DECEMBER 29 We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. I. Corinthians 4:9. A Strange Spectacle. (To Doctor Sunderland, chaplain of the Senate, a few days before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.) Doctor, if it had been left to you and me, there would have been no war. If it had been left to you and me, there would have been no cause for this war; but it was not left to us. God has allowed men to make slaves of their fellows. He permits this war. He has before him a strange spectacle. We, on our side, are praying him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must he think of us? And what is coming from the struggle? What will be the effect of it all on the whites and on the negroes? As for the negroes, Doctor, and what is to become of them, I told Ben Wade the other day that it made me think of a story I read in one of my first books, "Esop's Fables." It was an old edition, and had curious, rough wood-cuts, one of which showed four white men scrubbing a negro in a potash kettle filled with cold water. The text explained that the men thought that by scrubbing the negro they might make him white. Just about the time they thought they were succeeding, he took cold and died. Now, I am afraid that by the time we get through this war the negro will catch cold and die. O pity God, this miserable age! What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, This deadly quarrel daily doth beget! -Shakespeare. DECEMBER 30 Unto thee shall the vow be performed. Psalms 65: 1. Solemn Vow Before God. (At a Cabinet meeting just before the issue of the Pro- The time for the annunciation of the emancipation policy can be no longer delayed. Public sentiment, I think, will sustain it, many of my warmest friends and supporters demand it, and I have promised my God that I would do it. I made a solemn vow before God that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves. Yes! thy proud lords, unpitied land! shall see DECEMBER 31 When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not Job 16:22. return. The Silent Artillery of Time. (Extract from an address before the Springfield, Lyceum, in 1838, when he was twenty-nine years of age. He here alludes to our Revolutionary ancestors. See pages 35, 36, 37.) In history we hope they will be read of and recounted as long as the Bible shall be read. But even granting that they will, their influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then they cannot be so universally known nor so vividly felt as they were by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that struggle nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family-a history bearing the indubitable testimonies to its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received in the midst of the very scenes related; a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what the invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done the leveling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the resistless hurricane has swept over them and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, then to sink and be no more. The year is closed-the record made, Of all its joys, its griefs, its gains; -Anonymous. |