--offered him posthumous honors and worship if he would but do as they
desired. Had they possessed the power, no doubt they would have taken
him up into an exceeding high mountain and have offered to him all the
Kingdoms of the Earth to do their bidding. But their temptations were
of no avail.

President Lincoln's duty, and inclination alike--no less than the
earnest importunities of the Abolitionists--carried him in the opposite
direction; but carried him no farther than he thought it safe, and wise,
to go. For, in whatever he might do on this burning question of
Emancipation, he was determined to secure that adequate support from the
People without which even Presidential Proclamations are waste paper.

But now, May 9, 1862, was suddenly issued by General Hunter, commanding
the "Department of the South," comprising Georgia, Florida and South
Carolina, his celebrated Order announcing Martial Law, in those States,
as a Military Necessity, and--as "Slavery and Martial Law in a Free
Country are altogether incompatible"--declaring all Slaves therein,
"forever Free."

This second edition, as it were, of Fremont's performance, at once threw
the loyal Border-State men into a terrible ferment. Again, they, and
their Copperhead and other Democratic friends of the North, meanly
professed belief that this was but a part of Mr. Lincoln's programme,
and that his apparent backwardness was the cloak to hide his
Anti-Slavery aggressiveness and insincerity.

How hurtful the insinuations, and even direct charges, of the day, made
by these men against President Lincoln, must have been to his honest,
sincere, and sensitive nature, can scarcely be conceived by those who