To-day.
We are here to-day to honor ourselves by doing honor to the memory of the foremost champion of that cause.
If we look for a moment at the result of the method of composing the troubles of the country in 1861, adopted by
Mr. Lincoln, I do not think that much encouragement will be found to resort to it again.
It is true that it abolished slavery and removed the only serious cause of dissension between the people of the North and South, but as I have shown the overthrow of slavery was an accident of the war, and not its object.
Its object was the restoration of the cotton States to the
Union, or, in the language of the proclamation, ‘to maintain the integrity and existence of our national Union and the perpetuity of popular government, and to avenge wrongs already long enough endured.’
The last-mentioned object, it must be owned, was accomplished, whatever and however great the wrongs to be avenged may have been.
It did restore the cotton States to the
Union, but it restored only the land and the wretched inhabitants of it.
Instead of maintaining the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our national Union, it destroyed that Union, in all but a territorial sense, more effectually than secession, by substituting conquered provinces for free States, and repeating in
America the shameful history of
Russia and
Poland.
Instead of maintaining the perpetuity of popular government, it established a military government; instead of enforcing the laws of the
Union, it established over nearly half the
Union military and martial law.
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In fact, arbitrary power and force have proved themselves failures as agencies in establishing or maintaining the true principles of American government.
The actual re-establishment of the
Union, with all the blessings we enjoy under it, has come through a reaction against the policy of force and despotism.
The wave of arbitrary power, with the public and private corruption that always attend it, swept on for many dreary years after the war, until it began to lap against the foundations of the independence of the
Northern States.
They then found that to hold the
South in subjection to governments imposed upon it by Federal bayonets would endanger their own liberties, and the advancing wave broke upon the good sense and patriotism of the Northen people.
Then began the work of restoring the
Union by means of justice, good-will, conciliation, and fraternal kindness, and they have done their work well.
But the great mass of the
Southern people believed, and still believe, that the same agencies would have done the same blessed work in 1861, before a dark river of blood and tears was made to flow between the people of the North and South.
