were rescued from the false predicament in which they had been from the beginning, and the great popular heart leaped with new enthusiasm for “Liberty and Union, henceforth and forever, one and inseparable.”  It brought not only moral but material support to the cause of the government, for within two years 120,000 colored troops were enlisted in the military service and following the national flag, supported by all the loyalty of the North, and led by its choicest spirits.  One mother said, when her son was offered the command of the first colored regiment, “If he accepts it I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot.”  He was shot heading a gallant charge of his regiment....  The Confederates replied to a request of his friends for his body that they had “buried him under a layer of his niggers....;” but that mother has lived to enjoy thirty-six years of his glory, and Boston has erected its noblest monument to his memory.

The effect of the proclamation upon the actual progress of the war was not immediate, but wherever the Federal armies advanced they carried freedom with them, and when the summer came round the new spirit and force which had animated the heart of the government and people were manifest.  In the first week of July the decisive battle of Gettysburg turned the tide of war, and the fall of Vicksburg made the great river free from its source to the Gulf.

On foreign nations the influence of the proclamation and of these new victories was of great importance.  In those days, when there was no cable, it was not easy for foreign observers to appreciate what was really going on; they could not see clearly the true state of affairs, as in the last year of the nineteenth century we have been able, by our new electric vision, to watch every event at the antipodes and observe its effect.  The Rebel emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention, spared no pains to impress upon the minds of public and private men and upon the press their own views of the character of the contest.  The prospects of the Confederacy were always better abroad than at home.  The stock markets of the world gambled upon its chances, and its bonds at one time were high in favor.

Such ideas as these were seriously held:  that the North was fighting for empire and the South for independence; that the Southern States, instead of being the grossest oligarchies, essentially despotisms, founded on the right of one man to appropriate the fruit of other men’s toil and to exclude them from equal rights, were real republics, feebler to be sure than their Northern rivals, but representing the same idea of freedom, and that the mighty strength of the nation was being put forth to crush them; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders had created a nation; that the republican experiment had failed and the Union had ceased to exist.  But the crowning argument to foreign minds was that it was an utter impossibility for the government to win in the contest;