it, and not to be intimidated from their high resolve and
sacred duty by any threats of destruction to the government or of ruin
to themselves. He concluded with this telling sentence, which drove the
whole argument home to all our hearts: "Let us have faith that right
makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as
we understand it." That night the great hall, and the next day the whole
city, rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he who had
come as a stranger departed with the laurels of great triumph.

Alas! in five years from that exulting night I saw him again, for the
last time, in the same city, borne in his coffin through its draped
streets. With tears and lamentations a heart-broken people accompanied
him from Washington, the scene of his martyrdom, to his last
resting-place in the young city of the West where he had worked his way
to fame.

Never was a new ruler in a more desperate plight than Lincoln when
he entered office on the fourth of March, 1861, four months after his
election, and took his oath to support the Constitution and the Union.
The intervening time had been busily employed by the Southern States in
carrying out their threat of disunion in the event of his election.
As soon as the fact was ascertained, seven of them had seceded and had
seized upon the forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other public property
of the United States within their boundaries, and were making every
preparation for war. In the meantime the retiring President, who had
been elected by the slave power, and who thought the seceding States
could not lawfully be coerced, had done absolutely nothing. Lincoln
found himself, by the Constitution, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and
Navy of the United States, but with only a remnant of either at hand.
Each was to be created on a great scale out of the unknown resources of
a nation untried in war.

In his mild and conciliatory inaugural address, while appealing to the
seceding States to return to their allegiance, he avowed his purpose to
keep the solemn oath he had taken that day, to see that the laws of the
Union were faithfully executed, and to use the troops to recover the
forts, navy yards, and other property belonging to the government. It
is probable, however, that neither side actually realized that war
was inevitable, and that the other was determined to fight, until the
assault on Fort Sumter presented the South as the first aggressor