In the early gray of the morning of the 23d of February, 1861, he came in sight of the dome of the Capitol, then filled with traitors plotting his death and the overthrow of the Government. By anticipating the train, by which it had been publicly announced that he would pass through Baltimore, and passing through that city at night he escaped a deeply-laid conspiracy, which would otherwise have anticipated the crime of Booth. None who witnessed will ever forget the scene of his first inauguration.
The veteran Scott had gathered a few soldiers of the Regular Army to preserve order and security; many Northern citizens thronged the streets, few of them conscious of the volcano of treason and murder seething beneath them. The departments and public offices were full of plotting traitors. Many of the rebel generals held commissions under the Government they were about to desert and betray. The ceremony of inauguration is always imposing; on this occasion it was especially so. Buchanan, sad, dejected, bowed with a seeming consciousness of duties unperformed, rode with the President-elect to the Capitol.
There were gathered the Justices of the Supreme Court, both Houses of Congress, the representatives of foreign nations, and a vast concourse of citizens from all sections of the Union. There were Chase, and Seward, and Sumner, and Breckinridge, and Douglas, who was near the President, and was observed eagerly looking over the crowd, not unconscious of the personal danger of his great and successful rival. Mr. Lincoln was so absorbed with the gravity of the occasion and the condition of his country, that he utterly forgot himself, and there was observed a dignity, which sprung from a mind entirely engrossed with public duties.
He was perfectly cool, and stepping to the eastern colonnade of the Capitol, that voice, which had been often heard by tens of thousands on the prairies of the West, now read in clear and ringing tones his inaugural. On the threshold of war, he made a last appeal for peace. He declared his fixed resolve, firm as the everlasting rocks: "_I shall take care that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in every State_."
Yet his great, kind heart yearned for peace, and as he approached the close, his voice faltered with emotion. "I am loath to close," said he; "we are _not_ enemies, but friends; we must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot's grave, to every living heart and hearthstone over all this broad land, will yet swell with the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
