Sunday, May 3, 2015

Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, September 3, 1863

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. . . .
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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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