religious vow. He says that at the cabinet meeting
the President said: "When the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined,
as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a proclamation
of emancipation, such as I thought most likely to be useful. I said
nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself, and (hesitating a
little) to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to
fulfill that promise." About an event so important and so picturesque
small legends will cluster and cling like little barnacles on the solid
rock; but the rock remains the same beneath these deposits, and in this
case the fact that the proclamation was determined upon and issued at
the sole will and discretion of the President is not shaken by any
testimony that is given about it. He regarded it as a most grave
measure, as plainly it was; to a Southerner, who had begged him not to
have recourse to it, he replied: "You must not expect me to give up this
government without playing my last card."[38] So now, on this momentous
twenty-second day of September, the President, using his own judgment in
playing the great game, cast what he conceived to be his ace of trumps
upon the table.

The measure took the country by surprise. The President's secret had
been well kept, and for once rumor had not forerun execution. Doubtless
the reader expects now to hear that one immediate effect was the
conciliation of all those who had been so long reproaching Mr. Lincoln
for his delay in taking this step. It would seem right and natural that
the emancipationists should have rallied with generous ardor to sustain
him. They did not. They remained just as dissatisfied and distrustful
towards him as ever. Some said that he had been _forced_ into this
policy, some that he had drifted with the tide of events, some that he
had waited for popular opinion at the North to give him the cue, instead
of himself guiding that opinion. To show that he was false to the
responsibility of a ruler, there were those who cited against him his
own modest words: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess
plainly that events have controlled me." Others, however, put upon this
language the more kindly and more honest interpretation, that Mr.
Lincoln appreciated that both President and people were moved by the
drift of events, which in turn received their own impulse from an agency
higher than human and to which they must obediently yield. But whatever