It took a great soul in a man of Lincoln’s heroic origin, direct methods, intense patriotism and deep hatred of slavery to speak in such terms to rebellion.
The time came when he hurled a million armed men against the insurgent South, when with a stroke of his pen he set free four millions of slaves, representing a property value of about two and a half billion dollars; and when, with fire and sword and the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of lives and billions on billions of treasure, he proved to the world that democratic institutions were strong enough to resist the mightiest shocks of civil war.
But as he moved on to the scene of his great ordeal in Washington, there was nothing but temperate reason, kindness and peace on his lips.
It must not be forgotten that the tall, gawky, sad-faced lawyer in ill-fitting funereal black, was no limp-limbed product of sedentary sentimentalism, but a man with muscles of steel, who had thrashed and cowed the most dreaded desperadoes of the frontier, a self-made son of the wilderness, who had battled against floods, famines and wild beasts; and who had in him the stout heart and steady will of the cabin-born and forest-bred. Lincoln was incapable of fear, save the fear of folly or injustice. He was not afraid even of ridicule, that poisoned weapon before which so many strong men tremble.
As the nation prepared to honor the hundredth anniversary of his birth, well might it remember him, newly separated from his provincial and rude, but heroic West, advancing between the haggard passions of a divided country with firm, brotherly hands held out to the whole people.
In Philadelphia he was told by Allan Pinkerton, the detective, that there was a conspiracy to murder him when he reached Baltimore. Unless he agreed to make the rest of the journey secretly he could not reach Washington alive. He was urged not to expose himself again in public, but to go right on to his destination at once.
With this knowledge of his peril, he assisted in the raising of a new flag over Independence Hall that day, and delivered a noble address, in which he recalled the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence “which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”
“Now, my friends,” he cried, his shrill voice ringing to the outer edge of the excited multitude, “can this country be saved on that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it.... But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say that I would rather be assassinated on this spot.... I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and, if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, to die by.”
Mrs. Abraham Lincoln