I have been entrusted with that power for a brief term by the people. I
am using it sorrowfully but firmly--and I am backed by the prayers of
the mothers whose sons are dying for our cause--and the silent millions
out there, whom I can't at this moment see--but whom I love and trust.

VAUGHAN

[_With angry tears._]

The Constitution of the Republic guarantees to every freeman the right
to trial in open court, confronted by his accusers----

LINCOLN

[_Passionately._]

But we are fighting a war for the life of the Constitution itself! I
did not begin it. Once begun it must be fought to the end and the
Nation saved. We must prove now that among freemen there _can be_
no successful appeal from the ballot to the bayonet. To preserve the
Constitution of the Republic I must in this crisis strain some of its
provisions----

VAUGHAN

[_In hard tones._]

And you will not interfere to give these accused men a trial?

LINCOLN

I dare not interfere! The civil law must be suspended for the
moment--as the law of life is suspended while the surgeon cuts a cancer
out of bleeding flesh! I cannot shoot one soldier for desertion if I
allow the man to go free who causes him to desert----

[_He pauses, and puts his hands on_ VAUGHAN'S _shoulders._]

Don't think, my son, that all the suffering of this war is not mine!
Every shell from those guns finds _my_ heart. The tears of widows and
orphans--all, the blue and the gray--are mine! For we are equally
responsible for this war! When I came here from the West, I found a
panic-stricken North, strangling with the poison of Secession. Our
fathers had only _dreamed_ a Union--they never lived to see it. The
North had threatened Secession for thirty years. Horace Greeley in his
great paper on the day of my inauguration was telling the millions who
hung on his word as the oracle from Heaven, that Secession was
inevitable! "Therefore let our erring sisters of the South go!" was his
daily cry. I could not have prevented this war, nor could Jefferson
Davis. We are in the grip of mighty forces sweeping in from the
centuries. We are fighting the battle of the ages----

[_He pauses again._]

But our country's worth it, my boy, if we can only save it! Out of this
agony will be born a united people. There has never been a democracy
_in this world_ beca