Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/89

Rh Chairman be authorised to sign it on behalf of this meeting.”

“,—It is not for us to invade the privacy of domestic sorrow, nor fitting that we should add to the sharpness of your grief by characterising as it deserves the deed which has deprived you of a husband and your country of its chief magistrate. We desire, however, to express our deep sympathy with you in this mournful affliction, and our earnest hope that you may be supported through the trial by the consciousness that your husband, though called to the helm in the midst of tempest and storm, never failed to respond to the call of duty, and that throughout a period of unparalleled difficulty he has guided the affairs of the nation in a manner which will ever connect his name with all that is noble, magnanimous, and great in your country’s history. His name will be associated with the cause of human freedom throughout all time; and generations yet unborn will learn to lisp his name as synonymous with Liberty itself, and to connect the atrocious deed by which his career was closed with the expiring throes of that foul system of Slavery against which his life was a standing protest, and the fate of which he had sealed.