HER Official Organ Of The Slavonic Benevolent Order Of The State Of Texas. Founded 1897. BENEVOLENCE
VOLUME 54 — NO. 7
HUMANITY
BROTHERHOOD
POstmaster: Please Send Form 3579 with Undeliverable Copies to: SUPIU LODGE, SPJST, P. O. Box 100, TEMPLE, TEXAS
FEBRUARY 16, 1966
FROM THE ED I OR'S DESK (This week, we turn to the observance of the birthdays of two great Americans: George Washington, in the Czech section, and Abraham Lincoln, in the English section.) LINCOLN'S BIG DECISION On June 20, 1862, a delegation of six Quakers called on Abraham Lincoln in the White Howse. He greeted them with wry humor, remarking he was glad to see them first of all because they were not politicians looking for j obs. Lincoln shrewdly anticipated the Quaker request — which he knew would be identical with demands voiced by a hundred other delegations he had seen over the last year -- that he issue a proclamation freeing the slaves. He discussed slavery with these ernest Quakers for almost an hour — and left no doubt in their minds that he personally detested it. But they departed without getting a glimmer of a promise from him about the proclamation that they sought. Yet within two weeks, Lincoln was writing the Emancipation Proclamation. In his own quiet, solitary way, he made his hardest, and greatest, Presidential decision. Why should Lincoln have hesitated and agonized over proclaiming liberation? Distance has simplified what was for Lincoln and his times a diffiCult and complex question.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 12 February 1809 15 April 1865 The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
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Let us have faith that right makes right, and in that 1 faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it. The right to own slaves had been written into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers. Legally Lincoln's only purpose in fighting the Civil War was to preserve the Union. Legality
aside, the political problems were excruciating. Politicians of the border states, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, where many owned slaves but remained loyal to the Union, warned Lincoln that any attack on slavery might carry them into the Southern camp. This was serious. "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game," Lincoln wrote to Illinois Senator Orville H. Browning. Finally, there was the problem of foreign opinion. In England the working classes favored the North but the upper classes preferred the South, and would look with horror upon any tampering with slavery as a Lincoln attempt to begin a "servile insurrection" — which no great colonial power could approve. Small wonder that Lincoln's policies toward slavery often seemed one step forward and two back. When Northern general John Fremont freed the slaves of Missouri rebels by military proclamation, Lincoln slapped him down, hard. On the other hand, he persuaded Congress to give him $900,000 to launch a vast campaign to suppress the slave trade, under a law on the books since 1808, but never enforced. The Gordon Case When a U. S. warship captured a ship commanded by Nathaniel P. Gordon of Portland, Maine, with 893 slaves aboard, the court sentenced Gordon