After the battle of Bull Run, Congress passed a resolution declaring that the war was being waged for the sole purpose of preserving the Union, and that the Federal Government had no intention of interfering with slavery. This was subtle politics and it had the desired effect upon the doubtful Southern States; but there is no evidence that Mr. Lincoln was the first to suggest the resolution. Was Mr. Lincoln sincere in making the beautiful and touching plea for peace, in his first inaugural? Unquestionably. Yet he would make no concessions, nor encourage any efforts at reconciliation. He opposed the Crittenden Compromise, which demanded no sacrifice of principle by the North and which surrendered much that had been claimed by the South. Of the 1,200,000 square miles of public domain, the Southern leaders offered to close 900,000 square miles to slavery, leaving it to the people of the remaining 300,000 square miles to decide for or against slavery when they came to frame their state constitutions. Democrats, North and South, favored this Compromise. The Republicans rejected it. Then, the last hope of peaceable settlement was gone. Mr. Lincoln threw his influence as President-elect against the Peace Congress, and rejected the South’s offer to adjust the sectional differences by a restoration and extension of the old Missouri Compromise line. The proclamation in which Mr. Lincoln assured the seceding states that slavery should not be disturbed provided the insurgents laid down their arms by the 1st of January, 1863, proves that Mr. Lincoln is not entitled to the very great credit that is given him for signing the Emancipation Act. Mr. Lincoln was never a rabid abolitionist, and was an eleventh hour man, at that; he bore none of the brunt of the pioneers’ fight; he could show no such scars as Wendell Phillips and Lloyd Garrison and Cassius M. Clay carried; he never ran the risk of becoming a martyr, like Lovejoy; he stood aside, a good Whig, until the abolition movement was sweeping his own section, and then he fell into line with it like a practical, sensible, adjustable politician. He himself joked about the manner in which Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade and Charles Sumner nagged at him from week to week, and month to month, because of his luke-warmness in the matter of emancipation. Of and concerning those three more rabid abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln told his somewhat celebrated anecdote of the little Sunday School boy and those “same three damn fellows, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.” Not until it became a military necessity to do it, did Mr. Lincoln sign the Emancipation Act. Therefore, his hand having been forced by military policy rather than by the dictates of philanthropy, it does not seem just to class him with the crusaders of the abolition government.