Lincoln
[Passionately.]
But we are fighting a war for the life of the Constitution itself! I did not begin it. Once begun it must be fought to the end and the Nation saved. We must prove now that among freemen there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bayonet. To preserve the Constitution of the Republic I must in this crisis strain some of its provisions——
Vaughan
[In hard tones.]
And you will not interfere to give these accused men a trial?
Lincoln
I dare not interfere! The civil law must be suspended for the moment—as the law of life is suspended while the surgeon cuts a cancer out of bleeding flesh! I cannot shoot one soldier for desertion if I allow the man to go free who causes him to desert——
[He pauses, and puts his hands on Vaughan's shoulders.]
Don't think, my son, that all the suffering of this war is not mine! Every shell from those guns finds my heart. The tears of widows and orphans—all, the blue and the gray—are mine! For we are equally responsible for this war! When I came here from the West, I found a panic-stricken North, strangling with the poison of Secession. Our fathers had only dreamed a Union—they never lived to see it. The North had threatened Secession for thirty years. Horace Greeley in his great paper on the day of my inauguration was telling the millions who hung on his word as the oracle from Heaven, that Secession was inevitable! "Therefore let our erring sisters of the South go!" was his daily cry. I could not have prevented this war, nor could Jefferson Davis. We are in the grip of mighty forces sweeping in from the centuries. We are fighting the battle of the ages——