esent
within these pages. The public Lincoln, including the character of his
mind, is here the essential matter.

The bibliography at the close of the volume indicates the more important
books which are at the reader's disposal and which it is unfortunate not
to know.

NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON. Charleston, S. C., March, 1918.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE UNION

INDEX

I. THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC

II. THE PARTY OF POLITICAL EVASION

III. THE POLITICIANS AND THE NEW DAY

IV. THE CRISIS

V. SECESSION

VI. WAR

VII. LINCOLN

VIII. THE RULE OF LINCOLN

IX. THE CRUCIAL MATTER

X. THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY

XI. NORTHERN LIFE DURING THE WAR

XII. THE MEXICAN EPISODE

XIII. THE PLEBISCITE OF 1864

XIV. LINCOLN'S FINAL INTENTIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

CHAPTER I

THE TWO NATIONS OF THE REPUBLIC

"There is really no Union now between the North and the South.... No two
nations upon earth entertain feelings of more bitter rancor toward each
other than these two nations of the Republic."

This remark, which is attributed to Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio,
provides the key to American politics in the decade following the
Compromise of 1850. To trace this division of the people to its ultimate
source, one would have to go far back into colonial times. There was a
process of natural selection at work, in the intellectual and economic
conditions of the eighteenth century, which inevitably drew together
certain types and generated certain forces. This process manifested
itself in one form in His Majesty's plantations of the North, and in
another in those of the South. As early as the opening of the nineteenth
century, the social tendencies of the two regions were already so far
alienated that they involved differences which would scarcely admit of
reconciliation. It is a truism to say that these differences gradually
were concentrated around fundamentally different conceptions of
labor--of slave labor in the South, of free labor in the North.

Nothing, however, could be more fallacious than the notion that this
growing antagonism was controlled by any deliberate purpose in either
part of the country. It was apparently necessary that this Republic in
its evolution should proceed from confederation to nationality through
an intermediate and apparently reactionary period of sectionalism. In
this stage of American history, slavery was without doubt one of the
prime factors involved, but