d consolation throughout the
length and breadth of our land all those who, through the vicissitudes
of marches, voyages, battles, and sieges have been brought to suffer in
mind, body, or estate, and finally to lead the whole nation through the
paths of repentance and submission to the Divine Will back to the
perfect enjoyment of union and fraternal peace.

LETTER TO J. C. CONKLING

Executive Mansion,

Washington, August 26, 1863.

Hon. James C. Conkling:

My dear Sir: Your letter inviting me to attend a mass-meeting of
unconditional Union men, to be held at the capital of Illinois on the
3d day of September, has been received. It would be very agreeable to
me to thus meet my old friends at my own home; but I cannot just now be
absent from here so long as a visit there would require.

The meeting is to be of all those who maintain unconditional devotion
to the Union; and I am sure my old political friends will thank me for
tendering, as I do, the nation's gratitude to those and other noble men
whom no partizan malice or partizan hope can make false to the nation's
life.

There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You
desire peace, and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we
attain it? There are but three conceivable ways: First, to suppress
the rebellion by force of arms. This I am trying to do. Are you for
it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second
way is to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If
you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for force, nor yet
for dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise. I do
not believe that any compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union
is now possible. All I learn leads to a directly opposite belief. The
strength of the rebellion is its military, its army. That army
dominates all the country and all the people within its range. Any
offer of terms made by any man or men within that range, in opposition
to that army, is simply nothing for the present, because such man or
men have no power whatever to enforce their side of a compromise, if
one were made with them.

To illustrate: Suppose refugees from the South and peace men of the
North get together in convention, and frame and proclaim a compromise
embracing a restoration of the Union. In what way can that compromise
be used to keep Lee's army out of Pennsylvania? Meade's army can keep
Le