Mr. Lincoln had declared his purpose to "Maintain the Union, the Constitution and the laws, regardless of slavery," and in the border slave States--in fact, in all the slave States, public sentiment admitted that slavery was wrong, but as far as they were concerned an inherited wrong which they saw no practical way to remedy, as where slaves were held in large numbers they would be as helpless as children to care for themselves if freed. In the border mountain States, however, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, where families held only a few slaves, their close environments enabled the slaves to acquire such individual character in habits of morality, industry and responsibility as would enable them to make a living for themselves and become comparatively good citizens, and in hundreds of such cases their masters manumitted them, and these manumitted men were setting an example to others and making an incentive which they had not had before. So that by this time if there had been no war or senseless fanatical interference, a great majority of the slaves would be free and would have become citizens well qualified for all duties, including the franchise, and those still in bondage, if any, would have been honestly striving to emulate the example set before them by the more progressive and competent. I have said that we were fortunate in living in our day and generation, but we have many other things to be thankful for. We should be thankful that we for the Union had for our leader from start to finish one whom we, his contemporaries, believe to have been the greatest of the human kind; one who spent his early life in loneliness, poverty and toil, and whose after lot fell to lead our mighty hosts; yet with these extreme vicissitudes he was always the same great, good and lovable spirit, "with malice toward none and charity for all." We should be thankful, too, that our adversaries had for their leader perhaps the greatest man and patriot next to Lincoln in this greatest of wars of history. This is no disparagement to Grant, Jackson (Stonewall), Sherman or Johnston (J. E.), for Lee had the most difficult part: it is easier to be great when triumphant than to be great when vanquished. Lee showed his patriotism from the day of his surrender to the day of his death by becoming a humble, useful and law-abiding citizen, setting an example to many of his more turbulent countrymen that was of untold value in the rehabilitation of the Union as it is today; another and greater Cincinnatus because he had the moral force and patriotism to guide his millions of vanquished but unconquered followers back to the flag--to a loyal obedience and support of the laws of those who vanquished them--thus doing perhaps more than any other to bring about Whittier's beautifully expressed hope that