Now, Mr. Lincoln was not a man who was incapable of reading the signs of the times.  He saw that he was drifting towards an irreparable breach with an element that had previously furnished his staunchest supporters.  As a politician of great native shrewdness, as well as the head of the Government, he could not afford to let the quarrel go on and widen.  There was need of conciliation.  Something had to be done.  We know what he did.  He issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

As far as freeing any slaves was concerned, he knew it amounted to very little, if anything.  He said so.  Less than two weeks before the preliminary section of the proclamation appeared, Mr. Lincoln was waited on by a delegation of over one hundred Chicago clergymen, who urged him to issue a proclamation of freedom for the slaves.  “What good would a proclamation from me do, especially as we are now situated?” asked Mr. Lincoln by way of reply.  “I do not want to issue a document that the whole world would see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet.  Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?”

In contemplating a proclamation applicable to the rebel States, it is hardly to be supposed that Mr. Lincoln did not understand the situation two weeks earlier quite as well as when the document appeared.

If Mr. Lincoln had been told, when he entered on the Presidency, that before his term of office would expire he would be hailed as “The Great Emancipator,” he would have treated the statement as equal to one of his own best jokes.  Slavery was a thing he did not then want to have disturbed.  He discountenanced all radical agitators of the subject, and especially in the border slave States, where he was able to hold them pretty well in check, except in Missouri.  There they stood up and fought him, and in the end beat him.  One of the rather curious results of this condition of things was that, when the States came to action on the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, the one absolutely abolishing slavery, the three border slave States of Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, over which the President’s influence was practically supreme, gave an adverse vote of four to one, while Missouri, with whose radical emancipationists he had continuously been at loggerheads, ratified the amendment by a legislative vote of one hundred and eleven ayes to forty nays.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the President, at the beginning of his official term, opposed Anti-Slavery agitation and Anti-Slavery action with all his might, he promptly faced about as soon as he discovered that the subject was one that would not “down.”  No one ever worked harder to find a solution of a difficult problem than he did of the slavery question.  He began to formulate plans to that end, the most distinguishing feature, however, being the spirit of compromise by which they were pervaded.  All of