troops from Boston agitated that ancient stronghold of freedom to its
foundations. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which truly exposed
the frightful possibilities of the slave system; the reckless attempts by
force and fraud to establish it in Kansas against the will of the vast
majority of the settlers; the beating of Summer in the Senate Chamber for
words spoken in debate; the Dred Scott decision in the Supreme Court,
which made the nation realize that the slave power had at last reached
the fountain of Federal justice; and finally the execution of John Brown,
for his wild raid into Virginia, to invite the slaves to rally to the
standard of freedom which he unfurled:--all these events tend to
illustrate and confirm Lincoln's contention that the nation could not
permanently continue half slave and half free, but must become all one
thing or all the other. When John Brown lay under sentence of death he
declared that now he was sure that slavery must be wiped out in blood;
but neither he nor his executioners dreamt that within four years a
million soldiers would be marching across the country for its final
extirpation, to the music of the war-song of the great conflict:

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on."

And now, at the age of fifty-one, this child of the wilderness, this farm
laborer, rail-sputter, flatboatman, this surveyor, lawyer, orator,
statesman, and patriot, found himself elected by the great party which
was pledged to prevent at all hazards the further extension of slavery,
as the chief magistrate of the Republic, bound to carry out that purpose,
to be the leader and ruler of the nation in its most trying hour.

Those who believe that there is a living Providence that overrules and
conducts the affairs of nations, find in the elevation of this plain man