"The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the People, and they have conferred none upon him to fix terms for the separation of the States. The People themselves can do this also, if they choose; but the Executive, as such, has nothing to do with it. His duty is to administer the present Government, as it came to his hands, and to transmit it, unimpaired by him, to his successor.
* * * * * * *
" * * * While the People retain their virtue and vigilance, no Administration, by any extreme of weakness or folly, can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years.
"My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied, still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied, hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored Land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.
"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of Civil War. The Government will not assault you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend it'.
"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad Land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Strange, indeed, must have been the thoughts that crowded through the brain and oppressed the heart of Abraham Lincoln that night—his first at the White House!
The city of Washington swarmed with Rebels and Rebel sympathizers, and all the departments of Government were honey-combed with Treason and shadowed with treachery and espionage. Every step proposed or contemplated by the Government would be known to the so-called Government of the Confederate States almost as soon as thought of. All means, to thwart and delay the carrying out of the Government's purposes, that the excuses of routine and red-tape admitted of, would be used by the Traitors within the camp, to aid the Traitors without.
No one knew all this, better than Mr. Lincoln. With no Army, no Navy, not even a Revenue cutter left—with forts and arsenals, ammunition and arms in possession of the Rebels, with no money in the National Treasury, and the National credit blasted—the position must, even to his hopeful nature, have seemed at this time desperate. To be sure, despite threats, neither few nor secret, which had been made, that he should not live to be inaugurated, he had passed the first critical point—had taken the inaugural oath—and was now duly installed in the White House. That was something, of course, to be profoundly thankful for. But the matter regarded by him of larger moment—the safety of the Union—how about that?
How that great, and just, and kindly brain, in the dim shadows of that awful first night at the White House, must have searched up and down and along the labyrinths of history and "corridors of time," everywhere in the Past, for any analogy or excuse for the madness of this Secession movement—and searched in vain!