The life and public services of Abraham Lincoln ... together with his state papers, including his speeches, addresses, messages, letters, and proclamations, and the closing scenes connected with his life and death. By Henry J. Raymond. To which are added anecdotes and personal reminiscences of President Lincoln, by Frank B. Carpenter.

STATE PAPERS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

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constitutionally elected, puts us in the wrong. * * We
went into the election with this people. The result was
different from what we wished; but the election has been
constitutionally held. Were we to make a point of resistance to the Government, and go out of the Union on this
account, the record would be made up hereafter against
us.,"
After the new confederacy had been organized, and Mr.
Stephens had been elected its Vice-President, he made an
elaborate speech to the citizens of Savannah, in which he
endeavored to vindicate this attempt to establish a new
government in place of the government of the United
States, and to set forth the new principles upon which it
was to rest, and which were to justify the movement in
the eyes of the world and of impartial posterity. That
exposition is too important to be omitted here. It is the
most authoritative and explicit statement of the character
and objects of the new government which has ever been
made. Mr. Stephens said:" The new constitution has put at rest forever all agitating questions
relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery, as it exists among
us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was
the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old
Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him, is
now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great
truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The
prevailing ideas entertained by him, and most of the leading statesmen at
the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was
wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they
knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of
that day was, that, somehow or other, in the o'rder of Providence, the
institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not
incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time.
The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used
against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally
wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This
was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a government