history exemplifies this law. It was not enough that we at
the North abolished slavery for ourselves, declared freedom of
speech and the press, built up churches, colleges, and free
schools, studied the science of morals, government, and economy,
dignified labor, amassed wealth, whitened the sea with our
commerce, and commanded the respect and admiration of the nations
of the earth, so long as the South, by the natural proclivities
of slavery, was sapping the very foundations of our national
life....

You are the first President ever borne on the shoulders of
freedom into the position you now fill. Your predecessors owed
their elevation to the slave oligarchy, and in serving slavery
they did but obey their masters. In your election, Northern
freemen threw off the yoke. And with you rests the responsibility
that our necks shall never bow again. At no time in the annals of
the nation has there been a more auspicious moment to retrieve
the one false step of the fathers in their concessions to
slavery. The Constitution has been repudiated, and the compact
broken by the Southern traitors now in arms. The firing of the
first gun on Sumter released the North from all constitutional
obligations to slavery. It left the Government, for the first
time in our history, free to carry out the Declaration of our
Revolutionary fathers, and made us in fact what we have ever
claimed to be, a nation of freemen.

"The Union as it was"--a compromise between barbarism and
civilization--can never be restored, for the opposing principles
of freedom and slavery can not exist together. Liberty is life,
and every form of government yet tried proves that slavery is
death. In obedience to this law, our Republic, divided and
distracted by the collisions of caste and class, is tottering to
its base, and can only be reconstructed on the sure foundations
of impartial freedom to all men. The war in which we are involved
is not the result of party or accident, but a forward step in the
progress of the race never to be retraced. Revolution is no time
for temporizing or diplomacy. In a radical upheaving, the people
demand eternal principles to stand upon.

Northern power and loyalty can never be measured until the
purpose of the war be liberty to man; for a lasting enthus