The appeal was received by some with apathy, by others with caviling and opposition, and was followed by action on the part of none. Meanwhile his friends urged emancipation. They declared there could be no permanent peace while slavery lived. "Seize," cried they, "the thunderbolt of Liberty, and shatter Slavery to atoms, and then the Republic will live." After the great battle of Antietam, the President called his cabinet together, and announced to them that "_in obedience to a solemn vow to God_," he was about to issue the edict of Freedom.
The proclamation came, modestly, sublimely, reverently the great act was done. "Sincerely believing it to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, he invoked upon it the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God."
On the first of January, 1863, the Executive mansion, as is usual on New Year's Day, was crowded with the officials, foreign and domestic, of the National Capital; the men of mark of the army and navy and from civil life crowded around the care-worn President, to express their kind wishes for him personally, and their prayers for the future of the country.
During the reception, after he had been shaking hands with hundreds, a secretary hastily entered and told him the Proclamation (the final proclamation) was ready for his signature. Leaving the crowd, he went to his office, taking up a pen, attempting to write, and was astonished to find he could not control the muscles of his hand and arm sufficiently to write his name. He said to me, "I paused, and a feeling of superstition, a sense of the vast responsibility of the act, came over me; then, remembering that my arm had been well-nigh paralyzed by two hours' of hand-shaking, I smiled at my superstitious feeling, and wrote my name."
This Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and _Magna Charta_, these be great landmarks, each indicating an advance to a higher and more Christian civilization. Upon these will the historian linger, as the stepping-stones toward a higher plane of existence. From this time the war meant _universal liberty_. When, in June, 1858, at his home in Springfield, Lincoln startled the country by the announcement, "this nation can not endure half _slave_, and _half free_," and when he concluded that remarkable speech by declaring, with uplifted eye and the inspired voice of a prophet, "we shall not fail if we stand firm, _we shall not fail_, wise councils may accelerate or mistakes delay, but sooner or later the victory is sure to come," he looked to years of peaceful controversy and final triumph through the ballot-box. He anticipated no war, and he did not foresee, unless in those mysterious, dim shadows, which sometimes startle by half revealing the future, his own elevation to the presidency; he little dreamed that he was to be the instrument in the hands of God to speak those words which should emancipate a race and free his country!