Presidential procession formed upon Pennsylvania Avenue. It moved along with a slow dignity, undisturbed in any manner, yet bearing a heavy and somber air which seemed to be fully in sympathy with that of the crowds which stared at or accompanied it.

At about a quarter past one o'clock Mr. Lincoln reached the Senate Chamber, where the members of the two Houses, of the Supreme Court, of the Diplomatic Corps, the heads of executive departments, and other privileged persons, were already assembled. From thence, a few moments later, all passed on, in stately progress, to the platform from which Mr. Lincoln was to announce his purposes as President,-not to that throng only, but to the country and to the world.

He had given the finishing touches to his address that very morning. None knew so well as he what consequences would surely follow any blunder in tone or mistake in declaration. He looked worn and pale and anxious, but from the first to the last his voice rang out clear, firm, unhesitating, resonant with faith and courage, while its every tremor and modulation seemed to vouch for his sincerity. He was making his last appeal for peace and his last solemn protest against needless bloodshed. The address may be epitomized as an argumentative attempt to convince all whom it might concern that there was nothing in the past or present attitude or purposes of the Republican party, nor any possible action by the national government as it would be administered by himself, which could sanely be construed as a justification of revolution and civil war. There was in it, however, no expression which could be interpreted as an admission of the right of peaceable secession on the part of any State. On the contrary, it contained one clause which closed the door upon any hope which the conspirators may have entertained that the threatening aspect of affairs had affected his steady firmness. He said:

"The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government

and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will be no invasion, no using of force among the people anywhere."

He kept his word carefully afterwards, for he thus described the precise result obtained when, four years later, the last rebel army laid down its arms and surrendered. In these few words he condensed the most important visible expressions of American national sovereignty.

Towards the close of his argument Mr. Lincoln addressed himself altogether to the people of the seceded States and such other communities as seemed likely to follow their leading. He said:

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."

This was but a plain reiteration of his frequently declared position, and it was now more than ever perfectly understood and comprehended. The rebellion had already taken him at his word. It had made itself the aggressor at a hundred different places, and it was hourly preparing to strike such additional blows as should assume for it the full responsibility he so forcibly presented.

There is one other sentence in the address which is full of meaning. It tells in a few words a fundamental truth of the American national organism.

Of politics, in 1850, he had said to his friend Mr. Stuart: "The time will come when we must all be Democrats or Abolitionists.”

Of the government and its constitution he had said, in 1858, in his Bloomington speech: "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. It will become all one thing or all the other."

Of the territorial area involved he now said with equal clearness: "Physically speaking we cannot separate."

The leaders of the rebellion perfectly understood the axiom so enunciated, and they had laid their plans accordingly.

For more than a generation they had ruled the whole country through the clumsy machinery provided for them at Washington. Their " secession” now was but a first step in a design which proposed a more absolute, more sweeping, and more arbitrary domination.

They looked forward to the control of the entire territory of the United States, then to that of the whole continent to the Isthmus, and with that the absorption of the West Indies.

Slavery was aggressive as a necessity of its existence. Its rebuff in its attempt upon Kansas and Nebraska had but precipitated the more desperate undertakings of its bloody campaign for its life. At the hour when Mr. Lincoln was speaking, armed rebel forces were already preparing to seize New Mexico and the adjacent Territories. A well-devised conspiracy was at work in the free State of California. There was a strong pro-slavery element in the city of New York, hardly deigning to disguise itself under what now seems the wild project for slicing off that commercial metropolis by itself as "a free city."

In every place, and in whatever form, the true intent and meaning of every suggestion of dismemberment was the eventual unification of the United States as a Slave Empire.

The issue thus created was met squarely by Mr. Lincoln then and afterwards, but the hour was not ripe for its elaborate presentation. He was a ruler about to assume the direction of a war in which his opponents had had nearly their own way for three months. He was a commander-in-chief with a bankrupt treasury and without either army or navy. He was himself then standing upon a platform on the steps of a building some days' march within the enemy's lines. He was addressing himself to populations listening to his words as if

almost in search of causes of offence. He was compelled to clothe his plainest enunciations in such forms of speech as should not throw away communities and States by arraying angrily against him the very elements whereof he hoped and intended to make immediate use.

Read in the light of subsequent deeds and events, Mr. Lincoln's inaugural address must be given the high praise that it was a State paper equal to the demands of an unparalleled occasion.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

WAR.

The New Era-Unification of the South-Free Speech-Copperheads-The Cabinet-The White House-Confederate Ambassadors-Traitors in Office-The Border States-The Sumter Gun-The President's Call to Arms-April, 1861.

MR. JEFFERSON DAVIS was installed as President of the Southern Confederacy on the 18th of February, 1861, and the flag of rebellion, afterwards so well known as the "Stars and Bars," was formally adopted, on the 4th of March, as the emblem of organized pro-slavery war. Around the flag and its chosen bearer were rapidly grouped and solidified the ready elements of the great peril with which Mr. Lincoln had thus far dealt with such skillful and courageous conservatism.

The forces he was thenceforth to direct were ample but were as yet chaotic and tumultuous, and his first duties were mainly those of organization.

The last Congress of the Buchanan Administration had steadily drifted out of pro-slavery control. The consecutive departures of its ultra-Southern membership left it more and more a "Republican" body, politically speaking, but its Unionloving elements were irregularly stratified and were not yet prepared to work in unison. Its closing hours were signalized by the rejection of the weak work of the so-called "Peace Congress" and of what was known as the "Crittenden Compromise."

The timely death of these twin-children of legislative timidity relieved Mr. Lincoln of any annoying guardianship of what must have proved a perpetual minority.