For me there can be but one course on this issue, and the moment it was presented I seemed to behold, for the first time, the dawn of that better era in our country when the Equal Rights of All should be placed under the safeguard of assured Peace and Reconciliation. Had I failed to sympathize with this endeavor, I should have been false to the record of my life. My first public utterance, as far back as July 4, 1845, was to commend the cause of Peace, which from that early day, amidst the contentions of public duty and the terrible responsibilities of war, has never been absent from my mind. While insisting on the Abolition of Slavery, while urging Enfranchisement, while vindicating the Equal Rights of All, and while pressing Reconstruction, I have constantly declared that all these were for no purpose of vengeance or punishment, but only for the security of the citizen and the establishment of government on just foundations, and that when this was done nobody should outdo me in those generosities that become the conqueror more than his conquest.
PERSONAL RECORD.
Here the testimony is complete. If I open it now, it is less to show the obligations which constrain me personally than to make these witnesses plead again the cause which from the beginning I have had at heart. I follow the order of time, letting each speak in a few words.
There are some among us who may remember that early speech before the Republican State Convention at Worcester, October 1, 1861, which excited at the time so much discussion, when, after calling for Emancipation, I united this cause with Peace:—
“Two objects are before us, Union and Peace, each for the sake of the other, and both for the sake of the country; but without Emancipation how can we expect either?”[199]
Thus at the beginning was I mindful of Peace.
Then again, in the same strain, at the Cooper Institute, New York, November 27, 1861, after showing Slavery to be the origin and main-spring of the Rebellion, I pleaded for Emancipation, and at the same time first sounded the key-note of Reconciliation:—
“Perversely and pitifully do you postpone that sure period of reconciliation, not only between the two sections, not only between the men of the North and the men of the South, but, more necessary still, between slave and master, without which the true tranquillity we all seek cannot be permanently assured. Believe it, only through such reconciliation, under sanction of freedom, can you remove all occasions of conflict hereafter.”[200]
Thus early was reconciliation associated with my most earnest efforts; nor did I at any moment hesitate in this work.