Abraham Lincoln | Page 5

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 Constitution altogether. When, early in the war, General Fremont 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 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 [one?] hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but 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 desired 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."

He struck slavery because slavery had clutched the throat of the Republic, and one of the twain must die! Mr. Lincoln said, LET IT BE SLAVERY!
Christianity, declaring the brotherhood of race, redemption and retribution answered, So be it! The Bible, sealed by slave-codes to four millions for whom its truths were designed, answered Amen! The gospel long fettered by the slave-master's will, and instead of an evangel of freedom made to proclaim a message of bondage, lifted up its voice in thanksgiving. Marriage, long dishonored, put on its robes of purity, and its ring of perpetual covenant, and answered Amen, and from above, God's strong angels and six-winged cherubim, bending earthward, shouted their response to the edict of the Great Emancipator!
IV. The next controlling idea was
PROFOUND RELIGIOUS DEPENDENCE.
As a public man, he set God before his eyes, and did reverence to the Most High. It was deeply a touching scene as he stood upon the platform of the car which was to carry him from his Springfield home, and tearfully asked his neighbors and old friends that they should remember him in their prayers. Amid tears and sobs they answered "We will pray for you." Again and again has he publicly invoked Divine aid, and asked to be remembered in the prayers of the people. His second Inaugural seems rather the tender pastoral of a white-haired bishop than a political manifesto.
What were his person relations to his God, I know not. We are not in all things able to judge him by our personal standard. How much etiquette may be demanded, how much may have been yielded