President Lincoln had shrewd sense enough to see that as the maintenance of the authority of the Union had only been made possible to him by the unswerving determination of the Northern and Western Democratic party that the authority of the Union should be maintained under the Constitution, so the restoration of peace within the Union could only be achieved by accepting the Democratic construction of the position and the rights of all the States in the Union under the Constitution, of the seceded as well as of the unseceded States; and he had patriotism enough to resolve that peace should be restored within the Union, no matter what became of the ephemeral “Republican” party which had been called into existence and carried into power chiefly by the force of the sectional passions which had found final expression in the civil war. He had gone beyond the Constitution under the war power in abolishing slavery, and he knew that in abolishing slavery he had abolished the vital impulse to which the “Republican” party owed its existence. He knew too that the extreme “Republican” partisans by whom he was surrounded knew this as well as he, and he was thoroughly aware that there were among them men like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who were prepared and determined if possible to keep the sectional passions which slavery had evoked alive and burning after slavery itself should have disappeared, and to organise for themselves a new lease of power at the expense of the peace of the country and of the happiness and prosperity of millions of their fellow-countrymen. At the beginning of the war President Lincoln had met the challenge thrown down to him by the Confederate War Department on the lines indicated by a great Democratic jurist, the late Judge Black of Pennsylvania, in his “Opinion upon the Powers of the President,” prepared at the request of President Buchanan, in whose Cabinet Judge Black had successively held the posts of Attorney-General and of Secretary of State.