Constitution of the Confederacy was a paraphrase with convenient adaptations of the Constitution of the United States.  A significant one of these adaptations was the striking out of the first three words, “We, the people,” and the substitution of the words, “We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States.”  “Why,” said Mr. Lincoln, “why this deliberate pressing out of view the rights of men and the authority of the people?  This is essentially a people’s contest.  On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men ... to afford to all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life....  This is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.  I am most happy to believe that the plain people understand and appreciate this.”

Many persons, not gifted with the power of thinking clearly, were disturbed at what seemed to them a purpose to “invade” and to “subjugate” sovereign States,—­as though a government could invade its own country or subjugate its own subjects!  These phrases, he said, were producing “uneasiness in the minds of candid men” as to what would be the course of the government toward the Southern States after the suppression of the rebellion.  The President assured them that he had no expectation of changing the views set forth in his inaugural address; that he desired “to preserve the government, that it may be administered for all as it was administered by the men who made it.  Loyal citizens everywhere have a right to expect this,... and the government has no right to withhold or neglect it.  It is not perceived that in giving it there is any coercion, any conquest, or any subjugation.”

In closing he said that it was with the deepest regret that he had used the war power; but “in defense of the government, forced upon him, he could but perform this duty or surrender the existence of the government.”  Compromise would have been useless, for “no popular government can long survive a marked precedent that those who carry an election can only save the government from immediate destruction by giving up the main point upon which the people gave the election.”  To those who would have had him compromise he explained that only the people themselves, not their servants, can safely reverse their own deliberate decisions.  He had no power to agree to divide the country which he had the duty to govern.  “As a private citizen the executive could not have consented that these institutions shall perish; much less could he, in betrayal of so vast and so sacred a trust as these free people have confided to him.  He felt that he had no moral right to shrink, nor even to count the chances of his own life in what might follow.”

The only direct request made in the message was that, to make “this contest a short and decisive one,” Congress would “place at the control of the government for the work at least 400,000 men, and $400,000,000.  That number of men is about one tenth of those of proper ages within the regions where apparently all are willing to engage, and the sum is less than a twenty-third part of the money value owned by the men who seem ready to devote the whole.”