In these pages Mr. Lincoln has not been spared. He made mistakes, and
he himself would have been the last to claim infallibility. He had
entered the White House with a rich endowment of common-sense, a high
sense of duty, and an extraordinary knowledge of the American
character; but his ignorance of statesmanship directing arms was
great, and his military errors were numerous. Putting these aside,
his tenure of office during the dark days of "61 and "62 had been
marked by the very highest political sagacity; his courage and his
patriotism had sustained the nation in its distress; and in spite of
every obstacle he was gradually bringing into being a unity of
sympathy and of purpose, which in the early days of the war had
seemed an impossible ideal. Not the least politic of his measures was
the edict of emancipation, published after the battle of Sharpsburg.
It was not a measure without flaw. It contained paragraphs which
might fairly be interpreted, and were so interpreted by the
Confederates, as inciting the negroes to rise against their masters,
thus exposing to all the horrors of a servile insurrection, with its
accompaniments of murder and outrage, the farms and plantations where
the women and children of the South lived lonely and unprotected.
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