This history is not to be written in our day. The
contemporaries of such events are not the hands to describe them.
Time must first do its office--must silence the passions, remove the
actors, develop consequences, and canonize all that is sacred to honor,
patriotism, and glory. In after ages the historic genius of our America
shall produce the writers which the subject demands--men far removed
from the contests of this day, who will know how to estimate this great
epoch, and how to acquire an immortality for their own names by
painting, with a master's hand, the immortal events of the patriot
President's life.
And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on
myself. Solitary and alone, and amid the jeers and taunts of my
opponents, I put this ball in motion. The people have taken it up, and
rolled it forward, and I am no longer anything but a unit in the vast
mass which now propels it. In the name of that mass I speak. I
demand the execution of the edict of the people; I demand the
expurgation of that sentence which the voice of a few Senators, and the
power of their confederate, the Bank of the United States, has caused
to be placed on the journal of the Senate; and which the voice of
millions of freemen has ordered to be expunged from it.
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