fairly, as a legal technicality. He would
have said in substance: here is a congregation to be benefited, this
great mass of all the inhabitants of all the States of the Union;
accident, or destiny, or what you will, has brought them together, but
here they are; they are moving forward, haltingly, irregularly, but
steadily, toward fuller and fuller democracy; they are part of
the universal democratic movement; their vast experiment has an
international significance; it is the hope of the "Liberal party
throughout the world"; to check that experiment, to break it into
Separate minor experiments; to reduce the imposing promise of its
example by making it seem unsuccessful, would be treason to mankind.
Therefore, both on South and North, both on the Seceders he meant to
fight and on those Northerners of whom he was not entirely sure, he
aimed to impose the supreme immediate duty of proving to the world that
democracy on a great scale could have sufficient vitality to maintain
itself against any sort of attack. Anticipating faintly the Gettysburg
oration, the first message contained these words: "And this issue
embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the
whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or
democracy--a government of the people by the same people--can or can
not maintain its integrity against its own domestic foes. . . . Must a
government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people
or too weak to maintain its own existence?"(7) He told Hay that "the
crucial idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us
to prove that popular government is not an absurdity"; "that the basal
issue was whether or no the people could govern themselves."(8)

But all this elaborate reasoning, if it went no further, lacked
authority. It was political speculation. To clothe itself with authority
it had to discover a foundation in historic fact. The real difficulty
was not what ought to have been established in America in the past,
but what actually had been. Where was the warrant for those bold
proposition--who "we, the people," really were; in what their sovereign
power really consisted; what was history's voice in the matter? To state
an historic foundation was the final aim of the message. To hit its mark
it had to silence those Northerners who denied the obligation to fight
for the Union; it had to oppose their "free love" ideas of political
unity with th