Shady Hill, 3 September, 1863.
It is pleasant to think of you as so near us. It would be
much pleasanter to have you with us, — especially this morning, that we might
congratulate each other on the extraordinary excellence of the President's
letter.1 He rises with each new effort, and his letters are
successive victories. Indeed the series of his letters since and including the
one to the Albany Committee are, as he says to General Grant of Vicksburg, “of
almost inestimable value to the country,” — for they are of the rarest class of
political documents, arguments seriously addressed by one in power to the
conscience and reason of the citizens of the commonwealth. They are of the more
value to us as permanent precedents — examples of the possibility of the
coexistence of a strong government with entire and immediate dependence upon
and direct appeal to the people. There is in them the clearest tone of
uprightness of character, purity of intention, and goodness of heart. . . .
_______________
1 Presumably Lincoln's letter of August 26, 1863,
to J. C. Conkling, in
answer to an invitation to attend a mass-meeting of unconditional Union men at
Springfield, Illinois, on September 3.
SOURCE: Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters
of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 263
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