"We know, and the whole world knows, that when in the hour of our extremity we called upon the black race to did us, we promised them not liberty only, but all that that word liberty implies. All remember how unwilling we were to do any thing which would inure to the benefit of the negro. I recall with shame the fact that when, five years ago, the so-called Democracy--now Egyptians--were here in this capital, in the White House, in the Senate, and on this floor, plotting the destruction of the Government, and we were asked to appease them by sacrificing the negro, two-thirds of both houses voted to rivet his chains upon him so long as the republic should endure. A widening chasm yawned between the free and slave States, and we looked wildly around for that wherewith it might be closed. In our extremity we seized upon the negro, bound and helpless, and tried to cast him in. But an overruling Providence heard the cries of the oppressed, and hurled his oppressors into that chasm by hundreds of thousands, until the whole land was filled with mourning, yet still the chasm yawned. In our anguish and terror, we felt that the whole nation would be speedily ingulfed in one common ruin. It was then that the great emancipator and savior of his country, Abraham Lincoln, saw the danger and the remedy, and seizing four million bloody shackles, he wrenched them from their victims, and standing with these broken manacles in his hands upraised toward heaven, he invoked the blessing of the God of the oppressed, and cast them into the fiery chasm. That offering was accepted, and the chasm closed.