I
pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement
and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and the lost, and
the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice
upon the altar of freedom."
Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths of her queenly
and womanly heart, have spoken words more touching and tender to soothe
the stricken mothers of her own soldiers.
The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln delighted the
country and the world on the first of January, 1863, will doubtless
secure for him a foremost place in history among the philanthropists and
benefactors of the race, as it rescued, from hopeless and degrading
slavery, so many millions of his fellow-beings described in the law and
existing in fact as "chattels-personal, in the hands of their owners and
possessors, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever."
Rarely does the happy fortune come to one man to render such a service to
his kind--to proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof.
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