Lincoln had one more paragraph, startlingly naïve, that he’d wanted Trumbull to include. Two sentences long, and reflecting his persistent belief that pro-Union sentiment would triumph in the South, it proposed that the many Southern militias forming in the slave states were a good thing because they could eventually be put to use in taming rebellion. “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South,” Lincoln wanted Trumbull to say. “It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which their misrepresentations of purposes may have encouraged.” Even the
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