“I am naturally anti-slavery.  If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.  I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never understood that the presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.  It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.  I could not take the office without taking the oath.  Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.  I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery.  I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways.  And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.  I did understand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government,—­that nation, of which that Constitution was the organic law.  Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution?  By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.  I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation.  Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it.  I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the Constitution, if, to save slavery or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together.  When, early in the war, General Fremont attempted military emancipation, I forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity.  When, a little later, General Cameron, then secretary of war, suggested the arming of the blacks, I objected because I did not yet think it an indispensable necessity.  When, still later, General Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think the indispensable necessity had come.”

None could deny that the North could abolish slavery in the South only by beating the South in the pending war.  Therefore, by his duty as President of the Union and by his wishes as an anti-slavery man, Mr. Lincoln was equally held to win this fight.  Differing in opinion from the Abolitionists, he believed that to turn it, at an early stage, into a war for abolition rather than to leave it a war for the Union would be to destroy all hope of winning.  The step would alienate great numbers at the North.  The “American Society for promoting National Unity” had lately declared that emancipation “would be rebellion against Providence and destruction to the colored race in our land;” and it was certain that this