by the
Secretary of War, with the request that I would consider it. It is quite
natural that you should feel some sensibility on the subject; yet I am not
impressed, nor do I think the country is impressed, with the belief that
your honor demands, or the public interest demands, such an inquiry. The
country knows that at all events you have done good service; and I believe
it agrees with me that it is much better for you to be engaged in trying
to do more, than to be diverted, as you necessarily would be, by a court
of inquiry.

Yours truly,

A. LINCOLN.

TELEGRAM TO GENERAL U. S. GRANT.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, March 29,1864.

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL GRANT, Army of the Potomac:

Captain Kinney, of whom I spoke to you as desiring to go on your staff,
is now in your camp, in company with Mrs. Senator Dixon. Mrs. Grant and I,
and some others, agreed last night that I should, by this despatch, kindly
call your attention to Captain Kinney.

A. LINCOLN.

TO A. G. HODGES.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, April 4, 1864.

A. G. HODGES, ESQ., Frankfort, Kentucky:

MY DEAR SIR:--You ask me to put in writing the substance of what I
verbally said the other day, in your presence, to Governor Bramlette and
Senator Dixon. It was about as follows:

"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never
understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to
act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took
that I would to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without
taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get
power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in
ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically
indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I
had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that,
to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract
judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand, however, that my oath
to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me
the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government,
that nation, of which that Constitution was the organic law. Was it
possible to lose the nat