His vehicle for publishing his case was the first message to Congress.(1) It forms an amazing contrast with the first inaugural.  The argument over slavery that underlies the whole of the inaugural has vanished.  The message does not mention slavery.  From the first word to the last, it is an argument for the right of the central government to exercise sovereign power, and for the duty of the American people—­to give their lives for the Union.  No hint of compromise; nought of the cautious and conciliatory tone of the inaugural.  It is the blast of a trumpet—­a war trumpet.  It is the voice of a stern mind confronting an adversary that arouses in him no sympathy, no tolerance even, much less any thought of concession.  Needless to insist that this adversary is an idea.  Toward every human adversary, Lincoln was always unbelievably tender.  Though little of a theologian, he appreciated intuitively some metaphysical ideas; he projected into politics the philosopher’s distinction between sin and the sinner.  For all his hatred of the ideas which he held to be treason, he never had a vindictive impulse directed toward the men who accepted those ideas.  Destruction for the idea, infinite clemency for the person—­such was his attitude.

It was the idea of disunion, involving as he believed, a misconception of the American government, and by implication, a misconception of the true function of all governments everywhere, against which he declared a war without recourse.

The basis of his argument reaches back to his oration on Clay, to his assertion that Clay loved his country, partly because it was his country, even more because it was a free country.  This idea ran through Lincoln’s thinking to the end.  There was in him a suggestion of internationalism.  At the full height of his power, in his complete maturity as a political thinker, he said that the most sacred bond in life should be the brotherhood of the workers of all nations.  No words of his are more significant than his remarks to passing soldiers in 1863, such as, “There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one.  There is involved in this struggle the question whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed.”  And again, “I happen temporarily to occupy this White House.  I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has."(2)

This idea, the idea that the “plain people” are the chief concern of government was the bed rock of all his political thinking.  The mature, historic Lincoln is first of all a leader of the plain people—­of the mass—­as truly as was Cleon, or Robespierre, or Andrew Jackson.  His gentleness does not remove him from that stern category.  The latent fanaticism that is in every man, or almost every man, was grounded in Lincoln, on his faith—­so whimsically expressed—­that God must have loved the plain people because he had made so many of them.(3) The basal appeal of the first message was in the words: