Abraham Lincoln's Birthday

Our greatest president was born today, February 12, 1809, in LaRue County, Kentucky, literally in a log cabin.

Historian Michael Beschloss reminds us. 

Fergus M. Bordewich, Congress at War

At Amazon, Fergus M. Bordewich, Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America. 

James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition

 At Amazon, James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln

I've been talking up President Lincoln for the last three weeks (in my American government classes).

This book looks great.

At Amazon, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons.

James M. McPherson, Tried by War

*BUMPED.*

It's President's Day Weekend coming up, a three-day holiday weekend --- which is cool.

I'll have some President's Day blogging to go with it, heh.

Thanks for your support!

At Amazon, James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.

Abraham Lincoln's Birthday

I love President Lincoln. He's my favorite president. I just wish I could transport back in time and meet him.

He was born 208 years ago today.

In any case, here's Scott Johnson, at Power Line, "REMEMBERING MR. LINCOLN," and "THINKIN’ ABOUT 'LINCOLN' AGAIN."

While only 272 words, the #GettysburgAddress is still one of the most powerful speeches ever given. #PresidentLincoln #LoveLincoln pic.twitter.com/pGELhijcxW

— The National Mall (@TheNationalMall) February 11, 2017

Lincoln's Birthday

Abraham Lincoln's birthday was February 12, 1809. Today would be his holiday. George Washington's birthday was February 22, 1732. Next Monday would be his holiday, but the feds consolidated them in 1971.

Allen Guelzo's has a major biograpy of Lincoln,  Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Also, from David Herbert Donald, Lincoln.

And from Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years.

What Did Abraham Lincoln Really Think of Thomas Jefferson?

Allen Guelzo's a major scholar of the Civil War era, writing opus-style histories such as Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, and not to mention critical biographies such as Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.

And here's Guelzo at today's New York Times, "What Did Lincoln Really Think of Jefferson?":

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”

Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.

“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”

True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”

Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.

Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote. He despised “the selfish spirit of commerce” for feeling “no passion or principle but that of gain.” And he regarded banks with special suspicion as the source of all commercial evil. “Banks may be considered as the primary source” of “paper speculation,” and only foster “the spirit of gambling in paper, in lands, in canal schemes, town lot schemes, manufacturing schemes and whatever could hit the madness of the day.”

Lincoln, who actually grew up on a backwoods farm, saw little there but drunkenness, rowdyism and endless, mind-numbing labor under the rule of his loutish and illiterate father. He made his escape from the farm as soon as he turned 21, opened a store (which failed) and finally went into law, that great enforcer of commercial contract. “I was once a slave,” he remarked, “but now I am so free that they let me practice law.”

As an Illinois state legislator, Lincoln promoted a state banking system and public funding for canals and bridges. As a lawyer, according to colleagues, Lincoln was never “unwilling to appear in behalf of a great soulless corporation” — especially railroads — and had no compunction about recommending the eviction of squatters who farmed railroad-owned land.

As president, he put into place a national banking system, protective tariffs for American manufacturing and government guarantees for building a transcontinental railroad. Lincoln was Jefferson’s nightmare.

But Jefferson also held out a second example to Lincoln, as the man who, for all his limitations and fixations, still managed to articulate certain universal truths about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Lincoln understood that Jefferson’s words — if not his practice — formed “the definitions and axioms of free society.” When he was urged during the Civil War to ignore the Constitution’s restraints on presidential power, he echoed Jefferson’s warning against taking “possession of a boundless field of power” by asking: “Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?”

And so, Lincoln concluded, “All honor to Jefferson,” who “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity” to fix in the Declaration of Independence the “abstract truth” that all men are created equal, so that it would “be a rebuke and a stumbling block” to anyone who planned to reintroduce “tyranny and oppression.”

Still more.

P.S. Stogie hates Lincoln, but he loves Jefferson the slave-holder, unsurprisingly. At Saberpoint, "Declaration of Independence -- Thomas Jefferson."

150th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

See John Steele Gordon, at Commentary, "Lincoln’s Second Inaugural."

From the speech:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . . Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

How the Civil War Created Thanksgiving

From Kenneth Davis, at the New York Times.

Also, from President Abraham Lincoln, at Real Clear History, "A Wartime Proclamation of Thanksgiving":

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

More.

The Republican Party Remains the Natural Repository of the Values Espoused by Abraham Lincoln

From Richard Brookhiser, at the Wall Street Journal, "Freedom, Hard Work and the Party of Lincoln":

Every February, local Republican parties celebrate Lincoln’s birthday, complete with costumed re-enactors reciting the Gettysburg Address. It is one of the charming rituals of American politics, half playful, half earnest and all homemade.

Better than dressing up like Lincoln is thinking seriously about his ideas. Much of Lincoln’s career was consumed by issues that—thanks largely to him—are long gone: We will never again argue about slavery in Kansas. But his principles are forever relevant: his love of freedom; his belief in work as the means of self-fulfillment; his devotion to America’s founders and their great documents. The Republican Party, which he helped found and which backed him loyally through the Civil War, is the natural repository of his legacy.

Lincoln’s greatest achievement, along with preserving the Union, was extinguishing American slavery. He won the presidency in 1860 on a pledge to stop slavery from expanding into new territories; in January 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves of rebels; the 13th Amendment, approved by Congress in January 1865 with his support, abolished slavery nationwide. As a result of his efforts four million bondmen and -women were freed.

But Lincoln believed in freedom as a universal right, “applicable,” as he put it in 1859, “to all men and all times.” Lincoln thought liberty and tyranny were locked in an age-old struggle. He repeatedly linked slavery to older forms of despotism. “A king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation,” he said in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, was animated by “the same tyrannical principle” as “one race of men . . . enslaving another race.” But Lincoln’s comparison applies equally to the modern metastasized state.

Lincoln understood the necessary limits of democratic government: The people could become their own oppressors if they endorsed tyranny. If a “man governs himself that is self-government,” he said in 1854, “but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.”

Lincoln’s faith in freedom was bound up with his views on work. Lincoln rose from frontier subsistence farming to the professional middle class by his own efforts. As a teenager he resented his father, Thomas Lincoln, for hiring him out as an unpaid laborer, as if he were a horse or a plow. As a young adult he tried a variety of jobs to support himself, from blacksmithing to surveying, until he finally taught himself the law. Lawyers could make good money in early-19th-century America, but it was never easy. Twice a year Lincoln traveled Illinois’ 8th judicial circuit (approximately the size of Connecticut) to earn fees from criminal cases and small claims. He also argued for railroads, the big businesses of the day....

Lincoln claimed to be preserving the Founders’ handiwork. Their principles were his; his solutions fulfilled their aims. In the Gettysburg Address, he called, not for a birth of new freedom, but “a new birth of freedom”—the Founders’ freedom, cleansed by removing the stain of slavery. For Lincoln the road to America’s future always began in its past...

RTWT.

Daniel Day-Lewis Wins Best Actor for 'Lincoln'

Well, I would've been a little disappointed if he didn't win.

The Los Angeles Times reports, "It was Daniel Day-Lewis by a landslide for “Lincoln”."

If Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't win Best Actor it will define injustice. #Oscars2013
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) February 25, 2013

I haven't seen "Silver Linings Playbook." I'm sure it's a wonderful movie. But I thought Jessica Chastain would get Best Actress in what would've been at least a minimal recognition by the Academy of the tremendous movie that was "Zero Dark Thirty." Maybe she'll reject the radical left's progressive antiwar (anti-Bush) agenda, to say nothing of the progressive hypocrisy. In any case, I'll have more on this later. A complete shutout for director Kathryn Bigelow (well, not a complete shutout, if one considers the movie's tie for the sound editing category).

RELATED: "F*ck Your Consideration: Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty Doesn't Need You, Oscar."

Abraham Lincoln Was Gay?

When school started a couple of weeks back, I mentioned to my classes that research shows that college students have little historical grounding in our founding institutions. I also mentioned that a lot of young people don't keep up with the news, that they're not informed about current events and how politics affects them. But then in one of my classes a young man piped up about how he really loves politics, and that he'd won awards in high school for the debate team, or some such thing. In any case, I was reminded of the Ron Paul libertarians and perhaps even the more whacked Paulbots. I was talking about the Gettysburg Address last week, which is cited in my textbook's discussion about the different definitions of democracy, and the student got going about how Lincoln was a gay atheist who ran concentration camps for some group or another. I ignored the atheist part, since almost all of Lincoln's most famous addresses are deeply grounded in God and divine provenance. But that gay bit was funny and some of the other students were practically gasping. And interestingly enough, Joan Rivers mouthed the gay smear on late-night TV a couple of days ago. See NewsBusters, "Joan Rivers: 'Abe Lincoln Was Gay'."

Anyway, I looked it up the other day and found this at USA Today, "200 years later, a more complex view of Lincoln":

* Lincoln the homosexual: A gay man in the White House?

Some writers, such as the late sex researcher and gay rights activist C. A. Tripp (The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, 2004) have argued that Lincoln was sexually attracted to men.

Lincoln's long friendship with Joshua Speed, a young store owner in Springfield, Ill., when Lincoln arrived there at age 28 in 1837, has attracted the most attention. Lincoln, whose worldly possessions at the time fit in two saddlebags, accepted Speed's invitation to save money by sharing the double bed in the room he was renting, according to many of the biographies, including David Herbert Donald's Lincoln.

Most historians don't think they were lovers. As Donald points out, bed-sharing was not unusual at the time because of financial necessity. Many boys grew up sharing a bed with one or more brothers.

Burlingame says speculation persists about a Speed diary and letters in which he wrote explicitly about a relationship with Lincoln. Burlingame doesn't buy it; nor does Berry, who says Lincoln wasn't homosexual, but homosocial.

"He cried too much to be a man's man, but he was a guy's guy," Berry says. "He liked nothing more than to sit around the stove, telling jokes and stories."

I have Donald's, Lincoln, and reading the USA Today piece reminded me about him sharing a bed at one point. But I can see how libertarians might attack Lincoln as a homosexual, since the paleocons deride him as a tyrant already, and they might want to smear him. But progressives might think a homosexual Lincoln is flaming cool. Barack Hussein likens himself to Lincoln and has sworn in twice on the Lincoln inaugural Bible. So if Lincoln was switch hitting, leftists can argue that Obama's not the first homosexual president after all.

(And I need to check back with the student on the concentration camp part. I was overwhelmed with the homosexual allegations and attacks on Lincoln the tyrant are pretty common already. But camps? More on that later...)

Ruth Wisse on the Future of Conservatism

See, "What Is the Future of Conservatism?":

I take this presidential election as a call for university reform as well as tax reform. For a start, I suggest citizens challenge the use of “diversity” for racial and gender profiling and argue for reinvestment in teaching the foundational texts of Western thought. To conserve our liberal democracy, conservatives and other concerned citizens will have to work harder.

RTWT.

Lincoln's Language and its Legacy

A lengthy review article from Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker, "ANNALS OF BIOGRAPHY: ANGELS AND AGES":

The tendency to obsess over single words and phrases reflects, in part, the semi-divine status of Lincoln in American history. But it also reflects a desire to show that rhetoric and writing were as essential to his career as acts and orders and elections. In the past twenty-five years, and particularly since the publication of Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg” (1992), language and its uses has become a central Lincoln subject. Two prominent strains of rhetoric run through the period—the Biblical and the classical—and political ideas tend to get tinted by whichever of them the speaker uses. Reading Edward Everett’s Gettysburg address, the two-hour set speech that preceded Lincoln’s and was meant to be the real event of the Gettysburg commemoration, one is startled to see how relentlessly classical it is in tone and analogy: Everett goes on and on about Marathon and the Greeks and the Persian invasions, in order to “elevate” Gettysburg and the Union soldiers. Lincoln’s rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis.

What strikes a newcomer to Lincoln’s speeches, however, is how rare those famous cadences are; their simple, resonant language—“with malice towards none, with charity for all”; the concluding and opening lines of the Gettysburg Address—is memorable in part because there isn’t much of it. The majority of Lincoln’s public utterances are narrowly, sometimes brilliantly, lawyerly—even, on occasion, crafted to give an appearance of inevitability to oratorical conclusions that are not well supported by the chain of reasoning that precedes them. The undramatic, small-print language in which Lincoln offered the Emancipation Proclamation is the most famous instance of his mastery of anti-heroic rhetoric. (Karl Marx said that it reminded him of “ordinary summonses sent by one lawyer to another.”)

But Lincoln believed in legalism. One of his first public speeches, the Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum, in Springfield in 1837, declared a radical insistence on “reason” to be the only acceptable form of public discourse; the cure for the prevalence and epidemic of violence in American life would be “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason”: “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.” Lincoln tempered but never really abandoned that conviction. His rhetorical genius lay in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religious necessity...

Grab a cup of coffe and read it all. It's well done.

How Lincoln Emerged in the Stratosphere of Greatness

From Conrad Black, at the New York Sun, "As Daniel Day Lewis’ Portrayal of the 16th President Is About To Hit the Silver Screen, Our Columnist Offers an Assessment of the Original" (via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit):

The mighty American star system has elevated and demoted thousands of people over the 236 years since the propagandistic arts were first torqued up in the Declaration of Independence. But the supreme champion of the American personality cult has been Abraham Lincoln. Given the hyperbole which frequently attaches to much-admired Americans, there is a temptation to assume that Lincoln could not possibly deserve the stratospheric elevation he has received. But he does.

Lincoln was born on the Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809, received only about a year of formal education, and moved with his family to the frontier country of Indiana, and then, at 21, to Illinois. He largely educated himself as a voracious reader, worked at a variety of jobs, had his first, disturbing, look at slavery on a trip down the Mississippi in 1831, and toiled in a law office until he became a member of the Illinois Bar in 1836.

His mother died when he was young and he had little rapport with his father. But he got on, was a tall and rugged man, companionable, and a fine raconteur with a good sense of humor, who gradually built up his legal practice and became a leading attorney.

He was troubled by slavery as fundamentally wrong: “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our Republican example of its just influence in the world.” This seems an obvious position to hold now, but America was largely founded and built by slave-holders. Although Lincoln did not at first consider African Americans to be equal in talent and intelligence to Caucasians, he eventually amended that view, when he came to know more of them.

Lincoln came gradually to believe that the incongruity to proclaimed American values, and the outright evil of slavery, were so profound that the nation could not survive. He was for, above all, the preservation of the Union, and favored various methods of curtailing and gradually eliminating slavery. These included support for the original idea of paying for the emancipation of slaves and their voluntary return to Africa, to the purpose-created country of Liberia.

Continue reading.

I haven't been this excited about a new movie in a long time. Abraham Lincoln is my favorite president. The more I read about him the more fascinated I become. And I love sharing things like the Gettysburg Address with my students, especially because they too are fascinated by him, and of the sacrifice that he eventually made for the preservation of American democracy.

The trailer is in theaters. My oldest boy and I saw "Taken 2" over the weekend and we watched it. Daniel Day Lewis, when viewed at some angles, looks like he's Lincoln himself. It's an amazing likeness. I'm excited.

The Death of the Left

From Michael Ledeen, at PJ Media (via Instapundit):

Hegel would have well understood one of the most interesting contemporary developments:  the old liberal establishment is shrinking, both in numbers and in confidence, and their political/ideological opponents are growing.  Several smart people have noticed the extraordinary depth of the conservative political team, many of whose members were on display in Tampa this week.  The Ryans and the Romneys, the Christies and the Haleys, the Loves and the Rubios, the Brewers and the Walkers, on and on.  They have a much clearer vision of the real world, and they accordingly have more realistic political approaches than those on the left, who are trapped in a world that no longer exists.

Here’s another way to grasp the dialectical process:  look at Wisconsin.  Long considered one of the wackier leftist places in America, it is now the cradle of creative conservatives. The Progressive mission known as the “Wisconsin Idea” is politically and intellectually dead and buried.  Wisconsin now votes for Paul Ryan and Scott Walker (and probably Tommy Thompson in a couple of months).

If you’re one of those leftists, unable to sort out how the world works nowadays, and unable to win an honest debate with your political and intellectual opponents, it makes you very angry, and you lash out at them with a violence that often surprises observers who are less engaged in the political or intellectual wars.  The left has died as an intellectual force worth taking seriously.  Its mission belongs to another time.   It is reduced to fighting for political power alone, and its weapons are what we recently called “the politics of personal destruction.”  It’s the only way they can hope to win.  None of us should be surprised when the leftists accuse the righties of pushing old women off of cliffs, or murdering cancer-afflicted employees, or waging war on women, and so forth.  They have to destroy their opponents one by one.  They no longer have a “movement” of any significance.

That’s what happens when you become an anachronism...

This Day in History: Abraham Lincoln Was Inaugurated as 16th President of the United States

Can you imagine, 151 years ago today, the nation's greatest president was sworn into office?

And you can read Lincoln's words, "First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861":

One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, can not be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other.

Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you can not fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to add that to me the convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people, and they have referred none upon him to fix terms for the separation of the States. The people themselves can do this if also they choose, but the Executive as such has nothing to do with it. His duty is to administer the present Government as it came to his hands and to transmit it unimpaired by him to his successor.

Read it all...