But in his determination to save the Republic no horror could shake his resolution. It is no small part of his title to the love of the nation to-day that one so merciful and tender-hearted could suffer the frightful shocks of years of slaughter and waste without wavering from his duty.
His sense of nationality, his refusal to consider the American people save as a whole, was expressed in that immortal speech at the dedication of the cemetery on the Gettysburg battlefield in November, 1863.
Edward Everett, who was looked upon as the most eloquent of living Americans, was the orator of the occasion. The invitation to Lincoln was an afterthought.
Yet who can remember anything of the two hours’ polished speech of Everett, and who can forget a sentence of the two hundred and sixty-five words which Lincoln spoke almost before his hundred thousand listeners realized the dignity and imperishable beauty of his utterance?
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Even after that Lincoln offered pardon to every one who would return to the old allegiance, save the leaders of the rebellion. His heart cried out to the bleeding South.
Yet his head was steady, and when he put the sword of the nation into the hands of Grant, with Sherman and Sheridan to help him; when the army swept all before it, and when, after reviewing Grant’s forces in front of grim Petersburg, Lincoln called for half a million fresh soldiers, he had the wit and shrewdness to silence Horace Greeley’s senseless clamor for peace negotiations by writing to the officious editor:
“If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you; and that if he really brings such proposition, he shall at the least have safe conduct with the paper (and without publicity if he chooses) to the point where you shall have met him. The same if there be two or more persons.”