no longer exist. The dispenser of the patronage of an empire, the
chief of this great confederacy of States, is soon to be a private
individual, stripped of all power to reward, or to punish. His own
thoughts, as he has shown us in the concluding paragraph of that
message which is to be the last of its kind that we shall ever receive
from him, are directed to that beloved retirement from which he was
drawn by the voice of millions of freemen, and to which he now looks
for that interval of repose which age and infirmities require. Under
these circumstances, he ceases to be a subject for the ebullition of
the passions, and passes into a character for the contemplation of
history. Historically, then, shall I view him; and limiting this view
to his civil administration, I demand, where is there a Chief
Magistrate of whom so much evil has been predicted, and from whom so
much good has come? Never has any man entered upon the Chief
Magistracy of a country under such appalling predictions of ruin and
woe! never has any one been so pursued with direful prognostications!
never has any one been so beset and impeded by a powerful combination
of political and moneyed confederates! never has any one in any country
where the administration of justice has risen above the knife or the
bowstring, been so lawlessly and shamelessly tried and condemned by
rivals and enemies, without hearing, without defence, without the forms
of law and justice! History has been ransacked to find examples of
tyrants sufficiently odious to illustrate him by comparison. Language
has been tortured to find epithets sufficiently strong to paint him in
description. Imagination has been exhausted in her efforts to deck him
with revolting and inhuman attributes. Tyrant, despot, usurper;
destroyer of the liberties of his country; rash, ignorant, imbecile;
endangering the public peace with all foreign nations; destroying
domestic prosperity at home; ruining all industry, all commerce, all
manufactures; annihilating confidence between man and man; delivering
up the streets of populous cities to grass and weeds, and the wharves
of commercial towns to the encumbrance of decaying vessels; depriving
labor of all reward; depriving industry of all employment; destroying
the currency; plunging an innocent and happy people from the summit of
felicity to the depths of misery, want, and despair. Such is the faint
outline, followed up by actual condemnation, of the appa