to whom they owed
their freedom,--were they not half right? For it was not to one man,
driven by stress of policy, or swept off by a whim of pity, that the
noble act was due. It was to the American nature, long kept by God in
his own intentions till his time should come, at last emerging into
sight and power, and bound up and embodied in this best and most
American of all Americans, to whom we and those poor frightened slaves
at last might look up together and love to call him, with one voice, our
Father.

Thus, we have seen something of what the character of Mr. Lincoln was,
and how it issued in the life he lived. It remains for us to see how it
resulted also in the terrible death which has laid his murdered body
here in our town among lamenting multitudes to-day. It is not a hard
question, though it is sad to answer. We saw the two natures, the nature
of Slavery and the nature of Freedom, at last set against each other,
come at last to open war. Both fought, fought long, fought bravely; but
each, as was perfectly natural, fought with the tools and in the ways
which its own character had made familiar to it. The character of
Slavery was brutal, barbarous, and treacherous; and so the whole history
of the slave power during the war has been full of ways of warfare
brutal, barbarous, and treacherous, beyond anything that men bred in
freedom could have been driven to by the most hateful passions. It is
not to be marvelled at. It is not to be set down as the special sin of
the war. It goes back beyond that. It is the sin of the system. It is
the barbarism of Slavery. When Slavery went to war to save its life,
what wonder if its barbarism grew barbarous a hundred-fold!

One would be attempting a task which once was almost hopeless, but which
now is only needless, if he set himself to convince a Northern
congregation that Slavery was a barbarian institution. It would be
hardly more necessary to try to prove how its barbarism has shown itself
during this war. The same spirit which was blind to the wickedness of
breaking sacred ties, of separating man and wife, of beating women till
they dropped down dead, of organizing licentiousness and sin into
commercial systems, of forbidding knowledge and protecting itself with
ignorance, of putting on its arms and riding out to steal a State at the
beleaguered ballot-box away from freedom--in one word (for its simplest
definition is its worst dishonor), the spirit that gave man the
own