ttempted military emancipation, I
forbade it, because I did not then think it an indispensable necessity.
When, a little later, General Cameron, then Secretary of War, suggested
the arming of the blacks, I objected, because I did not think it an
indispensable necessity. When, still later, General Hunter attempted
military emancipation, I again forbade it, because I did not yet think
the indispensable necessity had come. When, in March and May and July,
1862, I made earnest and successive appeals to the border States to
favour compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity
for military emancipation and arming the blacks would come, unless
averted by that measure. They declined the proposition, and I was, in my
best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the
Union, and with it the Constitution, or laying strong hand upon the
coloured element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for
greater gain than loss; but of this I was not entirely confident. More
than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations,
none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military
force,--no loss by it anyhow or anywhere. On the contrary, it shows a
gain of quite one hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and
labourers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be
no cavilling. We have the men, and we could not have had them without
the measure.

And now let any Union man who complains of the measure, test himself by
writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force
of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty
thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be
but for the measure he condemns. If he cannot face his case so stated,
it is only because he cannot face the truth.

I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this
tale, I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have
controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
Now, at the end of three years' struggle, the nation's condition is not
what either party, or any man, devised or expected. God alone can claim
it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a
great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the
South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial
history will find therein new cause to attest and