laws, the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed, in all the States." Then after considering the decision of the supreme court upon the subject of slavery, and admitting its binding force upon the parties to a suit under it, he shows that its sphere and power must be limited by the power and sphere of the other departments of a popular government, otherwise "the people will have ceased to be their own rulers and have practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal." And finally, after counseling the people, "one and all, to think calmly and well upon this whole subject," before they break down their government, or essentially modify its Constitution, and have confidence in the intelligence, patriotism, and christianity of the people, and in God who has never yet forsaken this favored land, to adjust in the best way all their present difficulties, the President closes as follows: : In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail 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 loth 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 battlefield 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. When the cheering had subsided, the Chief Justice arose, the clerk presented the open Bible, and upon it the President-elect deliberately pronounced the oath of office: "I, Abraham Lincoln, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Amid the shouts of the people, the booming of cannon, and the inspiration of bands of music, "Citizen Buchanan and President Lincoln" returned to their carriage, and were escorted back as they came to the executive mansion, where they bade each other good-by with mutual good wishes and hopes for the country; the one to enter upon his presidential term of unequaled perplexities and perils, and to be cut off prematurely by martyrdom, leaving him the most peculiar and one of the noblest personages of our history; while the other, spurned by his Southern friends after they had betrayed him and made a tool of him as long as they could, and neglected by his partisans of the North as soon as they found that he could no longer hold their party together, found a temporary asylum with his friend, Mr. Ould,* soon to become a Confederate officer, until the former could return to his home in Pennsylvania, there to pass wholly out of public life, and almost out of public notice, for the few years that remained to him. Buchanan was neither an unpatriotic or an unprincipled man. But he was not equal to the emergency, when placed at the head of the government. At the dictation of the South, he introduced into his cabinet several of the leading secessionists, who controlled his policy and tied his hands until that movement was almost too strong ever to be checked. He was, as he designated himself in one of his public documents, an "Old Public Functionary," trained to administer public affairs simply by rule and precedent, even though the rules were wrong and the precedents bad. He lived, too, in the most corrupt period of politics, when such maxims as, "All is fair in politics," were not only Mr. Mr. Ould was United States District Attorney, made such by Mr. Buchanan, and who, though a native of Maryland, soon fled to Richmond, and entered the military service of the Confederacy, and was made their commissioner for the exchange of prisoners. acted upon but avowed, and, "To the victors belong the spoils," and before the civil service reform was undertaken, or that better maxim had been announced in an inaugural, that, "He who serves his country best, best serves his party." And trained and practiced in such a school up to his old age, perhaps it was too much to expect that he could ever change his principles and habits to meet any emergency however dangerous. And so this one of our Presidents retired from public life the object of charitable judg ment and almost of pity from the country, rather than of high honor or grateful remembrance. CHAPTER VII. THE BREAKING OUT OF THE WAR. Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet and the Views Held by its Members and by Him-The Bombardment of Fort Sumter-The Purpose of South Carolina Accomplished. Mr. Lincoln appointed the following cabinet officers:- Montgomery Blair of Maryland, Postmaster General. It will be noticed that Mr. Lincoln selected Mr. Seward, his chief rival in the Republican convention which nominated him for the presidency, for the most important position in his cabinet, and the three next appointments were the three who received the next largest votes for the same position. This was not only magnanimous, but fitted to secure the confidence of the North in the new administration, though some of its members were distrusted on the slavery question, and it was feared that some of the others would compromise matters without settling that question properly. But it was an able and trustworthy cabinet, especially after Mr. Stanton went into it a little later. The exact position of the President and his cabinet was not at first understood. When Mr. Buchanan was asked what he thought of the inaugural address, he is said to have replied: "I cannot say what he means until I have read it. I cannot understand the secret meaning of the document, which has been simply read to me." * Senator Douglas replied to a similar inquiry: "Well, I hardly know what he means. Every point in the address is susceptible of a double construction." It is not strange, perhaps, that the secessionists hardly knew what to expect from the new administration, when the President stated its position and policy in such guarded terms and with such evident reluctance to resort to force. True, he claimed for the government the right of coercion, but he might never exercise it any more than Mr. Buchanan did, who, though he gave up the right of coercion with reference to the secession of a State, did make it a duty "to collect the public revenues and to protect the public property," and claimed the right "to use military force" for such a purpose, but he never exercised that right nor discharged that duty. Under the shelter of such impunity, South Carolina had already declared itself out of the Union, seized the Federal arsenal in Charleston and was collecting forces and constructing batteries with which to subdue Fort Sumter, one of the fortifications of the general government and held by a Federal force. And Mr. Lincoln, while he claimed such a right and admitted such a duty, might be afraid to undertake, or find himself unable to accomplish, such a difficult task any more than his predecessor. The truth was that no other administration had ever come into power beset by such obstacles and perplexities as this must encounter. Looking back upon that period, and understanding better than any one could at the time, what agencies were plotting the overthrow of the government, and what influences were at work at the North, as well as at the South, to allow * For the numerous and remarkable suggestions made by Mr. Seward in respect to that paper, and as to such as were rejected, or adopted, or modified, it is worth while to refer to them as given in full and compared by Nicolay & Hay in their history of Mr. Lincoln. And not the least interesting of them is the close of that address, as suggested by the one and wrought out by the peculiar genius and glowing patriotism of the other.-The Century, Dec. 1887, p. 278. |