put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved."

Our special thanks are due to you, that by your proclamation 2,000,000
women are freed from the foulest bondage humanity ever suffered. Slavery
for man is bad enough, but the refinements of cruelty ever must fall on
the mothers of the oppressed race, defrauded of all the rights of the
family relation and violated in the most holy instincts of their nature.
A mother's life is bound up in that of her child. There center all her
hopes and ambitions. But the slave-mother in her degradation rejoices
not in the future promise of her daughter, for she knows by experience
what her sad fate must be. No pen can describe the unutterable agony of
that mother whose past, present and future all are wrapped in darkness;
who knows the crown of thorns she wears must press her daughter's brow;
who knows the wine-press she treads those tender feet must tread alone.
For, by the law of slavery, "the child follows the condition of the
mother."

By your act, the family, that great conservator of national virtue and
strength, has been restored to millions of humble homes around whose
altars coming generations shall magnify and bless the name of Abraham
Lincoln. By a mere stroke of the pen you have emancipated millions from
a condition of wholesale concubinage. We now ask you to finish the work
by declaring that nowhere under our national flag shall the motherhood
of any race plead in vain for justice and protection. So long as one
slave breathes in this republic, we drag the chain with him. God has so
linked the race, man to man, that all must rise or fall together. Our
history exemplifies this law. It was not enough that we at the North
abolished slavery for ourselves, declared freedom of speech and press,
built 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 never sh