbelievers in the high capabilities and 
 lofty destinies of our race, by passing us through the fiercest fire, 
 and contriving every possible test even to. the final catastrophe of 
 the assassination of our Federal Head to establish the great fact 
 of the ability of man to govern himself, and to dispense, under all 
 circumstances, with the machinery of hereditary rule. A different 
 policy, by rendering the task an easier and a speedier one, would 
 have left the world and ourselves much to learn of our resources 
 and capabilities, and much of the barbarism of that institution 
 which it would have left substantially intact, to breed new re- 
 bellions, and exact new sacrifices from our posterity. 
 
 It was under these influences, strengthened as they were by an 
 apprehension not apparently removed by the enthusiasm with which 
 they responded to the call of the President, that the people were 
 not yet up to the real level of the crisis, and not prepared for the 
 adoption of such earnest measures of repression as a state of war 
 demanded, that the armies of the Union were brought into the 
 field. It was not for the Chief Magistrate, of course, to direct 
 their operations in person. But his generals were unfortunately 
 either men of Southern birth, or men who had been educated in a 
 feeling of profound reverence for Southern institutions. With 
 them it was almost profanation to invade the sacred soil of a
 
 17 
 
 sovereign State. With them the treason of their ancient comrades, 
 if not a chivalrous virtue, was only the infirmity of a noble mind. 
 Perjury and ingratitude the blackest and most damning rebellion 
 and treachery the most wanton and unprovoked implied no stain 
 upon the personal honor of their enemy. Longstreet and Jackson 
 were models of Christian virtue Lee and Beaurcgard unblemished 
 specimens of elegant and well-bred gentlemen every ingrate 
 especially, who had betrayed the Government that reared him, an 
 honorable man. No "kind regard" Avas forfeited by their base 
 defection; no hand refused in friendly greeting, though red with 
 a brother's blood; no fervent "God bless you," left unuttered 
 because the recipient had blackened his soul with the foulest and 
 basest crime that history records. To have opened their camps to 
 a loyal negro, would have been a violation of the constitutional 
 rights of his rebel master. Knightly courtesy required his return. 
 To have hearkened to the evidence he brought of the strength and 
 position of the enemy, would have been a- violation of the rule 
 which disqualified him as a witness against his master. Rebel ex- 
 aggerations for purposes of effect, were more acceptable than the 
 simple, unvarnished truth from the lips of a runaway contraband. 
 What success was to be hoped for, with such instruments? The 
 President himself both saw and felt the difiiculty. His patience 
 was severely tried, but what was he to do ? If he ordered a move- 
 ment in advance, the weather was either too cold or too hot the 
 mud was axle-deep or the dust intolerable. If made, it was done 
 reluctantly, or with a protest, and the responsibility of a failure was 
 with him. If refused, and he threatened to displace the officer, it 
 was perhaps suggested to him, that the army or the people would 
 revolt, while they were actually chafing with impatience the re- 
 bellion growing in strength and the friends of the Government 
 beginning to despair. In this dilemma, it became necessary for 
 him to take up the question of an entire change of policy. The 
 struggle was a long and painful one. If he had felt at liberty to 
 consult the promptings of his own mind and heart, in a case where 
 the life of a nation was depending on his decision, it would have 
 ended as soon as it was begun. But his habitual caution, inten- 
 sified by a just sense of his great responsibility as an officer, held 
 his judgment in abeyance. His own good sense, however, tri- 
 umphed at the last. Unaided but by the counsels of a faithful few, 
 2
 
 18 
 
 ho took up the case, calculated all the elements that entered into 
 it, and arrived, by a strictly logical process, of which the steps are 
 now obvious, at the conclusion that the rebellion could only be 
 conquered by the emancipation of the slave. He put that result in 
 the shape of a Proclamation, and then summoned his Cabinet to- 
 gether, not to advise, but to hear what he had determined. The 
 picture of the consultation over this important document, is the 
 merest fancy-piece. The point was decided by him before they 
 met, and there was no demur, because there was no further room 
 for objection. 
 
 Nothing, however, is clearer than the fact that it was not the 
 original purpose of Mr. Lincoln to interfere with slavery in the 
 States. With all his strong convictions that it was a crime that, 
 in his own terse language, "if slavery was not wrong, there was 
 nothing wrong" his respect for the constitutional rights of the 
 South was such as to over-ride his own private sympathies for the 
 bondsman. With him, the leading, over-ruling thought the idea 
 nearest to his heart was the preservation of our glorious Union, 
 as God's chosen instrument on earth, and the one best fitted, with 
 all its defects, to secure the peace and happiness of man. The 
 other question was entirely subordinate to this. He was willing 
 to quote from him again "to save the Union, with slavery if he 
 could, or without it, if he could." His first idea, encouraged, if not 
 inspired by the men who had then his confidence, was, that it could 
 only be saved by tenderness to that interest, whose extreme sensi- 
 bility to danger to say no worse of it had brought all these 
 troubles these almost apocalyptic woes upon the land. Under 
 these impressions, the war was waged for eighteen months, in such 
 a way as to do as little harm as possible to that institution, in the 
 hope that the rebels might be conciliated as they had never been 
 before by the forbearance of the Government. It Avas only the 
 current of events the failure of this policy the fuel furnished by 
 the great expense, the tardy progress, and the inadequate results 
 of the war, to the growing discontent of the friends of the Govern- 
 ment in the North and the conviction that the policy of saving 
 the Union with slavery must give way to the opposite policy, if it 
 was to be saved at all that drifted him into the position assumed 
 for the first time in the Proclamation, and maintained with unwav- 
 ering constancy until the last hour of his life. That he should ever
 
 19 
 
 have been persuaded to believe it possible to conciliate the men who 
 had voluntarily abdicated their places in the government, only be- 
 cause it was obvious that they could no longer hope to rule it perma- 
 nently, is to be set down more to the account of his habitual caution, 
 his strong conservative temperament, his deference to older heads, 
 and his desire to give full scope to an experiment of an apparently 
 innocuous character, enforced by the counsels of almost every man 
 around him, than to the convictions of his own unbiased judgment. 
 The case was one of conflicting systems and ideas, that might ad- 
 mit of a truce, but of no compromise. It would have been but an 
 adjournment of the question until the antagonistic forces had taken 
 breath for a fresh struggle, while the rebel element was strength- 
 ening itself in the meanwhile for new aggressions. The enforced 
 connection between Liberty and Slavery was worse than incestuous. 
 God and nature had decreed an eternal divorce between them. 
 Our fathers, it is true, had made the experiment of reconciling 
 these hostile elements not, however, under the modern hallucina- 
 tion that they would permanently combine, or coalesce, but only 
 to keep the peace between them, until the weaker should disappear. 
 The President had apprehended this, when he declared that this 
 government could not be "half free and half slave." Mr. Seward 
 himself had comprehended it, when he characterized the war be- 
 tween the two systems as "an irrepressible conflict." As well 
 attempt to blend darkness with light. The intermingled elements 
 would produce only a disastrous twilight with perpetual jars, or, as 
 the one or other interest predominated, either deepen into the 
 chaotic gloom where the lost spirits are supposed to dwell, or flush 
 into the rosy light of liberty. The Union could not have been 
 saved with slavery, any more than a man could be made immortal 
 with the seeds of death in his constitution. The inherent vices of 
 the system were sure to bring about a conflict at last, by engender- 
 ing and fostering the spirit that inaugurated it here, as they were 
 equally sure to give to the contest itself a character of fierceness 
 and atrocity which has appertained to no modern war. It was but 
 a new phase 01 the old quarrel as old as government itself which 
 has shaken the kingdoms and hierarchies of the world, and was 
 destined to be fought out here, upon a wider arena than any that 
 the Old World could offer. If it was not comprehended, however, 
 by ourselves, the governing classes in Europe, and the advocates of
 
 20 
 
 unlimited power everywhere, had not failed to understand it from 
 the beginning. 
 
 The proclamation of freedom was the first decisive measure of the 
 war. It inaugurated a new era, and proclaimed the purpose of the 
 Government to wrest from the rebels their most effective weapon, 
 if not to turn it against their own bosoms. The menace of it was 
 at first derided as a mere brutum fulmen. by those who knew what 
 was to be its effect, and dreaded it accordingly. As soon as it 
 became obvious that this mode of attack was about to fail, the 
 policy of the auxiliary rebel presses of the North was changed. 
 Dire were their denunciations then of a measure represented to be 
 fraught with woe to helpless womanhood and feeble infancy, and big 
 with the unutterable horrors of a servile war. Its promulgation was 
 soon after followed by the elections of 1862, whose unfavorable 
 results attributable only to the public weariness of the inaction of 
 our armies were adroitly placed to the account of this threatened 
 measure. By those who did not understand the temper of the 
 President, or the process of reasoning by which he had reached 
 that point, it was greatly feared that he would falter, when the 
 hour of trial came. But alike regardless of the gloomy auguries of 
 the timid, and the storm of obloquy and denunciation that burst 
 upon him from the sympathizers with the rebellion here, he stood 
 unmoved, and the bolt sped at the appointed hour, and shook the 
 rebal capital to its foundations, as it lodged in the very heart of 
 the Confederacy. Dismay sat on every face at Richmond. If a 
 shell had exploded in that pandemonium, where those dark con- 
 spirators against the rights of man were then assembled, a greater 
 consternation could not have followed. In the midst of " a uni- 
 versal hubbub wild, of stunning sounds, and voices all confused," 
 like that of chaos, which "assailed the ear with loudest vehem- 
 ence," a dozen members were on their feet at once, with retaliatory 
 propositions of the wildest and most atrocious character. But if 
 there was gloom there, there was joy elsewhere. The great heart 
 of humanity dilated at the tidings. The wearied soldier stretched 
 by his camp-fire, and joined till then in unequal battle, was lifted 
 up and comforted. Four millions of bondsmen raised their unfet- 
 tered hands to Heaven to call down blessings on the head of the 
 deliverer \vho had broken their chains. The patriot felt that the 
 arm of the country was strengthened at home and abroad by the act
 
 21 
 
 that had at last vindicated the solemn truths of our immortal De- 
 claration, and placed our Government once more in harmony with 
 its own fundamental principles. Instead of any further necessity 
 of humbling ourselves, by holding out to foreign powers a menace 
 of emancipation, as the signal for a servile war, in order to deter 
 them from an intervention which they never would have ventured 
 on and never could, without the risk of ruin to themselves it was 
 no longer possible for any Christian nation to take sides against 
 us. It was the turning point of our great struggle, and the death 
 warrant of the rebellion itself. And it was just because they felt 
 and knew it, that it roused among its ruling spirits all the devilish 
 passions that flamed out most fiercely during the latter period of 
 the war. It foreshadowed the appearance of the black man himself, 
 at no distant day, with the harness of the Union on his back, as a 
 combatant in the arena on the side of liberty. From that day 
 forward, with only the occasional vicissitudes to which all wars 
 are subject, the banner of the Republic, with its new blazonry of 
 Freedom, never drooped or went backward in battle. God was on 
 our side. The holiday generals, great on the parade the strategic 
 imbeciles the half-hearted martinets who were more solicitous to 
 protect the chattel than to punish the treason of the master, gave 
 place to a race of earnest men heroes of the Cromwellian type 
 who felt the inspiration of their work, and with a faith that no 
 reverses could shake, and no disaster disturb, were ever ready to 
 second or anticipate the fiery ardor of their legions, by giving a full 
 rein to the spirit that had chafed and fretted under inglorious re- 
 straint, whether it was to plunge into the fastnesses of the Rapidan,, 
 to scale the Alpine passes of the Tennessee, or to sweep with 
 resistless force across the sunny plains of Georgia. The rebellion 
 was doomed, and the baleful star that had rushed up with the ve- 
 locity of a meteor into the forehead of the sky, and shed its porten- 
 tous glare for a moment upon the nations, plunged down again into 
 eternal night, to be remembered hereafter only as one of those 
 scourges of humanity, that are sometimes let loose upon the earth 
 for high and inscrutable purposes. 
 
 But it is not for me to follow the history of this long and bloody 
 struggle through all its varying fortunes to the period of its final 
 consummation. That is a task which belongs to the historian. It 
 has some points of interest, however, that are not unworthy of
 
 22 
 
 commemoration, and not unsuited to the occasion that has brought 
 us here. 
 
 The scene that has just passed before our vision, was such as has 
 been presented to no other generation of men. Few of us have 
 perhaps fully realized the importance of the part that has been 
 assigned to us in history. The records of our race have nothing 
 to offer so grand and imposing as this bloody conflict, in its mag- 
 nitude, its causes, its theatre, and its details. A peaceful nation, 
 schooled only in the arts of quiet industry, entirely unfamiliar 
 with the use of arms, holding itself aloof from the political compli- 
 cations of the old world, and but thinly diffused over half a conti- 
 nent imagining no evil, and fearing none from others is suddenly 
 startled from its repose by the blare of the trumpet, and the roll of 
 the martial drum, and summoned to the defense of its institutions, 
 its liberties, its very life, against a wicked conspiracy, organized in 
 its own bosom for the purpose of destroying it. It not only re- 
 sponds to the call, but astonishes the world by an exhibition of 
 unanimity, and zeal, and high religious fervor, which have had no 
 example since the era of the Crusades. In utter forgetfulness of 
 self, of danger, and of the comforts and endearments of home, it 
 covers the earth with its living tides, as it rushes to the rescue of 
 the object of its love. Over a region almost as wide as the united 
 kingdoms of Europe, a million of brave hearts are marshaled in 
 armed array, with implements of destruction such as no age hath 
 seen. Along the Atlantic coast, across the great rivers, and the 
 boundless prairies of the mighty West, over the swamps and 
 savannas of the distant South, through forest, brake and wilder- 
 ness, through bayou and morass, over rugged mountains, and along 
 the cultivated plains that laugh with the abundance with which 
 industry has covered them the earth shakes with the tread of em- 
 battled hosts, while bay and gulf swarm with innumerable prows, 
 and the shores against which the tides of two oceans break, are 
 belted around with those leviathans of the deep, which bear our 
 thunders, and are destined hereafter to proclaim our power in the 
 remotest seas. It is the battle of the Titans, with fitting accesso- 
 ries, with lists scarce less ample, with enginery as complete, and 
 upon a theatre almost as stupendous, as that which the genius of 
 Milton has assigned to the armies of angel and archangel joined in 
 battle for the supremacy of Heaven. The Old World, till now
 
 ignorant of the power that had been sleeping here, stands amazed 
 at an exhibition which its united kingdoms would in vain essay to 
 match. It comprehends at once the whole significance of the 
 struggle. It is the world's battle the same that has been fought 
 so often with other watch-words, and on other fields the old con- 
 flict between antagonistic social forms between the people and the 
 kings between the privileges of caste and the Republican idea 
 of equality. It feels that the interests of all its ancient, and hoary, 
 and moss-grown establishments its thrones and hierarchies alike 
 resting on the prescription of a thousand years, and buttressed 
 by the still older traditional idea, that man is unfit to govern 
 himself, are staked on the issue of this contest. It sees, or thinks 
 it sees, in the martial array of the disciplined legions of the Con- 
 federacy, inflated with pride, and sneering at the base-born hinds 
 and greasy mechanics of the Free States, the impersonation of the 
 mailed chivalry who rode down the miserable Jacquerie of France 
 five hundred years ago. Forgetful of its treaties of commerce 
 and amity oblivious even of its own apparent interests, in the 
 maintenance of due authority and subordination between govern- 
 ment and subjeofc ignoring alike the usages, and customs, and 
 comity of nations it does not find patience even to await the issue 
 of a battle. The disruption of this great Republic the standing 
 reproach and menace of royalty in all its forms is assumed as a 
 fact accomplished, upon this mistaken view, and the additional 
 postulate of its statesmen, that a structure like our own, however 
 prosperous or formidable against external violence, is without the 
 power of self-preservation, and must inevitably perish on the first 
 internal convulsion. It does not even stop to inquire into the 
 special provocations, if any, for this wanton and wicked rebellion 
 against authority and humanity. Professing to make war against 
 the slave trade, denouncing it as piracy, and employing fleets for 
 its suppression, it does not even revolt at the unexampled, and 
 atrocious, and anti-christian idea of a government, boldly and 
 shamelessly declaring its only purpose to be the perpetuation of 
 human bondage an organized piracy, and a systematic attack upon 
 the rights of man. In its anxiety to aid the cause on which its 
 own institutions are depending, it hurries with an indecent precipi- 
 tancy into the recognition of a belligerency, tha t will enable it to 
 serve the interest in which it dares not venture openly to draw its
 
 24 
 
 sword, by throwing wide its ports to the privateers of the enemy, 
 and fitting out its own cruisers to prey upon our commerce on the 
 seas. Its governmental press, aided by its hireling scribblers here, 
 is prostituted to the base employment of showing the inevitable 
 failure of our great experiment, by maligning our brave defenders, 
 and libeling our sainted President. Its Ministers at our own 
 capital, prompted by the same instincts, and sympathizing openly 
 with our enemies, and equally ignorant of the people to whom they 
 are accredited, advise their sovereigns, and are allowed to proclaim 
 here openly without rebuke, that our career as a nation is at an end ; 
 and inwardly rejoice with them, that a power declared by themselves 
 to be too formidable for the world's peace, and too formidable to 
 be safely met either upon the sea or upon the land, by their united 
 strength, has perishtd miserably by intestine strife the supposed 
 inherent and unavoidable disease of the republics of all times. 
 
 How great has been its error ! How disappointed all its flatter- 
 ing prognostications ! How utterly has all its boasted wisdom been 
 confounded by events ! How deeply does it now tremble in the 
 presence of the great fact, which it is yet reluctant to acknowledge, 
 that this nation, with all the sympathies of the governments of the 
 world against it, has proved its indestructibility, by a trial which 
 no European State could have outlived ! But how inexpressibly 
 grand and sublime what a spectacle for men and angels, has been 
 the attitude of this people throughout the fiery trials of these four 
 eventful years ! What a theme for an epic such as Milton or Tasso 
 might have written the great Republic of the Western Hemi- 
 sphere the world's last champion charged with the loftiest in- 
 terests that ever were committed to the guardianship of man 
 belted around by enemies, open and secret, who were thirsting for 
 its destruction torn by intestine strife, and bleeding at every 
 pore without the sympathy of any one of the ruling powers of 
 earth, and with no help but the prayers of the faithful few in all 
 lands, who looked upon its star as the last hope of the oppressed 
 standing alone, like a solitary rock in the ocean, with the tempests 
 howling wildly around it, but flinging off the angry surges which 
 dash and break against its sides, and bearing aloft with intrepid 
 and unfaltering hand, amid the wild uproar of elemental war, the 
 broad ensign of our Fathers the pledge of freedom to universal 
 man ! If the enemies of liberty now tremble in our presence, it
 
 25 
 
 is not more from the dread of a resentment, which they feel 
 to have been justly merited, than from an apprehension of the con- 
 sequences of the sublime lesson of constancy, and faith, and self- 
 sacrifice, and persevering courage, which we have given to the 
 world, throughout a contest commenced under circumstances the 
 most adverse, and prosecuted by the people themselves, with a 
 more than royal munificence, as essentially their war, and the first 
 in history that has been so recognized. 
 
 In no aspect of the whole case were the eminent prudence and 
 lofty patriotism of our great leader more strongly exemplified, than 
 in the forbearance and moderation with which he ignored these 
 transparent evidences of unfriendliness on the part of foreign 
 governments, aggravated, as they were, by the most indecent person- 
 al attacks upon himself. Without personal resentments, and great 
 enough to despise abuse, even if he had felt it, he knew that the 
 success of our struggle was the best answer that could be made to 
 those who wished us ill. He is already avenged in the only way 
 in which his great heart would have desired it. The bloody cat- 
 astrophe that hurried him from our sight, has flashed upon the 
 European world with a suddenness which has swept down the 
 barriers of prejudice, and extorted even from his enemies the con- 
 fession, that in him a truly great man of the pure American 
 type of far-reaching sagacity of unexampled modesty and 
 moderation has fallen. The powers of language almost fail to 
 convey their now exalted sense of the high-souled magnanimity 
 with which he has forborne to respond in kind to the many provo- 
 cations that have been offered. He is pronounced by great authori- 
 ty in England "a king of men" not in the Homeric sense, as 
 used in reference to the Argive chief not because, like the wrath- 
 ful Achilles, whose ire was fruitful of unnumbered woes, he was 
 
 "Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer," 
 
 but because he was precisely the opposite of all these peace-loving 
 and placable, even to a fault. It stands admitted, that no word of 
 his can now be found in all his foreign intercourse, to convey a 
 menace or reproach. And then his exalted benevolence of heart 
 his moderation in the hour of victory the greatest the entire 
 absence of all natural exultation over a fallen foe these, these 
 are confessed to be so rdfre, as to take him out of the roll of vulgar
 
 26 
 
 conquerors, and lift him high above the ordinary level of humanity. 
 It cost him nothing, however, to forgive, or even to compassionate 
 an enemy. He was indeed much better fitted for the office of a 
 mediator, than the function of a judge. It would have wrung his 
 more than woman's heart to have been compelled even to do execu- 
 tion upon the guiltiest of the conspirators, as it did to put his 
 name to the warrant that consigned the spy or the deserter to 
 eternity. In thus according to him the palm of magnanimity 
 which is only another word for greatness of soul, as its etymology 
 implies the highest eulogy has been pronounced on him that 
 human lips could utter. His moderation in victory was but part 
 and parcel of the same high attribute. 
 
 Nor is it to be forgotten, while making these admissions, that 
 there were other circumstances connected with this rebellion, that 
 put this high quality to the severest proof, and rendered it im- 
 possible to indulge a sentiment so elevated and ennobling, without 
 great peril to the general cause. Though war is, in all its aspects, 
 even the most favorable, the direst scourge that Providence has 
 ever permitted to afflict the earth, it has no form so hideous as the 
 intestine strife that arrays brother against brother, and arms the 
 father against the son in murderous conflict, and doubly intensifies, 
 by its very unnaturalness, all the brutal and ferocious passions of 
 our fallen nature. The family quarrel is proverbial for its bitter- 
 ness, while the odium theologicum is the stereotyped, but feeble ex- 
 pression, of the rancor which has sometimes crept into the contro- 
 versies of even Christian men. In the present case, however, there 
 was a feature superadded on the one side, that lent ten-fold ad- 
 ditional horror to the contest. The institution of human slavery 
 the prolific source of all our woes tracked into the palatial man- 
 sions of the lordly proprietors, by a Nemesis which always follows 
 upon the heels of a great wrong as though Providence intended 
 that Nature violated should always vindicate herself had expelled 
 from them every broad fraternal feeling all that recognized the 
 common brotherhood of humanity and ended by unsexing the 
 women, and making wolves and tigers of the men. All that was 
 said of that institution, sometimes blasphemously mis-named divine, 
 by the author of the great Declaration himself, had been already 
 realized in the temper and condition of Southern society. To speak 
 of these as barbarous, in the language of a learned and eloquent
 
 27 
 
 New England Senator, was, in the judgment of the more charitable 
 and fastidious here, an offense against good taste and truth, that 
 was thought by them to hare deserved the felon blow that proved 
 it to be true. The picture drawn by him was supposed by many 
 to be greatly over-charged. How inadequately he portrayed its 
 hideous aspect, is now seen in its conduct of this devastating war, 
 which it has forced upon the country, and under which it has buried 
 itself, thank God ! so deep that it can produce no future eruption, 
 even by turning uneasily in its grave. Hell never engendered 
 such a monster, though "woman to the waist and fair" as her who 
 sat as portress at its gates. There is no page of history so dark 
 and damning as that which will record the fiendish atrocities of 
 which it has been guilty, in an age of light. The manufacture of 
 the bones of Union soldiers, left to bleach unburied on the soil 
 where they fell, into personal ornaments for the delicate fingers of 
 high-born Southern dames, or drinking cups for their chivalrous 
 braves the mutilation of the corpses of the uncoflined dead 
 the cold-blooded and systematic starvation and butchery of prison- 
 ers of war the efforts to destroy, by wholesale, rail road trains, 
 filled with innocent women and children the employment of hired 
 incendiaries to swing the midnight torch over the spires of sleeping 
 cities the invocation of the pestilential agencies of the miasma of 
 the Southern swamps and the diabolical, though unsuccessful 
 attempt to inoculate our seaboard towns with the deadly virus of 
 the plague all are but episodes in the bloody drama that culmi- 
 nated in the assassination of the President. The cannibal of the 
 South Sea Islands, and the savage of the American forests, who 
 dances around the blazing faggots that encircle and consume his 
 victim, have been over-matched in cold-blooded ingenuity of torture, 
 by the refined barbarians the Davises and Lees, and other "honor- 
 able and Christian " gentlemen who have inspired and conducted 
 this revolt. God will witness for the North, that with all these in- 
 human provocations, and with a necessity that seemed almost in- 
 evitable, of putting an end to horrors such as these, by a system of 
 just and exemplary retaliation, it has dealt with these great crimi- 
 nals with a degree of forbearance that has no example, and has but 
 too often been mistaken by them for want of spirit, and a whole- 
 some fear of their great prowess. When they went out, they were 
 but wayward children, and we entreated them kindly. To spare
 
 28 
 
 their blood, we permitted them to envelope our defenses at Suniter, 
 without resistance, when we could easily have prevented it. To 
 keep the peace with them, we hesitated even to victual its starving 
 garrison. When we were smitten, we did not even smite them in 
 return. It was only when they flung insult and defiance at our 
 country's flag, that we felt our pulses quicken, and our blood 
 kindling into flame. But even then, we could not fully realize that 
 they were indeed our enemies. Our camps were closed against 
 their slaves. Their officers, when captured, were treated with a' 
 distinction that made them feel that they had done no wrong, and 
 dismissed on their paroles of honor, although they had been guilty 
 of a base desertion of our flag. Their men were fed and clothed, 
 and afterward exchanged as prisoners of war. And for much of 
 this feeling they were indebted to the temper of the President, 
 who held in check the impetuous ardor of the North, and incurred 
 the risk of alienating his most steadfast friends, by a moderation 
 so unusual in stormy times. There was no period, indeed, in which 
 he would not have opened his arms to receive them back, without 
 humiliation to themselves, and with the welcome that was accorded 
 to the repentant and returning prodigal. His last expressions, in 
 regard to them were kind; his last measures intended to smooth 
 the way for their return. And in recompense for all this, "with 
 wicked hands they slew him" their best friend just when his 
 heart was overflowing with mercy and forgiveness for themselves. 
 He had not learned because his was not a nature to believe that 
 no kindness could soften or reclaim the leaders of this unholy re- 
 bellion. It was not a crime only, but a blunder the most serious on 
 their part. Whether actuated by private malice, or stimulated by 
 public ends, there was no time at which the blow that struck him 
 down could have been dealt with less advantage to their cause, and 
 so little personal detriment to him. If he had survived, he could 
 not, in the course of nature, have looked for many years of life, 
 and might have lived to disappoint the expectations of his friends, 
 in what would probably have proved the most difficult part of his 
 task, by a policy of mercy that would have brought no peace. 
 The suppression of the rebellion was but the first step in the pro- 
 cess of restoration. With the odds so largely in our favor, there 
 could not at any time have existed any rational doubt as to the 
 result of the contest, under any rational direction. It was not so
 
 29 
 
 much the war, as the peace which was to follow, that was dreaded 
 by the wise. To suppress an armed rebellion was one thing; to 
 reconstruct a government, resting, not on force, but on co-operative 
 wills, was another and a higher task. The one called only for 
 material agents; the other demanded the ripest wisdom of the 
 statesman. The sword was the instrument of the former; a keen- 
 er, subtler, and mightier instrument was required for the latter. 
 It is not impossible that President Lincoln, with all his great 
 qualities, might have failed at this point. If stern rigor and ex- 
 emplary justice if the confiscation of the property, or the exile or 
 disfranchisement of the leaders of this wicked revolt, the dark 
 assassins of our peace if an absolute refusal to treat with those 
 miscreants at all were essential to the permanent restoration of 
 peace and harmony in the land as they are believed by many men 
 to be there was at least room for apprehension, that the kind and 
 gentle spirit, the broad, catholic charity of our dead President, 
 would have unfitted him for the task. It was a remark of one of 
 the Greeks, that no man was happy, or sure of posthumous renown, 
 until the grave had closed upon him. Abraham Lincoln's work 
 was done, and done successfully. He had disappointed nobody in 
 the Free States, except the enemies who had hoped to rob him of 
 the glory, and the country of the advantage of finishing up a task, 
 which they had prematurely denounced as a failure. He is now 
 beyond the reach of censure, or unfriendly criticism, with his 
 record made up for history honored and lamented as no man ever 
 was before him ; embalmed in the heart of a nation that has fol- 
 lowed him to his tomb ; doubly endeared to them by the cause in 
 which he died by his death as well as by his life ; and surrounded 
 by a halo that has invested him with a world-wide fame. Grieve 
 not, then, for him. The blow that took him from our arms was 
 but his passport for immortality. The nation has lost a President, 
 but Abraham Lincoln has won an imperishable crown. 
 
 The time is not now to subject the minute details of his adminis- 
 tration to searching criticism. That men should differ in regard to 
 this or the other measure of his policy, is not unreasonable. It 
 was his fortune, as might have been expected of a cautious man, in 
 a revolutionary era, to find himself occasionally at variance with 
 his friends, as well as with his enemies. If he was sometimes too 
 conservative for the former, he was always too radical for the latter,
 
 30 
 
 and was sure, therefore, to secure the good will of neither ; but 
 he yielded slowly to the indications of public opinion which he 
 followed only, and did not lead and was generally sure in the end 
 to bring the extremes into harmony, by disappointing both, and to 
 find the public mind prepared to approve his acts. He explored 
 his ground with care, and having reached his conclusion at last by 
 long and patient thought, he stood upon it with a firmness that 
 nothing could shake. With him there was no step backward. 
 Having once planted himself on the ground of emancipation, as a 
 necessity of state, by a process of laborious induction, he never 
 afterward lost sight of that object, and never faltered in the execu- 
 tion of his plans. Adopted only as a means, because the restora- 
 tion of the Union was his only end, it became at last so far an end, 
 that he refused even to treat for that restoration upon any other 
 condition than the absolute extinction of slavery, to which he now 
 stood pledged before the world. It was partly because he then 
 occupied a stand-point that opened to him a wider and more com- 
 prehensive field of vision, and enabled him to see that the Union 
 could really be saved upon no other terms than those of absolute 
 justice to the black man. The public mind had ripened with his 
 own under the torrid atmosphere of revolution. The acts of his 
 administration are, however, to be estimated in the light of the 
 exceeding novelty, and the great responsibilities of his position. 
 It is no fault of his, even if a bolder policy might have resulted in 
 earlier success. Men are always wise after the fact, but in his 
 position, with the fate of a nation in his hands, there was no place 
 for rash experiments, and he might well decline to take the risks, 
 which others, without responsibility themselves, might have insisted 
 on, in opposition to the opinions of advisers who were supposed to 
 be better schooled in the affairs of nations than himself. 
 
 And yet few men have understood the people better than 
 Abraham Lincoln. With no advantages of education whatever, 
 his associations had been more with men than books. His thoughts 
 and style of expression all bear the impress of that early school. 
 His ideas flowed in the same channels as theirs. No man was 
 more at home with them, or better understood the art of winning 
 their confidence, just because they recognized the relationship, and 
 felt that his heart pulsated in unison with their own. His mind 
 and character were indeed the natural growth of our free institu-
 
 31 
 
 tions, and he was so eminently a representative of them, that no 
 other country could have produced his counterpart. A higher 
 culture would only have disguised the man, by paring down the 
 r^ugh edges, and wearing away the individuality that so much dis- 
 tinguished him. Condemned to wrestle with poverty from the 
 outset, he was indebted, no doubt, for a large share of the robust 
 vigor of his genius, to that healthy development which results from a 
 successful struggle with the accidents of fortune. Thus educated, he 
 owed nothing of his success in life to the cultivated manners, or the 
 bland and insinuating address the ready coin of society which 
 the people are so often willing to accept as substitutes for learning 
 and ability, and to which so many of our public men are indebted 
 for their personal popularity, and their great success in the arena 
 of politics. It would be difficult to find a man more unsymmetrical- 
 ly put together, or more essentially awkward and ungainly in his 
 personal presence. It would be still more difficult to find a man so 
 free from all pretension, so plain, and simple, and artless in his 
 manner, and with so little apparent consciousness of the important 
 part that he was enacting, or the great power that he had been 
 called upon to wield. The necessities of state ceremonial the 
 ordeal of a public reception were obviously the things that he most 
 dreaded and disliked. It was impossible for one who knew him 
 well, to look upon him there, or in a scene like that which attended 
 his last inauguration at the Capitol, surrounded as he was by the 
 ambassadors of all the crowned heads of Christendom, glittering 
 in the gay tinsel and the heraldic insignia of their several orders, 
 with a thousand bright eyes directed from the galleries upon that 
 unassuming man himself the central figure of the group without 
 feeling that he was under a constraint of posture that did violence 
 to his nature, and was as painful as it was embarrassing. The ex- 
 pression of his countenance, on such occasions, was one of sadness 
 and abstraction from the scene around him except when some 
 familiar face was recognized, and greeted in the throng that 
 crowded to take him by the hand. It was only in the retirement 
 of his own private audience-chamber that the whole man shone 
 out, and that he could be said to be truly himself. And there, 
 with a perfect abandon of manner, surrendering himself, without 
 constraint, to just such posture, however grotesque or inelegant, as 
 was most agreeable to himself, feeling that the eye of the world
 
 32 
 
 was no longer on him, and forgetting that he was the ruler of a 
 mighty nation, at a time of unexampled anxiety and peril, his eye 
 and lip would light up with an expression of sweetness that was 
 ineffable, while ho interested and amused his auditor, by the ease 
 and freedom of his conversation, and the inexhaustible fund of 
 anecdote with which he enriched his discourse, and so aptly and 
 strikingly illustrated the topics that he discussed. They err great- 
 ly, however, who suppose in him any undue levity of manner, or 
 assign to him the credit of having been a habitual joker. If he 
 told a story and it was perhaps of his early life and experience 
 it either pointed a moral, or winged a thought to the mark at which 
 it was aimed and left it there. He was not long in divining the 
 true characters of his visitors, and if he indulged in pleasantries, 
 it was either to gratify their tastes, or to parry the impertinences 
 to which he was so frequently subjected. Peculiarities so striking 
 as those of Abraham Lincoln, are always singled out for broad 
 caricature. A common face or character is altogether unfitted for 
 the purpose. But like many men who have acquired a reputation 
 for sprightliness and humor, the cast of his mind was deeply 
 serious. With the grave and earnest, who came to discourse with 
 him on important matters of state, he was always up to the height 
 of that great argument ; and there are few men living, with his 
 imperfect training, and so little acquaintance with books, who can 
 express their thoughts with more clearness, or force, or propriety 
 of speech, than himself. He talked as he wrote, and the world 
 knows with what originality, and precision, and felicity of phrase 
 without a model or a master he dealt with the many perplexing 
 questions that were presented to him. His style was indeed sui 
 generis. Everything he wrote has the marks of its paternity so 
 strongly impressed upon it, that the authorship cannot possibly be 
 mistaken. Nobody could imitate him ; " nobody but himself could 
 be his parallel." He had much of the genius of Swift, without 
 any of his cynicism. Without polish or elegance, there was, how- 
 ever, an elevation of tone a vein of deep faith, and of high re- 
 ligious trust, pervading some of his state papers, and especially 
 his last inaugural address, that have placed the latter, in the judg- 
 ment of some of the best European scholars, far above the range 
 of criticism. 
 
 But his crowning attribute the one that won for him so large a
 
 33 , 
 
 place in the hearts of the people so much more of true affection 
 than has been ever inspired by the exploits of the successful war- 
 rior was the large humanity that dwelt in that gentle bosom, 
 which knew no resentments, and was ever open to the appeals of 
 suffering. No feeling of vengeance ever found a lodgment there. 
 No stormy passion ever stirred the quiet depths, or swept the even 
 surface of his tranquil temperament. No wife or mother, who had 
 begged her way to Washington, to ask the pardon of an erring 
 husband, or the discharge of a wounded or a dying son, was ever 
 refused an audience, or ever retired from that presence without in- 
 voking Heaven's choicest blessings on the head of the good Presi- 
 dent, who could refuse nothing to a woman's tears. The wives and 
 mothers of America have just paid back the tribute of their over- 
 flowing hearts, in the floods of sorrow with which they have deluged 
 his grave. If he had a weakness, it was here, but it was such a 
 weakness as angels might confess, and history will not care to ex- 
 tenuate. That his good nature was sometimes imposed upon is not 
 improbable. For times and places such as his, a man of sterner 
 mould is sometimes absolutely necessary. It is greatly to be 
 doubted whether that gentle heart could ever have been persuaded 
 to pronounce the deserved doom upon the guiltiest of the traitors. 
 The crushing appeal of the wife and mother would have melted 
 down his stoicism, like wax before the fire. His last Cabinet con- 
 versation, as officially reported to us, was full of tenderness and 
 charity even for the rebel general who had abandoned our flag, and 
 connived at the butchery of our prisoners. The word was scarcely 
 uttered, before the gates of mercy were closed with impetuous re- 
 coil, and the gentle minister, who would have flung them wide, was 
 removed forever, to give place to the inexorable judge. The awful 
 form of Justice now appears upon the scene, to deal with those 
 whom mercy could not mollify, while a world does homage to the 
 great heart that is forever at rest. 
 
 Yes ! Abraham Lincoln rests. "After life's fitful fever he sleeps 
 well." His work on earth is done. No couch of roses, no bed of 
 luxurious down was that which pillowed his aching head, during the 
 four eventful years of his public ministry. No doubt his worn and 
 jaded spirit panted for repose. He must have felt, as the clouds 
 lifted around him, and the horizon of the future was all aglow with 
 
 3
 
 34 
 
 the splendors of the coming day, that he was about to enter on the 
 full fruition of his long cherished hopes of a ransomed and re- 
 united land. He had already scaled a height, from which the eye 
 of faith might sweep the boundless panorama of a happy conti- 
 nent, lapt in the repose of universal brotherhood its brown forests 
 and gold-bearing mountains bathed in the tranquil sunshine, and 
 sleeping in the quiet solitude of nature its lakes and rivers alive 
 with the glancing keels of an abundant and industrious commerce 
 its plains dimpling with golden harvests and the tall spires of 
 its multitudinous cities, the resorts of traffic, and the homes of 
 learning and the mechanic arts, pointing to the skies. But it was 
 not his fate to enter into that rest which such a vision might have 
 foreshadowed. Another and a more enduring, was to receive him 
 into its cold embrace. He dies unconscious without warning, and 
 without a struggle in the very hour of his triumph in no darkened 
 chamber tossed by no agonies on an uneasy couch with no 
 lamentations and no wail of woe no harrowing, heart-breaking 
 farewells to disturb his spirit in its heavenward flight ; but by an 
 unseen hand in a moment of respite from corroding care and in 
 the presence of the people whom he loved. With so little to fear, 
 he could not have made a happier exodus. How marked the con- 
 trast between his own last hours, and the last of the public life of 
 the rebel chief, whose wicked counsels have either inspired the blow, 
 or strengthened the hand that reached his life : Abraham Lincoln, 
 who never injured a human being, dying at the capital, in the hour 
 of his triumph, with no rancor in his heart, and nothing but 
 charity and forgiveness for his enemies upon his lips and Jeffer- 
 son Davis, with the blood of half a million of people on his hands, 
 flying like a thief in the night through the swamps of Georgia, and 
 captured in the disguise of a woman, without even one manly effort 
 at resistance ! It had been better for his fame, if he had died too, 
 even as he had lived. The genius of Milton almost flags under the 
 sublime story of the flight and fall of the apostate archangel, when 
 conquered but not dismayed, he plunged over the crystal battle- 
 ments of heaven, "with hideous ruin and combustion down," till 
 startled Chaos shook through his wild anarchy. It was reserved 
 for the guilty leader of this not less infamous revolt, to find even 
 a lower deep, where the dignity of the epic muse can never reach 
 him.
 
 35 
 
 Rest then, honored shade ! spirit of the gentle Lincoln, rest ! 
 No stain of innocent blood is on thy hand. No widow's tear no 
 orphan's wail shall ever trouble thy repose. No agonizing struggle, 
 between the conflicting claims of mercy and of justice, shall afflict 
 thee more. Thou hast but gone to swell the long procession of 
 that noble army of martyrs, who left their places vacant at the 
 family board, to perish for the faith in Southern dungeons, or to 
 leave their bones unburied, or ridge with countless graves the soil 
 that they have won and watered with their blood. Though lost to 
 us, thou art not lost to memory. The benefactors of mankind live 
 on beyond the grave. For thee, death ushers in the life that will 
 not die. Thy deeds shall not die with thee, nor the cause or 
 nation, which was aimed at in the mortal blow that laid thee low. 
 What though no sculptured column shall arise to mark thy sepul- 
 chre, and proclaim to future times the broad humanity the true 
 nobility of soul the moderation in success that, by the confession 
 of his harshest critics, have crowned the untutored and unpretend- 
 ing child of the prairies, as the "King of men?" What though 
 the quiet woodland cemetery that shelters thy remains, and woos 
 the pilgrim to its leafy shades, shall show no costly cenotaph no 
 offerings save those which the hand of affection plants, or that of 
 nature sheds upon the hallowed mound that marks thy resting 
 place ? What though the muse of history, who registers thy acts, 
 and inscribes thee high among the favored few, to whom God has 
 given the privilege of promoting the happiness of their kind, should 
 fail to record the quiet and unobtrusive virtues that cluster round 
 the hearth and heart, and shrink from the glare of day ? There 
 is a chronicler more faithful, that will take thy story up where his- 
 tory may leave it. The pen of the Recording Angel will write it 
 in the chancery of Heaven, while the lips of childhood will be 
 taught to repeat the tragic tale, until memory shall mellow into 
 the golden light of tradition, and poesy shall claim thy story for 
 its theme. But long ere this even now in our own day and gen- 
 eration the cotton fields and the rice swamps of the South will 
 be vocal with thy praise, while the voice of the emancipated white 
 man shall swell the choral harmony that ascends from the lips of 
 the dusky child of the tropics, as he lightens his daily toil now 
 sweet because no longer unrequited by extemporizing his simple 
 gratitude in unpremeditated lays, in honor of the good President
 
 36 
 
 who died to make him free. The mightiest potentates of earth 
 have labored vainly to secure a place in the memories and the re- 
 gards of men, by dazzling exhibitions of their power to enslave. 
 Both Memphian and Assyrian kings, whose very names had perished 
 but for the researches of the learned, have sought to perpetuate 
 their deeds and glory in the rock tombs of the Nile, and the un- 
 buried bas-reliefs of Nineveh and Babylon, covered with long 
 trains of sorrowing captives, manacled and bound, and dragged 
 along to swell the victors' triumphs, or, perhaps, as votive offerings 
 to the temples of their bestial gods. It was reserved for thee to 
 find a surer road to fame, by no parade of conquest. No mournful 
 train of miserable thralls either graces or degrades thy triumph. 
 The subjugated are made free, and the hereditary bondsmen drops 
 his galling chain, and feels that he is once more a man. If the 
 genius of sculpture should seek to preserve thy name, it will pre- 
 sent thee, lifting from their abject posture, and leading by the hand, 
 with gentle solicitation, the enfranchised millions of a subject race, 
 and laying down their fetters, as a free-will offering, upon the altars 
 of that God who is the common Father of mankind.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
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 I GAYLAMQUNIT 
 
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 Ii57.8 Eulogy on the 
 life and publjj 
 
 services of 
 Abraham Llncr>ii 
 
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