al happiness of the new President,
and for the national peace and prosperity.

VII. LINCOLN AND THE WAR

It is one thing to be elected President of the United States,--that
means triumph, honor, power: it is quite another thing to perform the
duties of President,--for that means labor, disappointment, difficulty,
even danger. Many a man envied Abraham Lincoln when, in the stately pomp
of inauguration and with the plaudits of the spectators ringing about
him, he took the oath of office which for four years transforms an
American citizen into the ruler of these United States. Such envy would
have been changed to deepest sympathy if they could have known what lay
before him. After the music and cannon were dumb, after the flags were
all furled and the cheering crowds had vanished, the shadows of war fell
about the Executive Mansion, and its new occupant remained face to face
with his heavy task--a task which, as he had truly said in his speech at
Springfield, was greater than that which rested upon Washington.

Then, as never before, he must have realized the peril of the nation,
with its credit gone, its laws defied, its flag insulted. The South
had carried out its threat, and seven million Americans were in revolt
against the idea that "all men are created equal," while twenty million
other Americans were bent upon defending that idea. For the moment both
sides had paused to see how the new President would treat this attempt
at secession. It must be constantly borne in mind that the rebellion in
the Southern States with which Mr. Lincoln had to deal was not a sudden
revolution, but a conspiracy of slow growth and long planning. As one
of its actors frankly admitted, it was "not an event of a day. It is not
anything produced by Mr. Lincoln's election.... It is a matter which has
been gathering head for thirty years." Its main object, it must also
be remembered, was the spread of slavery. Alexander H. Stephens, in
a speech made shortly after he became the Confederate Vice-President,
openly proclaimed slavery to be the "corner-stone" of the new
government. For years it had been the dream of southern leaders to
make the Ohio River the northern boundary of a great slave empire, with
everything lying to the south of that, even the countries of South and
Central America, as parts of their system. Though this dream was never
to be realized, the Confederacy finally came to number eleven States
(Alabama, Mississippi, Louis