Abraham Lincoln's Springfield Illinois Home
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HARPER'S WEEKLY. MAY 20, 1865. 316 PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S FORMER HOME AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S OLD HOME.PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S remains have been tenderly laid to rest at Springfield, his former home. The route, which little more than four years ago the then newly-elected President took from Springfield to Washington, has been retraced, under circumstances how different ! Different as regards the terrible national drama of the last four years by what degrees of joy ! Different as regards the personal drama in which our great leader has played, by what degrees of sacred sadness! It was on the 11th of February, 1861, that President LINCOLN took leave of his fellow-citizens of Springfield, among whom he had resided for a quarter of a century. As he stepped upon the platform which was to bear him away he said : " I must now leave you—for how long I know not....I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon WASHINGTON. ...I ask your prayers." How the people hung upon every word which that man uttered on that memorable march to the front ! Only the historian, who shall record the loose and ill-weighed utterances of other prominent men at that critical period of our history, can properly estimate to what degree Mr. LINCOLN moulded and almost created the national sentiment which from that moment prevailed. His statements were made not with Jacksonian ardor, but with all the firmness of a JACKSON, though couched in that argumentative style so peculiar to MR. LINCOLN. His insight into the great problem of the time did for him, though after a quieter fashion, what the attack on Sumter only could do for the masses. He did not, like JACKSON in 1833, say to the South : " Submit peaceably or I'll make you feel what virtue there is in harsher methods of procuring submission !" He carefully guarded against menace, but he said quietly and firmly: " I hold that the Union of these States is perpetual....I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union shall be faithfully executed in all the States. . . .The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property of the Government... An your hands, may dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict with-out being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend' it. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies!" Nothing Jacksonian in all that; but something of more than Jacksonian stability ! Four years have passed. LINCOLN has fulfilled his solemn pledge "to preserve, protect, and defend." Aggressive treason has been punished and crushed ; and as the martyred President's remains moved homeward from the scene of his anxious but glorious career to the haven of his final rest, the people that erected arches of triumph at every stage of his last march did not forget, even in their sadness, that they had triumphed through him, their slain leader ; and the very manner of his death disclosed to them the bitter malice of the treason over which they had gained the victory. They did not forget the anxiety with which they followed his (See Next Page) EXPLOSION OF THE STEAMER "SULTANA," APRIL 28, 1865. |
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