out a scheme whereby Congress should empower him to distribute between the slave States $400,000,000, in proportion to their respective slave populations, on condition that “all resistance to the national authority [should] be abandoned and cease on or before the first day of April next;” one half the sum to be paid when such resistance should so cease; the other half whenever, on or before July 1 next, the Thirteenth Amendment should become valid law.  So soon as he should be clothed with authority, he proposed to issue “a proclamation looking to peace and reunion,” in which he would declare that, upon the conditions stated, he would exercise this power; that thereupon war should cease and armies be reduced to a peace basis; that all political offenses should be pardoned; that all property, except slaves, liable to confiscation or forfeiture, should be released therefrom (except in cases of intervening interests of third parties); and that liberality should be recommended to Congress upon all points not lying within executive control.  On the evening of February 5 he submitted to his cabinet a draft covering these points.  His disappointment may be imagined when he found that not one of his advisers agreed with him; that his proposition was “unanimously disapproved.”  “There may be such a thing,” remarked Secretary Welles, “as so overdoing as to cause a distrust or adverse feeling.”  It was also said that the measure probably could not pass Congress; that to attempt to carry it, without success, would do harm; while if the offer should really be made, it would be misconstrued by the rebels.  In fact scarcely any Republican was ready to meet the rebels with the free and ample forgiveness which Lincoln desired to offer; and later opinion seems to be that his schemes were impracticable.

The fourth of March was close at hand, when Mr. Lincoln was a second time to address the people who had chosen him to be their ruler.  That black and appalling cloud, which four years ago hung oppressively over the country, had poured forth its fury and was now passing away.  His anxiety then had been lest the South, making itself deaf to reason and to right, should force upon the North a civil war; his anxiety now was lest the North, hardening itself in a severe if not vindictive temper, should deal so harshly with a conquered South as to perpetuate a sectional antagonism.  To those who had lately come, bearing to him the formal notification of his election, he had remarked:  “Having served four years in the depths of a great and yet unended national peril, I can view this call to a second term in no wise more flattering to myself than as an expression of the public judgment that I may better finish a difficult work, in which I have labored from the first, than could any one less severely schooled to the task.”  Now, mere conquest was not, in his opinion, a finishing of the difficult work of restoring a Union.

The second inaugural was delivered from the eastern portico of the Capitol, as follows:—­