rly and wholly misapprehend
the Form of Government."

"You deny," continued he, "the Sovereignty of the States; you deny the
right of self-government in the People; you insist upon Negro Equality;
your people interfere impertinently with our Institutions and attempt to
subvert them; you publish newspapers; you deliver lectures; you print
pamphlets, and you send them among us, first, to excite our Slaves to
insurrection against their masters, and next, to array one class of
citizens against the other; and I say to you, that we cannot live in
peace, either in the Union or out of it, until you have abolished your
Abolition societies; not, as I have been misquoted, abolish or destroy
your school-houses; but until you have ceased in your schoolhouses
teaching your children to hate us; until you have ceased to convert your
pulpits into hustings; until you content yourselves with preaching
Christ, and Him crucified, and not delivering political harangues on the
Sabbath; until you have ceased inciting your own citizens to make raids
and commit robberies; until you have done these things we cannot live in
the same Union with you. Until you do these things, we cannot live out
of the Union at Peace."

Such were the words--the spiteful, bitter words--with which this chosen
spokesman of the South saluted the cold and cloudy dawn of that day
which was to see the sceptre depart from the hands of the Slave Power
forever.

A few hours later, under the shadow of the main Pastern Portico of the
Capitol at Washington--with the retiring President and Cabinet, the
Supreme Court Justices, the Foreign Diplomatic Corps, and hundreds of
Senators, Representatives and other distinguished persons filling the
great platform on either side and behind them--Abraham Lincoln stood
bareheaded before full thirty thousand people, upon whose uplifted faces
the unveiled glory of the mild Spring sun now shone--stood reverently
before that far greater and mightier Presence termed by himself, "My
rightful masters, the American People"--and pleaded in a manly, earnest,
and affectionate strain with "such as were dissatisfied," to listen to
the "better angels" of their nature.

Temperate, reasonable, kindly, persuasive--it seems strange that Mr.
Lincoln's Inaugural Address did not disarm at least the personal
resentment of the South toward him, and sufficiently strengthen the
Union-loving people there, against the red-hot Secessionists, to put the
"brakes" d