Saturday, June 27, 2015

Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, July 24, 1864

Ashfield, Mass., 24 July, 1864.

. . . This week, let us hope, we shall hear that Sherman is in Atlanta, and that he is breaking up the army opposed to him. His work is not better done than Grant will do his. But I do not want peace till there is certainty of our carrying the Amendment to the Constitution. We must have that to make peace sure.

The Rebel self-appointed peacemakers took nothing by their move, and Lincoln showed as usual his straightforward good sense. What a contrast between him and the politicians who fancy themselves his superiors in insight and shrewdness! What does Raymond1 mean by his Saturday's article on Lincoln's statement of terms? Is he hedging for a reconstruction with slavery? If so, he is more shortsighted and more unprincipled than I believed. I never fancied, indeed, that he had principles, and I thought he had learned enough not to confess such bad ones. . . .
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1 Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times.

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 274

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