Executive Branch I

Questions on the assignment? 

Office hour today: 1:15-2:15

For next time:

• Reagan "Evil Empire" speech
• Noonan memoir (on Canvas)

On a lighter note... The presidency clip that everybody always remembers long after they have forgotten The Federalist.

The Constitution and Federalist

ARTICLE II 

The 25th Amendment

Presidential Succession Act

Federalist 70 "The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers."

Federalist 71. "It is one thing to be subordinate to the laws, and another to be dependent on the legislative body.

Federalist 73"But the convention have pursued a mean in this business, which will both facilitate the exercise of the power vested in this respect in the executive magistrate, and make its efficacy to depend on the sense of a considerable part of the legislative body. Instead of an absolute negative, it is proposed to give the Executive the qualified negative already described. This is a power which would be much more readily exercised than the other."

Presidential staff, the Waldman reading, and democratic writing

Congress checking the president: NAIL:

• Nominations
• Appropriations
• Investigations/Impeachment
• Legislation

Informal pressure:  Harry Reid and Gates

The presidency and national security:

Federalist 8: "It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority."

Democracy in America: "If executive power is weaker in America than in France, the reason for this lies perhaps more in circumstances than in the laws. It is generally in its relations with foreign powers that the executive power of a nation has the chance to display skill and strength. If the Union’s existence were constantly menaced, and if its great interests were continually interwoven with those of other powerful nations, one would see the prestige of the executive growing, because of what was expected from it and of what it did."

Complexity of the national security establishment

Broken Links:

• Stephen Hadley
• Mike Mullen, chair of JCS
• Regional and functional combatant commanders

Gates

The secretary of defense is second only to the president in the military chain of command (neither the vice president nor the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in the chain at all), and any order to American forces worldwide goes from the president to the secretary directly to the combatant commanders (although as a practical matter and a courtesy, I routinely asked the chairman to convey such orders). More important than any of the meetings, the secretary makes life-and-death decisions every day—and not just for American military forces. Since 9/11, the president has delegated to the secretary the authority to shoot down any commercial airliner he, the secretary, deems to be a threat to the United States. The secretary can also order missiles fired to shoot down an incoming missile. 

 Nuclear war steps

Nuclear war

Tom Nichols: "In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military members are trained to execute orders, not question them.

Congress II

 

For Monday

• Hamilton, Federalist # 70, 71, 73
• Tocqueville, pp. 121-138, 690-695
• Gates-Duty and reading by Michael Waldman P`15

SHUTDOWN 

• Appropriations
• Continuing resolution
• Filibuster & cloture
• Reconciliation
• History

From last time:

Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution: 

In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow.

Hill leadership

• House (Boehner on power)
• Senate  (Franken on Mitch?)

Mike Wirth and Dr. Suzanne Cooper-Guasco:

How is Congress representative?

Federalist 57:

The House of Representatives is so constituted as to support in the members an habitual recollection of their dependence on the people. Before the sentiments impressed on their minds by the mode of their elevation can be effaced by the exercise of power, they will be compelled to anticipate the moment when their power is to cease, when their exercise of it is to be reviewed, and when they must descend to the level from which they were raised; there forever to remain unless a faithful discharge of their trust shall have established their title to a renewal of it. I will add, as a fifth circumstance in the situation of the House of Representatives, restraining them from oppressive measures, that they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.

More on Demographics of Congress

HOW DOES LAUREN UNDERWOOD REPRESENT HER COMMUNITY?

WHAT IS THE PERSONAL SIDE OF CONGRESSIONAL SERVICE?

• Death threats

 

Federalist 63:

As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.

BUT DOES THE SYSTEM WORK WITH POLARIZED AND NATIONALIZED  PARTIES? 

There are bipartisan bills:  Franken and service dogs

BESIDES PASSING BILLS, MEMBERS OF CONGRESS:

• SERVE AS CONSTITUENT CONCIERGES
• MAKE APPEARANCES IN THE CONSTITUENCY
• MAKE SPEECHES
• DO MEDIA INTERVIEWS
• ISSUE PRESS RELEASES AND SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

HOLD HEARINGS:  FRANKEN REFLECTIONS

• 
  

Thinking about Congress, the presidency, emergencies, and foreign policy

Presidents and Emergency Powers

Governors actually have primary responsibility.

Tocqueville:

Now, it is this clear perception of the future, based on judgment and experience, which must often be lacking in a democracy. The people feel more strongly than they reason; and if present ills are great, it is to be feared that they will forget the greater evils that perhaps await them in case of defeat (p. 223).

[The] great privilege enjoyed by the Americans is not only to be more enlightened than other nations but also to have the chance to make mistakes that can be retrieved (p. 225).

 One kind of mistake, however, is not retrievable.

The steps in launching a nuclear attack.

Second Essay 2025

Pick any executive order that President Trump has issued in 2025. Your task is not just to write a summary, but to dig into its political and institutional context. In your essay, address the following:

1. Why this order?

   • What problem (or perceived problem) did the order claim to address?

   • What political, social, or economic forces made this issue urgent for the president?

   • Look closely at the text of the executive order and at least one statement from the White House (press release, remarks, or social media post). Quote and analyze the president’s own words.

2. How did Congress react?

   • Identify at least two members of Congress (by name) who publicly supported or criticized the order. Quote from floor speeches, press releases, or interviews.

   • Were the reactions partisan, regional, or responsive to particular interest groups?

3. So what?

   • Assess the early impact of the order. Did it immediately change policy, trigger lawsuits, or provoke oversight hearings?

   • Explain whether this order is likely to endure or face judicial or legislative challenge.

   • Avoid writing an editorial on whether you support or oppose this order or Trump's policies in general.

---

Requirements

• Length: Essays must be double-spaced and no more than three pages long. I will not read past the third page.

• Format: Submit as a Word document only. Do not submit pdfs or Google docs. Cite all sources with endnotes (not footnotes) in Chicago/Turabian style. Endnote pages do not count toward the page limit.

• AI Policy: You may use AI to locate sources or generate a list of possibilities, but you may not copy AI-generated summaries or arguments into your essay. Misrepresenting AI output as your own work is plagiarism and may result in referral to the Academic Standards Committee.

• Writing: Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Read Strunk & White and watch my writing lecture before drafting.

• Deadline: Upload essays to Canvas by 11:59 PM, Friday, October 10. (If you have trouble with Canvas, email it to me as a Word attachment.) I reserve the right to dock essays a grade point for one day’s lateness, and a full letter grade thereafter.

Congress

 Second Assignment:  an explainer on executive orders (Also see proclamations and memos:  sometimes the difference is form, not substance)

For Wednesday, Franken, Boehner, Underwood.

Federalist 47: "From these facts, by which Montesquieu was guided, it may clearly be inferred that, in saying "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates,'' or, "if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers,'' he did not mean that these departments ought to have no PARTIAL AGENCY in, or no CONTROL over, the acts of each other."

Federalist 48: The conclusion which I am warranted in drawing from these observations is, that a mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments, is not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.

ARTICLE ONE

SECTION 1 
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

SECTION 2

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen..

Federalist 57: Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscurity and unpropitious fortune. The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States. They are to be the same who exercise the right in every State of electing the corresponding branch of the legislature of the State. Who are to be the objects of popular choice? Every citizen whose merit may recommend him to the esteem and confidence of his country. No qualification of wealth, of birth, of religious faith, or of civil profession is permitted to fetter the judgement or disappoint the inclination of the people.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other

 Persons.Akhil Amar on the Three-Fifths Clause:

The radical vice of Article I as drafted and ratified was that it gave slaveholding regions extra clout in every election as far as the eye could see - a political gift that kept giving. And growing. Unconstrained by any explicit intrastate equality norm in Article I, and emboldened by the federal [3/5] ratio, many slave states in the antebellum era skewed their congressional-district maps in favor of slaveholding regions within the state. Thus the House not only leaned south, but also within coastal slave states bent east, toward tidewater plantations that grabbed more than their fair share of seats. ... The very foundation of the Constitution’s first branch was tilted and rotten.

And not just the first branch. The Article II electoral college sat atop the Article I base: The electors who picked the president would be apportioned according to the number of seats a state had in the House and Senate. In turn, presidents would nominate cabinet heads, Supreme Court justices, and other Article III judges.

Consequences of the Three-Fifths Clause.  From William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery:

Five of the first seven presidents were slaveholders, for thirty-two of the nation’s first thirty-six years forty of its first forty-eight, fifty of its first sixty four, the nation’s president was a slaveholder. The powerful office of Speaker of the House was held by a slaveholder for twenty-eight of the nation’s first thirty-five years. The president pro tem of the Senate was virtually always a slaveholder. The majority of the cabinet members and — very important — of justices of the Supreme Court were slaveholders. The slaveholding Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by slaveholding President Andrew Jackson to succeed the slaveholding John Marshall, would serve all the way through the decades before the war into the years of the Civil War itself; it would be a radical change of the kind slaveholders feared when in 1863, President Lincoln would appoint the anti-slavery politician Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to succeed Taney.

The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

Background on the size of the House of Representatives -- And commentary from a familiar source

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers;and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Section 3

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote. [Seventeenth Amendment changed the procedure]

SENATOR LAPHONZA BUTLER SUCCEEDED DIFI.

Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. ...

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

Tocqueville (p. 200):  "When one enters the House of Representatives at Washington, one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly...A couple of paces away is the entrance to the Senate, whose narrow precincts contain a large proportion of the famous men of America."

Federalist 63: As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law. 

SECTIONS 4 THROUGH 10

Demographics of Congress

=============
Thnking about Congress, the presidency and foreign policy

 Tocqueville:

Now, it is this clear perception of th

 

e future, based on judgment and experience, which must often be lacking in a democracy. The people feel more strongly than they reason; and if present ills are great, it is to be feared that they will forget the greater evils that perhaps await them in case of defeat (p. 223).

[The] great privilege enjoyed by the Americans is not only to be more enlightened than other nations but also to have the chance to make mistakes that can be retrieved (p. 225).

Congressional leadership.  
Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution: 

In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition, of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects! 

Consitutionalism II

For Monday, read: 

• Hamilton, Federalist # 47, 48, 57, 63.
• Tocqueville, 196-230.

For Wednesday, Franken, Boehner, Underwood.

Wurman and the meaning of meaning:

• Originalism:  original public meaning and original intent
• Original application and original sense.

From last time: Faction

• Federalist 10

39, 49, 51.

Federalist 39 and Federalism:

The proposed Constitution, therefore, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.

SPENCER COX RECENTLY COMMENTED ON THE VALUE OF FEDERALISM. 

Federalist 51

• Separation of Powers: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place."
• "In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people, is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments.  Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people.  The different governments will control each other; at the same time that each will be controlled by itself. " 

Is the Founding legitimate?  

• Federalist 39:  "derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people."
• Federalist 49: Madison quotes Jefferson: "As the people are the only legitimate fountain of power.."

Federalist 49  

• "Veneration"
• James Ceaser: "The idea of reverence for the Constitution was a creation of The Federalist. But why did The Federalist create this doctrine of constitutional reverence?"

Veneration: 

• Norms
• The Constitution and oaths
• Citizenship
• Military oath
• Presidential oath

Constitutionalism I

No student hour today (medical appointment). Tomorrow, virtual student hours are from noon to 2. Email me and will be available within minutes.

For Wednesday:

• Wurman, ch. 4-5 
• Amar, "Founding Myths" -- in CANVAS
• Federalist  39, 49, 51.

What did you think of  model constitutional provisions?*

"Constitutionalism"

• Political constraints within the document (more on Thu.)
• Norms

The Constitution

Which of the following does the Constitution explicitly mention?

1. The Speaker of the House
2. The right to a jury of one's peers
3. Privilege from arrest for members of Congress
4. Presumption of innocence
5. Post offices
6. The right to travel
7. Capital punishment
8. Marriage
9. Bribery
10. Qualifications of federal judges

Properties

• Fed 1: "government from reflection and choice [not] accident and force."
• "Writtenness"(Wurman 26)
• Minimalism (compare with other countries)
• Rigidity
• Decision rules (process, not outcome):  contrast with California
• Institutional Competition
• Federalism
• Bicameralism 
• Separation of Powers

Ron Chernow's biography undercut the notion that Alexander Hamilton was a well-born defender of privilege. Here is the passage that inspired the musical:

Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, 16, and Alexander, 14, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being -- that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen -- seems little short of miraculous

Threat One: Federalist 1:

[A]dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

A more contemporary version of the idea.

Threats: Insurrection, Invasion, and Military Control

• Federalist 8
• Federalist 9

Threat Four: Faction

• Federalist 10

* The source of the model

American Political Culture

Questions on the assignment?

Hate speech  (and Kirk himself weighed in) and private-sector blacklisting.  First Amendment issues?

 For Monday read

• The Constitution
• Wurman, ch. 1-3
• Federalist 1,8,9,10.

Tocqueville

This week, Pew Research reported on religion in the states.  See, esp., the contrast of Texas and California.

Civil Religion, which Robert Bellah defined as "a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity."

"I have observed with profound sorrow the role that many religious leaders have played in urging passage of this bill, because I cannot make their activities jibe with my concept of the proper place of religious leaders in our national life … This is the second time in my lifetime an effort has been made by the clergy to make a moral question of a political issue. The other was prohibition.  We know something of the results of that." source

BHO on religion:

But what I am suggesting is this — secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history — were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

A famous prophecy: Tocqueville concludes volume I (p. 413) by comparing the United States and Russia: "Their point of departure is different and their paths diverse; nevertheless, each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world."

What Tocqueville did not foresee:  immigration from Asia, southern and central Europe, and the Americas.

From Tocqueville, pp 291-292:

In Europe almost all the disorders of society are born around the domestic hearth and not far from the nuptial bed. It is there that men come to feel scorn for natural ties and legitimate pleasures and develop a taste for disorder, restlessness of spirit, and instability of desires. Shaken by the tumultuous passions which have often troubled his own house, the European finds it hard to submit to the authority of the state's legislators. When the American returns from the turmoil of politics to the bosom of the family, he immediately finds a perfect picture of order and peace. There all his pleasures are simple and natural and his joys innocent and quiet, and as the regularity of life brings him happiness, he easily forms the habit of regulating his opinions as well as his tastes.

Whereas the European tries to escape his sorrows at home by troubling society, the American derives from his home that love of order which he carries over affairs of state.

In the United States it is not only mores that are controlled by religion, but its sway extends even over reason.

From page 603 (not on this week's list): "If anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women"

Individualism

• US v. Europe
• Seeing the government as a threat

Patriotism

• "Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the American" (p. 237).
• Comparative data
• Americans view their industriousness  -- an ad!

• Putin on American exceptionalism
• Trump on American exceptionalism

Service

• Tocqueville on American democracy: "Under its sway it is not especially the things accomplished by the public administration that are great, but rather those things done without its help and beyond its sphere" (p. 244)
• Where people give: 24% goes to religion

• Where people volunteer: 33% religious

Conformity:

The Majority: "I know no country, in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America (Tocqueville, 254-255).

In 1829, Madison elaborated on his earlier fears about the majority: " In Monarchies the interests and happiness of all may be sacrificed to the caprice and passion of a despot: In Aristocracies, the rights and welfare of the many may be sacrificed to the pride and cupidity of a few: In Republics, the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the Minority."

Recent survey on free speech

Tocqueville on how slavery degrades slave0wners (347):

The white man on the right bank, forced to live by his own endeavors, has made material well being the main object of his existence; as he lives in a country offering inexhaustible resources to his industry and continual inducements to activity, his eagerness to possess things goes beyond the ordinary limits of human cupidity; tormented by a longing for wealth, he boldly follows every path to fortune that is open to him; he is equally prepared to turn into a sailor, pioneer, artisan, or cultivator; there is something wonderful in his resourcefulness and a sort of heroism in his greed for gain.

The American on the left bank scorns not only work itself but also enterprises in which work is necessary to success; living in idle ease, he has the tastes of idle men; money has lost some of its value in his eyes; he is less interested in wealth than in excitement and pleasure and expends in that direction the energy which his neighbor puts to other use; he is passionately fond of hunting and war; he enjoys all the most strenuous forms of bodily exercise; he is accustomed to the use of weapons and from childhood has been ready to risk his life in single combat.

In 1829, slaveholder Madison on African Americans: "If they had the complexion of the Serfs in the North of Europe, or of the villeins formerly in England in other terms, if they were of our own complexion, much of the difficulty would be removed. But the mere circumstance of complexion can not deprive them of the character of men."  (See the remarkable story of Paul Jennings.)

Pages 364-407: "what causes might lead to the dismemberment of the present confederation."

Lincoln Second Inaugural

Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." 

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.