He came there free, and hating slavery. He
came there, leaving on record words like these spoken three years before
and never contradicted. He had said, "A house divided against itself
cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently, half
slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not
expect the house to fall; but I expect it will cease to be divided. It
will become all one thing or all the other." When the question came, he
knew which thing he meant that it should be. His whole nature settled
that question for him. Such a man must always live as he used to say he
lived (and was blamed for saying it) "controlled by events, not
controlling them." And with a reverent and clear mind, to be controlled
by events means to be controlled by God. For such a man there was no
hesitation when God brought him up face to face with Slavery and put the
sword into his hand and said, "Strike it down dead." He was a willing
servant then. If ever the face of a man writing solemn words glowed with
a solemn joy, it must have been the face of Abraham Lincoln, as he bent
over the page where the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was growing
into shape, and giving manhood and freedom as he wrote it to hundreds of
thousands of his fellow-men. Here was a work in which his whole nature
could rejoice. Here was an act that crowned the whole culture of his
life. All the past, the free boyhood in the woods, the free youth upon
the farm, the free manhood in the honorable citizen's employments--all
his freedom gathered and completed itself in this.
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