And to those Americans of all classes and in all districts
of the North, who had set their hearts and were giving
all they had to give to preserve the life of the nation,
the political crisis of 1864 would seem to have been
the most anxious moment of the war. It is impossible—it
must be repeated—to guess how great the
danger really was that their popular government might
in the result betray the true and underlying will of
the people; for in any country (and in America perhaps
more than most) the average of politicians, whose
voices are most loudly heard, can only in a rough
and approximate fashion be representative. But
there is in any case no cause for surprise that the
North should at one time have trembled. Historic
imagination is easily, though not one whit too deeply,
moved by the heroic stand of the South. It is
only after the effort to understand the light in which
the task of the North has presented itself to capable
soldiers, that a civilian can perceive what sustained
resolution was required if, though far the stronger,
it was to make its strength tell. Notwithstanding
the somewhat painful impression which the political
chronicle of this time at some points gives, it is
the fact that the wisest Englishmen who were in those
days in America and had means of observing what passed
have retained a lasting sense of the constancy, under
trial, of the North.
CHAPTER XII
THE END
On December 6, 1864, Lincoln sent the last of his
Annual Messages to Congress. He treated as matter
for oblivion the “impugning of motives and heated
controversy as to the proper means of advancing the
Union cause,” which had played so large a part
in the Presidential election and the other elections
of the autumn. For, as he said, “on the
distinct issue of Union or no Union the politicians
have shown their instinctive knowledge that there
is no diversity among the people.” This
was accurate as well as generous, for though many Democrats
had opposed the war, none had avowed that for the
sake of peace he would give up the Union. Passing
then to the means by which the Union could be made
to prevail he wrote: “On careful consideration
of all the evidence accessible it seems to me that
no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader
could result in any good. He would accept nothing
short of severance of the Union—precisely
what we will not and cannot give. Between him
and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible.
It is an issue which can only be tried by war and
decided by victory. The abandonment of armed
resistance to the national authority on the part of
the insurgents is the only indispensable condition
to ending the war on the part of the Government.”
To avoid a possible misunderstanding he added that
not a single person who was free by the terms of the
Emancipation Proclamation or of any Act of Congress
would be returned to slavery while he held the executive
Copyrights
Abraham Lincoln from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
