racy to shatter it in pieces; men were uncertain if
there would be a great uprising of the people. The President and his
cabinet were in the midst of an enemy's country and in personal danger,
and at one time their connections with the North and West were cut off;
and that very moment was chosen by the trusted chief of staff of the
Lieutenant-General to go over to the enemy.

Every one remembers how this state of suspense was terminated by the
uprising of a people who now showed strength and virtues which they were
hardly conscious of possessing.

In some respects Abraham Lincoln was peculiarly fitted for his task, in
connection with the movement of his countrymen. He was of the Northwest;
and this time it was the Mississippi River, the needed outlet for the
wealth of the Northwest, that did its part in asserting the necessity of
Union. He was one of the mass of the people; he represented them,
because he was of them; and the mass of the people, the class that lives
and thrives by self-imposed labor, felt that the work which was to be
done was a work of their own: the assertion of equality against the
pride of oligarchy; of free labor against the lordship over slaves; of
the great industrial people against all the expiring aristocracies of
which any remnants had tided down from the Middle Age. He was of a
religious turn of mind, without superstition; and the unbroken faith of
the mass was like his own. As he went along through his difficult
journey, sounding his way, he held fast by the hand of the people, and
"tracked its footsteps with even feet." "His pulse's beat twinned with
their pulses." He committed faults; but the people were resolutely
generous, magnanimous, and forgiving; and he in his turn was willing to
take instructions from their wisdom.

The measure by which Abraham Lincoln takes his place, not in American
history only, but in universal history, is his Proclamation of January
1, 1863, emancipating all slaves within the insurgent States. It was,
indeed, a military necessity, and it decided the result of the war. It
took from the public enemy one or two millions of bondmen, and placed
between one and two hundred thousand brave and gallant troops in arms on
the side of the Union. A great deal has been said in time past of the
wonderful results of the toil of the enslaved negro in the creation of
wealth by the culture of cotton; and now it is in part to the aid of the
negro in freedom that the country owes