iably waive to make this
appeal to you. I intend no reproach or complaint when I assure you
that, in my opinion, if you all had voted for the resolution in the
gradual-emancipation message of last March, the war would now be
substantially ended. And the plan therein proposed is yet one of the most
potent and swift means of ending it. Let the States which are in rebellion
see definitely and certainly that in no event will the States you
represent ever join their proposed confederacy, and they cannot much
longer maintain the contest. But you cannot divest them of their hope
to ultimately have you with them so long as you show a determination to
perpetuate the institution within your own States. Beat them at elections,
as you have overwhelmingly done, and, nothing daunted, they still claim
you as their own. You and I know what the lever of their power is. Break
that lever before their faces, and they can shake you no more forever.
Most of you have treated me with kindness and consideration and I trust
you will not now think I improperly touch what is exclusively your own,
when, for the sake of the whole country, I ask, Can you, for your States,
do better than to take the course I urge? Discarding punctilio and maxims
adapted to more manageable times, and looking only to the unprecedentedly
stern facts of our case, can you do better in any possible event? You
prefer that the constitutional relation of the States to the nation shall
be practically restored without disturbance of the institution; and if
this were done, my whole duty in this respect, under the Constitution
and my oath of office, would be performed. But it is not done, and we
are trying to accomplish it by war. The incidents of the war cannot be
avoided. If the war continues long, as it must if the object be not sooner
attained, the institution in your States will be extinguished by mere
friction and abrasion--by the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone,
and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it. Much of its value is
gone already. How much better for you and for your people to take the step
which at once shortens the war and secures substantial compensation for
that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event! How much better
to thus save the money which else we sink forever in war! How much better
to do it while we can, lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable
to do it! How much better for you as seller, and the nation as buyer, to