It was this boatman who was twenty years
later to have, of all men, the chance.
One cannot tell here, even in outline, the story of that irrepressible
conflict in which this western ploughman and lawyer became commander-in-
chief of an army of a million men and carried on a war involving the
expenditure of three billion dollars. One need not tell it. It need only
to be recalled that it was this man of the western waters who first saw
clearly, or first made it clearly seen, that the nation could not endure
permanently half slave and half free. "I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved," he said, "but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will
become all one thing or the other." And it was he who more than any one
single force brought the fulfilment of his prophecy--of a nation reunited
and all free.
He hated slavery. "If slavery is not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong."
But he wanted to get rid of it without injustice to those to whom it was
an inherited, if cherished, institution.
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