With the first election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and his inauguration in March, 1861, we come upon a sudden and complete “solution of continuity” in the political history of the United States. Of the total popular vote of the country, amounting to 4,680,193, thrown on the 4th of November, 1860, Mr. Lincoln received but 1,866,452, being thus left in a popular minority of no fewer than _two million, two hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one votes_! It is impossible in the face of these figures to doubt that if the tremendous issue of peace and war between the two great sections of the Union, which really lay hidden in the ballot-boxes of the Union on that November day, had been never so dimly perceived by the American people, the verdict of the nation would have made an end that day of the new “Republican,” party. But neither Mr. Lincoln himself, nor Mr. Seward, nor any considerable number of the Republican voters of the North and the West believed, or could be made to believe, in the reality of this issue. It came upon them all and upon the country at last, after all the agitation and all the warnings of years, like “a thief in the night,” and coming upon the country it suspended for four long and dismal years the normal action of the constitution, and the normal development therefore of public opinion through the channels of constitutional politics. It is juggling with phrases to say that from the 5th of March, 1861, to the 15th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was, in any true sense of the words, a President of the United States with a political party at his back. He was to all intents and purposes a war dictator of the Northern and Western States, maintaining with all the resources of those sections of the country the fabric of the American Union against the armed and persistent efforts of thirteen sovereign States banded together in a confederacy to make an end of its authority and its existence so far as concerned its relations with them and with their inhabitants. To this colossal task Mr. Lincoln brought, as I think the most impartial critics of his administration in my own party now admit, most rare and remarkable gifts of character and of mind. It has been not uncommon among those who, since his death, have constituted themselves the special eulogists of this extraordinary man, to represent him as struggling from the first, not merely against the enormous difficulties arrayed in his path by the energy, and wealth, and determination of the seceding Confederacy, but against the ill-will and infidelity to his trust of the Democratic President whom Mr. Lincoln was elected by the North and the West to succeed. This is not the place for any vindication in this point of President Buchanan. He has had no lack of critics within the ranks of my own party. But no man who was present during that fateful winter of 1860-61 in Washington, and who was really conversant with men and things there,