“I am struggling to maintain the government, not to overthrow it.  I am struggling especially to prevent others from overthrowing it....  Whoever shall be constitutionally elected in November shall be duly installed as President on the fourth of March....  In the interval I shall do my utmost that whoever is to hold the helm for the next voyage shall start with the best possible chance to save the ship.  This is due to the people both on principle and under the Constitution....  If they should deliberately resolve to have immediate peace, even at the loss of their country and their liberty, I know [have?] not the power or the right to resist them.  It is their business, and they must do as they please with their own.”

In this connection it is worth while to recall an incident which occurred on August 26, amid the dark days.  Anticipating at that time that he might soon be compelled to encounter the sore trial of administering the government during four months in face of its near transmission to a successor all whose views and purposes would be diametrically opposite to his own, and desiring beforehand clearly to mark out his duty in this stress, Mr. Lincoln one day wrote these words:—­

“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected.  Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”

He then closed the paper so that it could not be read, and requested each member of the cabinet to sign his name on the reverse side.

In the end, honesty was vindicated as the best policy, and courage as the soundest judgment.  The preliminary elections in Vermont and Maine in September, the important elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana in October, showed that a Republican wave was sweeping across the North.  It swept on and gathered overwhelming volume in the brief succeeding interval before November 8.  On that momentous day, the voting in the States showed 2,213,665 Republican votes, to which were added 116,887 votes of soldiers in the field, electing 212 presidential electors; 1,802,237 Democratic votes, to which were added 33,748 votes of soldiers in the field, electing 21 presidential electors.  Mr. Lincoln’s plurality was therefore 494,567; and it would have been swelled to over half a million had not the votes of the soldiers of Vermont, Kansas, and Minnesota arrived too late to be counted, and had not those of Wisconsin been rejected for an informality.  Thus were the dreary predictions of the midsummer so handsomely confuted that men refused to believe that they had ever been deceived by them.