IV. LETTER, CONCERNING THE GOVERNMENT'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SLAVERY. (See Ch. XLI.) GOVERNOR BRAMLETTE and some other Kentucky gentlemen having called upon the President in relation to the draft in Kentucky, the following letter from the President was called forth by the conversation which then ensued: EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, April 4, 1864. A. G. Hodges, Esq., Frankfort, Ky. MY DEAR SIR: You ask me to put in writing the substance of what I verbally said the other day, in your presence, to Governor Bramlette and Senator Dixon. It was about as follows: "I am naturally antislavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government-that nation, of which that Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution? By gen eral law, life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the Constitution, if, to save slavery or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitutional together. When, early in the war, General Frémont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity. When, a little later, General Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity. When, still later, General Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come. When, in March, and May, and July, 1862, I made earnest and successive appeals to the border-States to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition, and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss, but of this I was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force, no loss by it anyhow or anywhere. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no caviling. We have the men, and we could not have had them without the measure. "And now let any Union man who complains of the measure test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms, and in the next that he is for taking three hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side and placing them where they would be best for the measure he condemns. If he cannot face his case so stated, it is only because he cannot face the truth." I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale, I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity, I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years' struggle, the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man, devised or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new causes to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God. Yours truly, A. LINCOLN. V. BY TOM TAYLOR. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.* FOULLY ASSASSINATED, APRIL 14, 1865. You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face, His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair, His lack of all we prize as debonair, Of power or will to shine, of art to please; *This tribute appeared in the London Punch, which, up to the time of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, had ridiculed and maligned him with all its well-known powers of pen and pencil. It is the poem alluded to on page 402. You, whose smart pen backed up the pencil's laugh, Of chief's perplexity, or people's pain: Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you? Yes: he had lived to shame me from my sneer, My shallow judgment I had learned to rue, How humble, yet how hopeful, he could be; Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame. He went about his work,—such work as few Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command; Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow, That God makes instruments to work his will, If but that will we can arrive to know, Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill. So he went forth to battle, on the side That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's, As in his peasant boyhood he had plied His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights; The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil, The iron-bark, that turns the lumberer's ax, The rapid, that o'erbears the boatman's toil, Such were the deeds that helped his youth to train: Rough culture, but such trees large fruit may bear, If but their stocks be of right girth and grain. So he grew up, a destined work to do, And lived to do it: four long-suffering years' Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through, And then he heard the hisses change to cheers, The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise, And took both with the same unwavering mood; Till, as he came on light, from darkling days, And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood, A felon hand, between the goal and him, Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest, And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim, Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest! The words of mercy were upon his lips, Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen, When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse To thoughts of peace on earth, good-will to men. The Old World and the New, from sea to sea, Utter one voice of sympathy and shame: Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high; Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came! A deed accurst! Strokes have been struck before By the assassin's hand, whereof men doubt If more of horror or disgrace they bore; But thy foul crime, like Cain's, stands darkly out. Vile hand, that brandest murder on a strife, |