understand, however, also, that my oath imposed upon me the duty of
preserving, to the best of my ability, by every indispensable means, that
government, that nation, of which the Constitution was the organic law.
I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tied to
preserve the Constitution--if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I
should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all
together." In other words, if the salvation of the government, the
Constitution, and the Union demanded the destruction of slavery, he felt
it to be not only his right, but his sworn duty to destroy it. Its
destruction became a necessity of the war for the Union.

As the war dragged on and disaster followed disaster, the sense of that
necessity steadily grew upon him. Early in 1862, as some of his friends
well remember, he saw, what Seward seemed not to see, that to give the
war for the Union an antislavery character was the surest means to
prevent the recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent
nation by European powers; that, slavery being abhorred by the moral
sense of civilized mankind, no European government would dare to offer so
gross an insult to the public opinion of its people as openly to favor
the creation of a state founded upon slavery to the prejudice of an
existing nation fighting against slavery. He saw also that slavery
untouched was to the rebellion an element of power, and that in order to
overcome that power it was necessary to turn it into an element of
weakness. Still, he felt no assurance that the plain people were
prepared for so radical a measure as the emancipation of the slaves by
act of the government, and he anxiously considered that, if they were
not, this great step might, by exciting dissension at the North, injure
the cause of the Union in one quarter more than it would help it in
another. He heartily welcomed an effort made in New York to mould and
stimulate public sentiment on the slavery question by public meetings