Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865; Presidents -- United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
We have another annual presidential message. Like a rejected
lover making merry at the wedding of his rival, the President
felicitates himself hugely over the late presidential election.
He considers the result a signal triumph of good principles and
good men, and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones. He says the
people did it. He forgets that the "people," as he complacently
calls only those who voted for Buchanan, are in a minority of the
whole people by about four hundred thousand votes--one full tenth
of all the votes. Remembering this, he might perceive that the
"rebuke" may not be quite as durable as he seems to think--that
the majority may not choose to remain permanently rebuked by that
minority.
The President thinks the great body of us Frémonters, being
ardently attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a
few wicked and designing men. There is a slight difference of
opinion on this. We think he, being ardently attached to the hope
of a second term, in the concrete, was duped by men who had
liberty every way. He is the cat's-paw. By much dragging of
chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt
off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further
use. As the fool said of _King Lear_, when his daughters had
turned him out-of-doors, "He's a shelled peascod." [That's a
sheal'd peascod.]
So far as the President charges us "with a desire to change the
domestic institutions of existing States," and of "doing
everything in our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws
of moral authority," for the whole party on belief, and for
myself on knowledge, I pronounce the charge an unmixed and
unmitigated falsehood.
[Sidenote] Illinois "State Journal," December 16, 1856.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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