we discern therein any departure from those divine
attributes which the believers in a living God always
ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently
do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily
pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue
until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s
two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall
be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with
the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it
must be said, ’The judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether.’
“With malice toward none, with charity for all,
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see
the right, let us strive on to finish the work we
are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care
for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his
widow, and his orphan,—to do all which
may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves, and with all nations.”
This speech has taken its place among the most famous
of all the written or spoken compositions in the English
language. In parts it has often been compared
with the lofty portions of the Old Testament.
Mr. Lincoln’s own contemporaneous criticism
is interesting. “I expect it,” he
said, “to wear as well as, perhaps better than,
anything I have produced; but I believe it is not
immediately popular. Men are not flattered by
being shown that there has been a difference of purpose
between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however,
in this case is to deny that there is a God governing
the world. It is a truth which I thought needed
to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is
in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others
might afford for me to tell it.”
CHAPTER XII
EMANCIPATION COMPLETED
On January 1, 1863, when the President issued the
Proclamation of Emancipation, he stepped to the uttermost
boundary of his authority in the direction of the
abolition of slavery. Indeed a large proportion
of the people believed that he had trespassed beyond
that boundary; and among the defenders of the measure
there were many who felt bound to maintain it as a
legitimate exercise of the war power, while in their
inmost souls they thought that its real basis of justification
lay in its intrinsic righteousness. Perhaps the
President himself was somewhat of this way of thinking.
He once said: “I felt that measure, otherwise
unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable
to the preservation of the Constitution through the
preservation of the Union.... 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.” Time,
however, proved that the act had in fact the character
which Mr. Lincoln attributed to it as properly a war
measure. It attracted the enlistment of negroes,
