The measure took the country by surprise. The President's secret had
been well kept, and for once rumor had not forerun execution. Doubtless
the reader expects now to hear that one immediate effect was the
conciliation of all those who had been so long reproaching Mr. Lincoln
for his delay in taking this step. It would seem right and natural that
the emancipationists should have rallied with generous ardor to sustain
him. They did not. They remained just as dissatisfied and distrustful
towards him as ever. Some said that he had been _forced_ into this
policy, some that he had drifted with the tide of events, some that he
had waited for popular opinion at the North to give him the cue, instead
of himself guiding that opinion. To show that he was false to the
responsibility of a ruler, there were those who cited against him his
own modest words: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess
plainly that events have controlled me." Others, however, put upon this
language the more kindly and more honest interpretation, that Mr.
Lincoln appreciated that both President and people were moved by the
drift of events, which in turn received their own impulse from an agency
higher than human and to which they must obediently yield. But whatever
ingenious excuses were devised by extremists for condemning the man who
had done the act, the Republican party faithfully supported the act
itself.
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