When the news of a second battle of Bull Run reached England it seemed at first to Lord John Russell that the failure of the North was certain, and he asked Palmerston and his colleagues to consider whether they must not soon recognise the Confederacy, and whether mediation in the interest of peace and humanity might not perhaps follow. But within two months all thoughts of recognising the Confederacy had been so completely put aside that even Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville caused no renewal of the suggestion, and an invitation from Louis Napoleon to joint action of this kind between England and France had once for all been rejected. The battle of Antietam had been fought in the meantime. This made men think that the South could no more win a speedy and decisive success than the North, and that victory must rest in the end with the side that could last. But that was not all; the battle of Antietam was followed within five days by an event which made it impossible for any Government of this country to take action unfriendly to the North.

On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln set his hand to a Proclamation of which the principal words were these: "That, on the first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward and forever free."

The policy and the true effect of this act cannot be understood without some examination. Still less so can the course of the man who will always be remembered as its author. First, in regard to the legal effect of the Proclamation; in normal times the President would of course not have had the power, which even the Legislature did not possess, to set free a single slave; the Proclamation was an act of war on his part, as Commander-in-Chief of the forces, by which slaves were to be taken from people at war with the United States, just as horses or carts might be taken, to subtract from their resources and add to those of the United States. In a curiously prophetic manner, ex-President John Quincy Adams had argued in Congress many years before that, if rebellion ever arose, this very thing might be done. Adams would probably have claimed that the command of the President became law in the States which took part in the rebellion. Lincoln only claimed legal force for his Proclamation in so far as it was an act of war based on sufficient necessity and plainly tending to help the Northern arms. If the legal question had ever been tried out, the Courts would no doubt have had to hold that at least those slaves who obtained actual freedom under the Proclamation became free in law; for it was certainly in good faith an act of war, and the military result justified it. A large amount of labour was withdrawn from the industry necessary to the South, and by the end of the war 180,000 coloured troops were in arms for the North, rendering services, especially in occupying conquered territory that was unhealthy for white troops, without which, in Lincoln's opinion, the war could never have been finished. The Proclamation had indeed an indirect effect more far-reaching than this; it committed the North to a course from which there could be no turning back, except by surrender; it made it a political certainty that by one means or another slavery would be ended if the North won. But in Lincoln's view of his duty as President, this ulterior consequence was not to determine his action. The fateful step by which the end of slavery was precipitated would not have taken the form it did take if it had not come to commend itself to him as a military measure conducing to the suppression of rebellion.

On the broader grounds on which we naturally look at this measure, many people in the North had, as we have seen, been anxious from the beginning that he should adopt an active policy of freeing Southern slaves. It was intolerable to think that the war might end and leave slavery where it was. To convert the war into a crusade against slavery seemed to many the best way of arousing and uniting the North. This argument was reinforced by some of the American Ministers abroad. They were aware that people in Europe misunderstood and disliked the Constitutional propriety with which the Union government insisted that it was not attacking the domestic institutions of Southern States. English people did not know the American Constitution, and when told that the North did not threaten to abolish slavery would answer "Why not?" Many Englishmen, who might dislike the North and might have their doubts as to whether slavery was as bad as it was said to be, would none the less have respected men who would fight against it. They had no interest in the attempt of some of their own seceded Colonists to coerce, upon some metaphysical ground of law, others who in their turn wished to secede from them. Seward, with wonderful misjudgment, had instructed Ministers abroad to explain that no attack was threatened on slavery, for he was afraid that the purchasers of cotton in Europe would feel threatened in their selfish interests; the agents of the South were astute enough to take the same line and insist like him that the North was no more hostile to slavery than the South. If this misunderstanding were removed English hostility to the North would never again take a dangerous form. Lincoln, who knew less of affairs but more of men than Seward, was easily made to see this. Yet, with full knowledge of the reasons for adopting a decided policy against slavery, Lincoln waited through seventeen months of the war till the moment had come for him to strike his blow.

Some of his reasons for waiting were very plain. He was not going to take action on the alleged ground of military necessity till he was sure that the necessity existed. Nor was he going to take it till it would actually lead to the emancipation of a great number of slaves. Above all, he would not act till he felt that the North generally would sustain his action, for he knew, better than Congressmen who judged from their own friends in their own constituencies, how doubtful a large part of Northern opinion really was. We have seen how in the summer of 1861 he felt bound to disappoint the advanced opinion which supported FrÉmont. He continued for more than a year after in a course which alienated from himself the confidence of the men with whom he had most sympathy. He did this deliberately rather than imperil the unanimity with which the North supported the war. There was indeed grave danger of splitting the North in two if he appeared unnecessarily to change the issue from Union to Liberation. We have to remember that in all the Northern States the right of the Southern States to choose for themselves about slavery had been fully admitted, and that four of the Northern States were themselves slave States all this while.

But this is not the whole explanation of his delay. It is certain that apart from this danger he would at first rather not have played the historic part which he did play as the liberator of the slaves, if he could have succeeded in the more modest part of encouraging a process of gradual emancipation. In his Annual Message to Congress in December, 1861, he laid down the general principles of his policy in this matter. He gave warning in advance to the Democrats of the North, who were against all interference with Southern institutions, that "radical and extreme measures" might become indispensable to military success, and if indispensable would be taken; but he declared his anxiety that if possible the conflict with the South should not "degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle," for he looked forward with fear to a complete overturning of the social system of the South. He feared it not only for the white people but also for the black. "Gradual and not sudden emancipation," he said, in a later Message, "is better for all." It is now probable that he was right, and yet it is difficult not to sympathise with the earnest Republicans who were impatient at his delay, who were puzzled and pained by the free and easy way in which in grave conversation he would allude to "the nigger question," and who concluded that "the President is not with us; has no sound Anti-slavery sentiment." Indeed, his sentiment did differ from theirs. Certainly, he hated slavery, for he had contended more stubbornly than any other man against any concession which seemed to him to perpetuate slavery by stamping it with approval; but his hatred of it left him quite without the passion of moral indignation against the slave owners, in whose guilt the whole country, North and South, seemed to him an accomplice. He would have classed that very natural indignation under the head of "malice"—"I shall do nothing in malice," he wrote to a citizen of Louisiana; "what I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing." But it was not, as we shall see before long, too vast for an interest, as sympathetic as it was matter of fact, in the welfare of the negroes. They were actual human beings to him, and he knew that the mere abrogation of the law of slavery was not the only thing necessary to their advancement. Looking back, with knowledge of what happened later, we cannot fail to be glad that they were emancipated somehow, but we are forced to regret that they could not have been emancipated by some more considerate process. Lincoln, perhaps alone among the Americans who were in earnest in this matter, looked at it very much in the light in which all men look at it to-day.

In the early part of 1862 the United States Government concluded a treaty with Great Britain for the more effectual suppression of the African slave trade, and it happened about the same time that the first white man ever executed as a pirate under the American law against the slave trade was hanged in New York. In those months Lincoln was privately trying to bring about the passing by the Legislature of Delaware of an Act for emancipating, with fit provisions for their welfare, the few slaves in that State, conditionally upon compensation to be paid to the owners by the United States. He hoped that if this example were set by Delaware, it would be followed in Maryland, and would spread later. The Delaware House were favourable to the scheme, but the Senate of the State rejected it. Lincoln now made a more public appeal in favour of his policy. In March, 1862, he sent a Message to Congress, which has already been quoted, and in which he urged the two Houses to pass Resolutions pledging the United States to give pecuniary help to any State which adopted gradual emancipation. It must be obvious that if the slave States of the North could have been led to adopt this policy it would have been a fitting preliminary to any action which might be taken against slavery in the South; and the policy might have been extended to those Southern States which were first recovered for the Union. The point, however, upon which Lincoln dwelt in his Message was that, if slavery were once given up by the border States, the South would abandon all hope that they would ever join the Confederacy. In private letters to an editor of a newspaper and others he pressed the consideration that the cost of compensated abolition was small in proportion to what might be gained by a quicker ending of the war. During the discussion of his proposal in Congress and again after the end of the Session he invited the Senators and Representatives of the border States to private conference with him in which he besought of them "a calm and enlarged consideration, ranging, if it may be, far above, personal and partisan politics," of the opportunity of good now open to them. The hope of the Confederacy was, as he then conceived, fixed upon the sympathy which it might arouse in the border States, two of which, Kentucky and Maryland, were in fact invaded that year with some hope of a rising among the inhabitants. The "lever" which the Confederates hoped to use in these States was the interest of the slave owners there; "Break that lever before their eyes," he urged. But the hundred and one reasons which can always be found against action presented themselves at once to the Representatives of the border States. Congress itself so far accepted the President's view that both Houses passed the Resolution which he had suggested. Indeed it gladly did something more; a Bill, such as Lincoln himself had prepared as a Congressman fourteen years before, was passed for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia; compensation was paid to the owners; a sum was set apart to help the settlement in Liberia of any of the slaves who were willing to go; and at Lincoln's suggestion provision was added for the education of the negro children. Nothing more was done at this time.

Throughout this matter Lincoln took counsel chiefly with himself. He could not speak his full thought to the public, and apparently he did not do so to any of his Cabinet. Supposing that the border States had yielded to his persuasion, it may still strike us as a very sanguine calculation that their action would have had much effect upon the resolution of the Confederates. But it must be noted that when Lincoln first approached the Representatives of the border States, the highest expectations were entertained of the victory that McClellan would win in Virginia, and when he made his last, rather despairing, appeal to them, the decision to withdraw the army from the Peninsula had not yet been taken. If a really heavy blow had been struck at the Confederates in Virginia, their chief hope of retrieving their military fortunes would certainly have lain in that invasion of Kentucky, which did shortly afterwards occur and which was greatly encouraged by the hope of a rising of Kentucky men who wished to join the Confederacy. This part of Lincoln's calculations was therefore quite reasonable. And it was further reasonable to suppose that, if the South had then given in and Congress had acted in the spirit of the Resolution which it had passed, the policy, of gradual emancipation, starting in the border States, would have spread steadily. The States which were disposed to hold out against the inducement that the cost of compensated emancipation, if they adopted it, would be borne by the whole Union, would have done so at a great risk; for each new free State would have been disposed before long to support a Constitutional Amendment to impose enfranchisement, possibly with no compensation, upon the States that still delayed. The force of example and the presence of this fear could not have been resisted long. Lincoln was not a man who could be accused of taking any course without a reason well thought out; we can safely conclude that in the summer of 1862 he nursed a hope, by no means visionary, of initiating a process of liberation free from certain evils in that upon which he was driven back.

Before, however, he had quite abandoned this hope he had already begun to see his way in case it failed. His last appeal to the border States was made on July 12, 1862, while McClellan's army still lay at Harrison's Landing. On the following day he privately told Seward and Bates that he had "about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity, absolutely essential to the salvation of the nation, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued." On July 22 he read to his Cabinet the first draft of his Proclamation of Emancipation; telling them before he consulted them that substantially his mind was made up. Various members of the Cabinet raised points on which he had already thought and had come to a conclusion, but, as he afterwards told a friend, Seward raised a point which had never struck him before. He said that, if issued at that time of depression, just after the failure in the Peninsula, the Proclamation would seem like "a cry of distress"; and that it would have a much better effect if it were issued after some military success.

Seward was certainly right. The danger of division in the North would have been increased and the prospect of a good effect abroad would have been diminished if the Proclamation had been issued at a time of depression and manifest failure. Lincoln, who had been set on issuing it, instantly felt the force of this objection. He put aside his draft, and resolved not to issue the Proclamation till the right moment, and apparently resolved to keep the whole question open in his own mind till the time for action came.

Accordingly the two months which followed were not only full of anxiety about the war; they were full for him of a suspense painfully maintained. It troubled him perhaps comparatively little that he was driven into a position of greater aloofness from the support and sympathy of any party or school. He must now expect an opposition from the Democrats of the North, for they had declared themselves strongly against the Resolution which he had induced Congress to pass. And the strong Republicans for their part had acquiesced in it coldly, some of them contemptuously. In May of this year he had been forced for a second time publicly to repress a keen Republican general who tried to take this question of great policy into his own hands. General Hunter, commanding a small expedition which had seized Port Royal in South Carolina and some adjacent islands rich in cotton, had in a grand manner assumed to declare free all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. This, of course, could not be let pass. Congress, too, had been occupied in the summer with a new measure for confiscating rebel property; some Republicans in the West set great store on such confiscation; other Republicans saw in it the incidental advantage that more slaves might be liberated under it. It was learnt that the President might put his veto upon it. It seemed to purport, contrary to the Constitution, to attaint the property of rebels after their death, and Lincoln was unwilling that the Constitution should be stretched in the direction of revengeful harshness. The objectionable feature in the Bill was removed, and Lincoln accepted it. But the suspicion with which many Republicans were beginning to regard him was now reinforced by a certain jealousy of Congressmen against the Executive power; they grumbled and sneered about having to "ascertain the Royal pleasure" before they could legislate. This was an able, energetic, and truly patriotic Congress, and must not be despised for its reluctance to be guided by Lincoln. But it was reluctant.

Throughout August and September he had to deal in the country with dread on the one side of any revolutionary action, and belief on the other side that he was timid and half-hearted. The precise state of his intentions could not with advantage be made public. To up-holders of slavery he wrote plainly, "It may as well be understood once for all that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed"; to its most zealous opponents he had to speak in an entirely different strain. While the second battle of Bull Run was impending, Horace Greeley published in the New York Tribune an "open letter" of angry complaint about Lincoln's supposed bias for slavery. Lincoln at once published a reply to his letter. "If there be in it," he said, "any statements or assumptions of fact which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views."

It was probably easy to him now to write these masterful generalities, but a week or two later, after Pope's defeat, he had to engage in a controversy which tried his feelings much more sorely. It had really grieved him that clergymen in Illinois had opposed him as unorthodox, when he was fighting against the extension of slavery. Now, a week or two after his correspondence with Greeley, a deputation from a number of Churches in Chicago waited upon him, and some of their members spoke to him with assumed authority from on high, commanding him in God's name to emancipate the slaves. He said, "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that, if it is probable that God would reveal His will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to me. What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative like the Pope's Bull against the comet. Do not misunderstand me, because I have mentioned these objections. They indicate the difficulties that have thus far prevented my acting in some such way as you desire. I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement. And I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God's will, I will do." The language of this speech, especially when the touch is humorous, seems that of a strained and slightly irritated man, but the solemnity blended in it showed Lincoln's true mind.

In this month, September, 1862, he composed for his own reading alone a sad and inconclusive fragment of meditation which was found after his death. "The will of God prevails," he wrote. "In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party, and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true, that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the minds of the contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began, and, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds." For Lincoln's own part it seemed his plain duty to do what in the circumstances he thought safest for the Union, and yet he was almost of a mind with the deputation which had preached to him, that he must be doing God's will in taking a great step towards emancipation. The solution, that the great step must be taken at the first opportune moment, was doubtless clear enough in principle, but it must always remain arguable whether any particular moment was opportune. He told soon afterwards how his mind was finally made up.

On the day that he received the news of the battle of Antietam, the draft Proclamation was taken from its drawer and studied afresh; his visit to McClellan on the battlefield intervened; but on the fifth day after the battle the Cabinet was suddenly called together. When the Ministers had assembled Lincoln first entertained them by reading the short chapter of Artemus Ward entitled "High-handed Outrage at Utica." It is less amusing than most of Artemus Ward; but it had just appeared; it pleased all the Ministers except Stanton, to whom the frivolous reading he sometimes had to hear from Lincoln was a standing vexation; and it was precisely that sort of relief to which Lincoln's mind when overwrought could always turn. Having thus composed himself for business, he reminded his Cabinet that he had, as they were aware, thought a great deal about the relation of the war to slavery, and had a few weeks before read them a draft Proclamation on this subject. Ever since then, he said, his mind had been occupied on the matter, and, though he wished it were a better time, he thought the time had come now. "When the rebel army was at Frederick," he is related to have continued, "I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation such as I thought likely to be most useful. I said nothing to any one, but I made the promise to myself and"—here he hesitated a little—"to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfil that promise. I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter, for that I have determined for myself. This I say without intending anything but respect for any one of you." He then invited their suggestions upon the expressions used in his draft and other minor matters, and concluded: "One other observation I will make. I know very well that many others might in this matter, as in others, do better than I can; and if I was satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But though I believe I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take." Then he read his draft, and in the long discussion which followed, and owing to which a few slight changes were made in it, he told them further, without any false reserve, just how he came to his decision. In his great perplexity he had gone on his knees, before the battle of Antietam, and, like a child, he had promised that if a victory was given which drove the enemy out of Maryland he would consider it as an indication that it was his duty to move forward. "It might be thought strange," he said, "that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters, when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do. God had decided this question in favour of the slaves."

Such is the story of what we may now remember as one of the signal events in the chequered progress of Christianity. We have to follow its consequences a little further. These were not at first all that its author would have hoped. "Commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is," he said in a private letter, "all that a vain man could wish," but recruits for the Army did not seem to come in faster. In October and November there were elections for Congress, and in a number of States the Democrats gained considerably, though it was noteworthy that the Republicans held their ground not only in New England and in the furthest Western States, but also in the border slave States. The Democrats, who from this time on became very formidable to Lincoln, had other matters of complaint, as will be seen later, but they chiefly denounced the President for trying to turn the war into one against slavery. "The Constitution as it is and the Union as it was" had been their election cry. The good hearing that they got, now as at a later time, was due to the fact that people were depressed about the war; and it is plain enough that Lincoln had been well advised in delaying his action till after a military success. As it was, there was much that seemed to show that public confidence in him was not strong, but public confidence in any man is hard to estimate, and the forces that in the end move opinion most are not quickly apparent. There are little indications that his power and character were slowly establishing their hold; it seems, for instance, to have been about this time that "old Abe" or "Uncle Abe" began to be widely known among common people by the significant name of "Father Abraham," and his secretaries say that he was becoming conscious that his official utterances had a deeper effect on public opinion than any immediate response to them in Congress showed.

In his Annual Message of December, 1862, Lincoln put before Congress, probably with little hope of result, a comprehensive policy for dealing with slavery justly and finally. He proposed that a Constitutional Amendment should be submitted to the people providing: first, that compensation should be given in United States bonds to any State, whether now in rebellion or not, which should abolish slavery before the year 1900; secondly, that the slaves who had once enjoyed actual freedom through the chances of the war should be permanently free and that their owners should be compensated; thirdly, that Congress should have authority to spend money on colonisation for negroes. Even if the greater part of these objects could have been accomplished without a Constitutional Amendment, it is evident that such a procedure would have been more satisfactory in the eventual resettlement of the Union. He urged in his Message how desirable it was, as a part of the effort to restore the Union, that the whole North should be agreed in a concerted policy as to slavery, and that parties should for this purpose reconsider their positions. "The dogmas of the quiet past," he said, "are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed, this could not fail." The last four words expressed too confident a hope as to what Northern policy apart from Northern arms could do towards ending the war, but it was impossible to exaggerate the value which a policy, concerted between parties in a spirit of moderation, would have had in the settlement after victory. Every honest Democrat who then refused any action against slavery must have regretted it before three years were out, and many sensible Republicans who saw no use in such moderation may have lived to regret their part too. Nothing was done. It is thought that Lincoln expected this; but the Proclamation of Emancipation would begin to operate within a month; it would produce by the end of the war a situation in which the country would be compelled to decide on the principle of slavery, and Lincoln had at least done his part in preparing men to face the issue.

Before this, the nervous and irritable feeling of many Northern politicians, who found in emancipation a good subject for quarrel among themselves and in the slow progress of the war a good subject of quarrel with the Administration, led to a crisis in Lincoln's Cabinet. Radicals were inclined to think Seward's influence in the Administration the cause of all public evils; some of them had now got hold of a foolish private letter, which he had written to Adams in England a few months before, denouncing the advocates of emancipation. Desiring his downfall, they induced a small "caucus" of Republican Senators to speak in the name of the party and the nation and send the President a resolution demanding such changes in his Cabinet as would produce better results in the war. Discontented men of opposite opinions could unite in demanding success in the war; and Conservative Senators joined in this resolution hoping that it would get rid not only of Seward, but also of Chase and Stanton, the objects of their particular antipathy. Seward, on hearing of this, gave Lincoln his resignation, which was kept private. Though egotistic, he was a clever man, and evidently a pleasant man to work with; he was a useful Minister under a wise chief, though he later proved a harmful one under a foolish chief. Stanton was most loyal, and invaluable as head of the War Department. Chase, as Lincoln said in private afterwards, was "a pretty good fellow and a very able man"; Lincoln had complete confidence in him as a Finance Minister, and could not easily have replaced him. But this handsome, dignified, and righteous person was unhappily a sneak. Lincoln found as time went on that, if he ever had to do what was disagreeable to some important man, Chase would pay court to that important man and hint how differently he himself would have done as President. On this occasion he was evidently aware that Chase had encouraged the Senators who attacked Seward. Much as he wished to retain each of the two for his own worth, he was above all determined that one should not gain a victory over the other. Accordingly, when a deputation of nine important Senators came to Lincoln to present their grievances against Seward, they found themselves, to their great annoyance, confronted with all the Cabinet except Seward, who had resigned, and they were invited by Lincoln to discuss the matter in his presence with these Ministers. Chase, to his still greater annoyance, found himself, as the principal Minister there, compelled for decency's sake to defend Seward from the very attack which he had helped to instigate. The deputation withdrew, not sure that, after all, it wanted Seward removed. Chase next day tendered, as was natural, his resignation. Lincoln was able, now that he had the resignations of both men, to persuade both of their joint duty to continue in the public service. By this remarkable piece of riding he saved the Union from a great danger. The Democratic opposition, not actually to the prosecution of the war, but to any and every measure essential for it, was now developing, and a serious division, such as at this stage any important resignation would have produced in the ranks of the Republicans, or, as they now called themselves, the "Union men," would have been perilous.

On the first day of January, 1863, the President signed the further Proclamation needed to give effect to emancipation. The small portions of the South which were not in rebellion were duly excepted; the naval and military authorities were ordered to maintain the freedom of the slaves seeking their protection; the slaves were enjoined to abstain from violence and to "labour faithfully for reasonable wages" if opportunity were given them; all suitable slaves were to be taken into armed service, especially for garrison duties. Before the end of 1863, a hundred thousand coloured men were already serving, as combatants or as labourers, on military work in about equal number. They were needed, for volunteering was getting slack, and the work of guarding and repairing railway lines was specially repellent to Northern volunteers. The coloured regiments fought well; they behaved well in every way. Atrocious threats of vengeance on them and their white officers were officially uttered by Jefferson Davis, but, except for one hideous massacre wrought in the hottest of hot blood, only a few crimes by individuals were committed in execution of these threats. To Lincoln himself it was a stirring thought that when democratic government was finally vindicated and restored by the victory of the Union, "then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue and clenched teeth and steady eye and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consummation." There was, however, prejudice at first among many Northern officers against negro enlistment. The greatest of the few great American artists, St. Gaudens, commemorated in sculpture (as the donor of the new playing fields at Harvard commemorated by his gift) the action of a brilliant and popular Massachusetts officer, Robert Gould Shaw, who set the example of leaving his own beloved regiment to take command of a coloured regiment, at the head of which he died, gallantly leading them and gallantly followed by them in a desperate fight.

It was easier to raise and train these negro soldiers than to arrange for the control, shelter, and employment of the other refugees who crowded especially to the protection of Grant's army in the West. The efforts made for their benefit cannot be related here, but the recollections of Army Chaplain John Eaton, whom Grant selected to take charge of them in the West, throw a little more light on Lincoln and on the spirit of his dealing with "the nigger question." When Eaton after some time had to come to Washington, upon the business of his charge and to visit the President, he received that impression, of versatile power and of easy mastery over many details as well as over broad issues, which many who worked under Lincoln have described, but he was above all struck with the fact that from a very slight experience in early life Lincoln had gained a knowledge of negro character such as very few indeed in the North possessed. He was subjected to many seemingly trivial questions, of which he was quick enough to see the grave purpose, about all sorts of persons and things in the West, but he was also examined closely, in a way which commanded his fullest respect as an expert, about the ideas, understanding, and expectations of the ordinary negroes under his care, and more particularly as to the past history and the attainments of the few negroes who had become prominent men, and who therefore best illustrated the real capacities of their race. Later visits to the capital and to Lincoln deepened this impression, and convinced Eaton, though by trifling signs, of the rare quality of Lincoln's sympathy. Once, after Eaton's difficult business had been disposed of, the President turned to relating his own recent worries about a colony of negroes which he was trying to establish on a small island off Hayti. There flourishes in Southern latitudes a minute creature called Dermatophilus penetrans, or the jigger, which can inflict great pain on barefooted people by housing itself under their toe-nails. This Colony had a plague of jiggers, and every expedient for defeating them had failed. Lincoln was not merely giving the practical attention to this difficulty that might perhaps be expected; the Chaplain was amazed to find that at that moment, at the turning point of the war, a few days only after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, with his enormous pre-occupations, the President's mind had room for real and keen distress about the toes of the blacks in the Cow Island. At the end of yet another interview Eaton was startled by the question, put by the President with an air of shyness, whether Frederick Douglass, a well-known negro preacher, could be induced to visit him. Of course he could. Frederick Douglass was then reputed to be the ablest man ever born as a negro slave; he must have met many of the best and kindest Northern friends of the negro; and he went to Lincoln distressed at some points in his policy, particularly at his failure to make reprisals for murders of negro prisoners by Southern troops. When he came away he was in a state little short of ecstasy. It was not because he now understood, as he did, Lincoln's policy. Lincoln had indeed won his warm approval when he told him "with a quiver in his voice" of his horror of killing men in cold blood for what had been done by others, and his dread of what might follow such a policy; but he had a deeper gratification, the strangeness of which it is sad to realise. "He treated me as a man," exclaimed Douglass. "He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our skins."

Perhaps the hardest effort of speech that Lincoln ever essayed was an address to negroes which had to do with this very subject of colour. His audience were men who had been free from birth or for some time and were believed to be leaders among their community. It was Lincoln's object to induce some of them to be pioneers in an attempt at colonisation in some suitable climate, an attempt which he felt must fail if it started with negroes whose "intellects were clouded by slavery." He clung to these projects of colonisation, as probably the best among the various means by which the improvement of the negro must be attempted, because their race, "suffering the greatest wrong ever inflicted on any people," would "yet be far removed from being on an equality with the white race" when they ceased to be slaves; a "physical difference broader than exists between almost any other two races" and constituting "a greater disadvantage to us both," would always set a "ban" upon the negroes even where they were best treated in America. This unpalatable fact he put before them with that total absence of pretence which was probably the only possible form of tact in such a discussion, with no affectation of a hope that progress would remove it or of a desire that the ordinary white man should lose the instinct that kept him apart from the black. But this only makes more apparent his simple recognition of an equality and fellowship which did exist between him and his hearers in a larger matter than that of social intercourse or political combination. His appeal to their capacity for taking large and unselfish views was as direct and as confident as in his addresses to his own people; it was made in the language of a man to whom the public spirit which might exist among black people was of the same quality as that which existed among white, in whose belief he and his hearers could equally find happiness in "being worthy of themselves" and in realising the "claim of kindred to the great God who made them."

It may be well here, without waiting to trace further the course of the war, in which at the point where we left it the slow but irresistible progress of conquest was about to set in, to recount briefly the later stages of the abolition of slavery in America. In 1863 it became apparent that popular feeling in Missouri and in Maryland was getting ripe for abolition. Bills were introduced into Congress to compensate their States if they did away with slavery; the compensation was to be larger if the abolition was immediate and not gradual. There was a majority in each House for these Bills, but the Democratic minority was able to kill them in the House of Representatives by the methods of "filibustering," or, as we call it, obstruction, to which the procedure of that body seems well adapted. The Republican majority had not been very zealous for the Bills; its members asked "why compensate for a wrong" which they had begun to feel would soon be abolished without compensation; but their leaders at least did their best for the Bills. It would have been idle after the failure of these proposals to introduce the Bills that had been contemplated for buying out the loyal slave owners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which was now fast being regained for the Union. Lincoln after his Message of December, 1862, recognised it as useless for him to press again the principles of gradual emancipation or of compensation, as to which it is worth remembrance that the compensation which he proposed was for loyal and disloyal owners alike. His Administration, however, bought every suitable slave in Delaware for service (service as a free man) in the Army. In the course of 1864 a remarkable development of public opinion began to be manifest in the States chiefly concerned. In the autumn of that year Maryland, whose representatives had paid so little attention to Lincoln two years before, passed an Amendment to the State Constitution abolishing slavery without compensation. A movement in the same direction was felt to be making progress in Kentucky and Tennessee; and Missouri followed Maryland's example in January, 1865. Meanwhile, Louisiana had been reconquered, and the Unionists in these States, constantly encouraged and protected by Lincoln when Congress looked upon them somewhat coldly or his generals showed jealousy of their action, had banded themselves together to form State Governments with Constitutions that forbade slavery. Lincoln, it may be noted, had suggested to Louisiana that it would be well to frame some plan by which the best educated of the negroes should be admitted to the franchise. Four years after his death a Constitutional Amendment was passed by which any distinction as to franchise on the ground of race or colour is forbidden in America. The policy of giving the vote to negroes indiscriminately had commended itself to the cold pedantry of some persons, including Chase, on the ground of some natural right of all men to the suffrage; but it was adopted as the most effective protection for the negroes against laws, as to vagrancy and the like, by which it was feared they might practically be enslaved again. Whatever the excuse for it, it would seem to have proved in fact a great obstacle to healthy relations between the two races. The true policy in such a matter is doubtless that which Rhodes and other statesmen adopted in the Cape Colony and which Lincoln had advocated in the case of Louisiana. It would be absurd to imagine that the spirit which could champion the rights of the negro and yet face fairly the abiding difficulty of his case died in America with Lincoln, but it lost for many a year to come its only great exponent.

But the question of overwhelming importance, between the principles of slavery and of freedom, was ready for final decision when local opinion in six slave States was already moving as we have seen. The Republican Convention of 1864, which again chose Lincoln as its candidate for the Presidency, declared itself in favour of a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery once for all throughout America. Whether the first suggestion came from him or not, it is known that Lincoln's private influence was energetically used to procure this resolution of the Convention. In his Message to Congress in 1864 he urged the initiation of this Amendment. Observation of elections made it all but certain that the next Congress would be ready to take this action, but Lincoln pleaded with the present doubtful Congress for the advantage which would be gained by ready, and if possible, unanimous concurrence in the North in the course which would soon prevail. The necessary Resolution was passed in the Senate, but in the House of Representatives till within a few hours of the vote it was said to be "the toss of a copper" whether the majority of two-thirds, required for such a purpose, would be obtained. In the efforts made on either side to win over the few doubtful voters Lincoln had taken his part. Right or wrong, he was not the man to see a great and beneficent Act in danger of postponement without being tempted to secure it if he could do so by terrifying some unprincipled and white-livered opponents. With the knowledge that he was always acquiring of the persons in politics, he had been able to pick out two Democratic Congressmen who were fit for his purpose—presumably they lay under suspicion of one of those treasonable practices which martial law under Lincoln treated very unceremoniously. He sent for them. He told them that the gaining of a certain number of doubtful votes would secure the Resolution. He told them that he was President of the United States. He told them that the President of the United States in war time exercised great and dreadful powers. And he told them that he looked to them personally to get him those votes. Whether this wrong manoeuvre affected the result or not, on January 31, 1865, the Resolution was passed in the House by a two-thirds majority with a few votes to spare, and the great crowd in the galleries, defying all precedent, broke out in a demonstration of enthusiasm which some still recall as the most memorable scene in their lives. On December 18 of that year, when Lincoln had been eight months dead, William Seward, as Secretary of State, was able to certify that the requisite majority of States had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the cause of that "irrepressible conflict" which he had foretold, and in which he had played a weak but valuable part, was for ever extinguished.

At the present day, alike in the British Empire and in America, the unending difficulty of wholesome human relations between races of different and unequal development exercises many minds; but this difficulty cannot obscure the great service done by those who, first in England and later and more hardly in America, stamped out that cardinal principle of error that any race is without its human claim. Among these men William Lloyd Garrison lived to see the fruit of his labours, and to know and have friendly intercourse with Lincoln. There have been some comparable instances in which men with such different characters and methods have unconsciously conspired for a common end, as these two did when Garrison was projecting the "Liberator" and Lincoln began shaping himself for honourable public work in the vague. The part that Lincoln played in these events did not seem to him a personal achievement of his own. He appeared to himself rather as an instrument. "I claim not," he once said in this connection, "to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." In 1864, when a petition was sent to him from some children that there should be no more child slaves, he wrote, "Please tell these little people that I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that, while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it." Yet, at least, he redeemed the boyish pledge that has been, fancifully perhaps, ascribed to him; each opportunity that to his judgment ever presented itself of striking some blow for human freedom was taken; the blows were timed and directed by the full force of his sagacity, and they were never restrained by private ambition or fear. It is probable that upon that cool review, which in the case of this singular figure is difficult, the sense of his potent accomplishment would not diminish, but increase.

had now received the coveted rank of Major-General, which McClellan had resigned on the day on which he was defeated for the Presidency. The North delighted to find in his achievements the dashing quality which appeals to civilian imagination, and Grant now had in him, as well as in Sherman, a lieutenant who would faithfully make his chief's purposes his own, and who would execute them with independent decision. The cold, in which his horses suffered, had driven Sheridan into winter quarters, but on February 27 he was able to start up the Shenandoah Valley again with 10,000 cavalry. Most of the Confederate cavalry under Early had now been dispersed, mainly for want of forage in the desolated valley; the rest were now dispersed by Sheridan, and the greater part of Early's small force of infantry with all his artillery were captured. There was a garrison in Lynchburg, 80 or 90 miles west of Richmond, which though strong enough to prevent Sheridan's cavalry from capturing that place was not otherwise of account; but there was no Confederate force in the field except Johnston's men near enough to co-operate with Lee; only some small and distant armies, hundreds of miles away with the railway communication between them and the East destroyed. Sheridan now broke up the railway and canal communication on the north-west side of Richmond. He was to have gone on south and eventually joined Sherman if he could; but, finding himself stopped for the time by floods in the upper valley of the James, he rode past the north of Richmond, and on March 19 joined Grant, to put his cavalry and brains at his service when Grant judged that the moment for his final effort had come.

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took office for the second time as President of the United. States. There was one new and striking feature in the simple ceremonial, the presence of a battalion of negro troops in his escort. This time, though he would say no sanguine word, it cannot have been a long continuance of war that filled his thoughts, but the scarcely less difficult though far happier task of restoring the fabric of peaceful society in the conquered South. His difficulties were now likely to come from the North no less than the South. Tentative proposals which he had once or twice made suggest the spirit in which he would have felt his way along this new path. In the Inaugural address which he now delivered that spirit is none the less perceptible because he spoke of the past. The little speech at Gettysburg, with its singular perfection of form, and the "Second Inaugural" are the chief outstanding examples of his peculiar oratorical power. The comparative rank of his oratory need not be discussed, for at any rate it was individual and unlike that of most other great speakers in history, though perhaps more like that of some great speeches in drama.

But there is a point of some moment in which the Second Inaugural does invite a comment, and a comment which should be quite explicit. Probably no other speech of a modern statesman uses so unreservedly the language of intense religious feeling. The occasion made it natural; neither the thought nor the words are in any way conventional; no sensible reader now could entertain a suspicion that the orator spoke to the heart of the people but did not speak from his own heart. But an old Illinois attorney, who thought he knew the real Lincoln behind the President, might have wondered whether the real Lincoln spoke here. For Lincoln's religion, like everything else in his character, became, when he was famous, a stock subject of discussion among his old associates. Many said "he was a Christian but did not know it." Some hinted, with an air of great sagacity, that "so far from his being a Christian or a religious man, the less said about it the better." In early manhood he broke away for ever from the scheme of Christian theology which was probably more or less common to the very various Churches which surrounded him. He had avowed this sweeping denial with a freedom which pained some friends, perhaps rather by its rashness than by its impiety, and he was apt to regard the procedure of theologians as a blasphemous twisting of the words of Christ. He rejected that belief in miracles and in the literally inspired accuracy of the Bible narrative which was no doubt held as fundamental by all these Churches. He rejected no less any attempt to substitute for this foundation the belief in any priestly authority or in the authority of any formal and earthly society called the Church. With this total independence of the expressed creeds of his neighbours he still went and took his boys to Presbyterian public worship—their mother was an Episcopalian and his own parents had been Baptists. He loved the Bible and knew it intimately—he is said also by the way to have stored in his memory a large number of hymns. In the year before his death he wrote to Speed: "I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this book upon reason that you can and the balance upon faith and you will live and die a better man." It was not so much the Old Testament as the New Testament and what he called "the true spirit of Christ" that he loved especially, and took with all possible seriousness as the rule of life. His theology, in the narrower sense, may be said to have been limited to an intense belief in a vast and over-ruling Providence—the lighter forms of superstitious feelings which he is known to have had in common with most frontiersmen were apparently of no importance in his life. And this Providence, darkly spoken of, was certainly conceived by him as intimately and kindly related to his own life. In his Presidential candidature, when he owned to some one that the opposition of clergymen hurt him deeply, he is said to have confessed to being no Christian and to have continued, "I know that there is a God and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me, and I think He has, I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything; I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God. I have told them that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and Christ and reason say the same, and they will find it so." When old acquaintances said that he had no religion they based their opinion on such remarks as that the God, of whom he had just been speaking solemnly, was "not a person." It would be unprofitable to enquire what he, and many others, meant by this expression, but, later at any rate, this "impersonal" power was one with which he could hold commune. His robust intellect, impatient of unproved assertion, was unlikely to rest in the common assumption that things dimly seen may be treated as not being there. So humorous a man was also unlikely to be too conceited to say his prayers. At any rate he said them; said them intently; valued the fact that others prayed for him and for the nation; and, as in official Proclamations (concerning days of national religious observance) he could wield, like no other modern writer, the language of the Prayer Book, so he would speak of prayer without the smallest embarrassment in talk with a general or a statesman. It is possible that this was a development of later years. Lincoln did not, like most of us, arrest his growth. To Mrs. Lincoln it seemed that with the death of their child, Willie, a change came over his whole religious outlook. It well might; and since that grief, which came while his troubles were beginning, much else had come to Lincoln; and now through four years of unsurpassed trial his capacity had steadily grown, and his delicate fairness, his pitifulness, his patience, his modesty had grown therewith. Here is one of the few speeches ever delivered by a great man at the crisis of his fate on the sort of occasion which a tragedian telling his story would have devised for him. This man had stood alone in the dark. He had done justice; he had loved mercy; he had walked humbly with his God. The reader to whom religious utterance makes little appeal will not suppose that his imaginative words stand for no real experience. The reader whose piety knows no questions will not be pained to think that this man had professed no faith.

He said, "Fellow Countrymen: At this second appearance to take the oath of the Presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the energies and engrosses the attention of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

"One-eighth of the whole population were coloured slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localised in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither expected that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses, which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

Lincoln's own commentary may follow upon his speech:

"March 15, 1865. Dear Mr. Weed,—Every one likes a little compliment. Thank you for yours on my little notification speech and on the recent inaugural address. I expect the latter to wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it however in this case is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.

"Truly yours,

"A. LINCOLN."

On March 20, 1865, a period of bright sunshine seems to have begun in Lincoln's life. Robert Lincoln had some time before finished his course at Harvard, and his father had written to Grant modestly asking him if he could suggest the way, accordant with discipline and good example, in which the young man could best see something of military life. Grant immediately had him on to his staff, with a commission as captain, and now Grant invited Lincoln to come to his headquarters for a holiday visit. There was much in it besides holiday, for Grant was rapidly maturing his plans for the great event and wanted Lincoln near. Moreover Sheridan had just arrived, and while Lincoln was there Sherman came from Goldsborough with Admiral Porter for consultation as to Sherman's next move. Peremptory as he was in any necessary political instructions, Lincoln was now happy to say nothing of military matters, beyond expressing his earnest desire that the final overmastering of the Confederate armies should be accomplished with the least further bloodshed possible, and indulging the curiosity that any other guest might have shown. A letter home to Mrs. Lincoln betrays the interest with which he heard heavy firing quite near, which seemed to him a great battle, but did not excite those who knew. Then there were rides in the country with Grant's staff. Lincoln in his tall hat and frock coat was a marked and curious figure on a horse. He had once, by the way, insisted on riding with Butler, catechising him with remorseless chaff on engineering matters and forbidding his chief engineer to prompt him, along six miles of cheering Northern troops within easy sight and shot of the Confederate soldiers to whom his hat and coat identified him. But, however odd a figure, he impressed Grant's officers as a good and bold horseman. Then, after Sherman's arrival, there evidently was no end of talk. Sherman was at first amused by the President's anxiety as to whether his army was quite safe without him at Goldsborough; but that keen-witted soldier soon received, as he has said, an impression both of goodness and of greatness such as no other man ever gave him.

What especially remained on Sherman's and on Porter's mind was the recollection of Lincoln's over-powering desire for mercy and for conciliation with the conquered. Indeed Sherman blundered later in the terms he first accepted from Johnston; for he did not see that Lincoln's clemency for Southern leaders and desire for the welfare of the South included no mercy at all for the political principle of the Confederacy. Grant was not exposed to any such mistake, for a week or two before Lee had made overtures to him for some sort of conference and Lincoln had instantly forbidden him to confer with Lee for any purpose but that of his unconditional surrender. What, apart from the reconstruction of Southern life and institutions, was in part weighing with Lincoln was the question of punishments for rebellion. By Act of Congress the holders of high political and military office in the South were liable as traitors, and there was now talk of hanging in the North. Later events showed that a very different sentiment would make itself heard when the victory came; but Lincoln was much concerned. To some one who spoke to him of this matter he exclaimed, "What have I to do with you, ye sons of Zeruiah, that ye should this day be adversaries unto me? Shall there any man be put to death this day in Israel?" There can be no doubt that the prerogative of mercy would have been vigorously used in his hands, but he did not wish for a conflict on this matter at all; and Grant was taught, in a parable about a teetotal Irishman who forgave being served with liquor unbeknownst to himself, that zeal in capturing Jefferson Davis and his colleagues was not expected of him.

While Lincoln was at Grant's headquarters at City Point, Lee, hoping to recover the use of the roads to the south-west, endeavoured to cause a diversion of the besiegers' strength by a sortie on his east front. It failed and gave the besiegers a further point of vantage. On April 1 Sheridan was sent far round the south of Lee's lines, and in a battle at a point called Five Forks established himself in possession of the railway running due west from Petersburg. The defences were weakest on this side, and to prevent the entrance of the enemy there Lee was bound to withdraw troops from other quarters. On the two following days Grant's army delivered assaults at several points on the east side of the Petersburg defences, penetrating the outer lines and pushing on against the inner fortifications of the town. On Sunday, April 2, Jefferson Davis received in church word from Lee to make instant preparation for departure, as Petersburg could not be held beyond that night and Richmond must fall immediately. That night the Confederate Government left the capital, and Lee's evacuation of the fortress began the next day. Lincoln was sent for. He came by sea, and to the astonishment and alarm of the naval officers made his way at once to Richmond with entirely insufficient escort. There he strolled about, hand in hand with his little son Tad, greeted by exultant negroes, and stared at by angry or curious Confederates, while he visited the former prison of the Northern prisoners and other places of more pleasant attraction without receiving any annoyance from the inhabitants. He had an interesting talk with Campbell, formerly a Supreme Court judge, and a few weeks back one of Davis' commissioners at Hampton Roads. Campbell obtained permission to convene a meeting of the members of the Virginia Legislature with a view to speedier surrender by Lee's army. But the permission was revoked, for he somewhat clumsily mistook its terms, and, moreover, the object in view had meantime been accomplished.

Jefferson Davis was then making his way with his ministers to Johnston's army. When they arrived he and they held council with Johnston and Beauregard. He would issue a Proclamation which would raise him many soldiers and he would "whip them yet." No one answered him. At last he asked the opinion of Johnston, who bluntly undeceived him as to facts, and told him that further resistance would be a crime, and got his permission to treat with Sherman, while the fallen Confederate President escaped further south.

Lee's object was to make his way along the north side of the Appomattox River, which flows east through Petersburg to the James estuary, and at a certain point strike southwards towards Johnston's army. He fought for his escape with all his old daring and skill, while hardly less vigorous and skilful efforts were made not only to pursue, but to surround him. Grant in his pursuit sent letters of courteous entreaty that he would surrender and spare further slaughter. Northern cavalry got ahead of Lee, tearing up the railway lines he had hoped to use and blocking possible mountain passes; and his supply trains were being cut off. After a long running fight and one last fierce battle on April 6, at a place called Sailor's Creek, Lee found himself on April 9 at Appomattox Court House, some seventy miles west of Petersburg, surrounded beyond hope of escape. On that day he and Grant with their staffs met in a neighbouring farmhouse. Those present recalled afterwards the contrast of the stately Lee and the plain, ill-dressed Grant arriving mud-splashed in his haste. Lee greeted Meade as an old acquaintance and remarked how grey he had grown with years. Meade gracefully replied that Lee and not age was responsible for that. Grant had started "quite jubilant" on the news that Lee was ready to surrender, but in presence of "the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly" he fell into sadness. Pleasant "talk of old army times" followed, and he had almost forgotten, as he declares, the business in hand, when Lee asked him on what terms he would accept surrender. Grant sat down and wrote, not knowing when he began what he should go on to write. As he wrote he thought of the handsome sword Lee carried. Instantly he added to his terms permission for every Southern officer to keep his sword and his horse. Lee read the paper and when he came to that point was visibly moved. He gauged his man, and he ventured to ask something more. He thought, he said, Grant might not know that the Confederate cavalry troopers owned their own horses. Grant said they would be badly wanted on the farms and added a further concession accordingly. "This will have the best possible effect on the men," said Lee. "It will do much towards conciliating our people." Grant included also in his written terms words of general pardon to Confederate officers for their treason. This was an inadvertent breach, perhaps, of Lincoln's orders, but it was one which met with no objection. Lee retired into civil life and devoted himself thereafter to his neighbours' service as head of a college in Virginia—much respected, very free with alms to old soldiers and not much caring whether they had fought for the South or for the North. Grant did not wait to set foot in the capital which he had conquered, but, the main business being over, posted off with all haste to see his son settled in at school.

Lincoln remained at City Point till April 8, when he started back by steamer. Those who were with him on the two days' voyage told afterwards of the happy talk, as of a quiet family party rejoicing in the return of peace. Somebody said that Jefferson Davis really ought to be hanged. The reply came in the quotation that he might almost have expected, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." On the second day, Sunday, the President read to them parts of "Macbeth." Sumner, who was one of them, recalled that he read twice over the lines,

"Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further."

On the Tuesday, April 11, a triumphant crowd came to the White House to greet Lincoln. He made them a speech, carefully prepared in substance rather than in form, dealing with the question of reconstruction in the South, with special reference to what was already in progress in Louisiana. The precise points of controversy that arose in this regard hardly matter now. Lincoln disclaimed any wish to insist pedantically upon any detailed plan of his; but he declared his wish equally to keep clear of any merely pedantic points of controversy with any in the South who were loyally striving to revive State Government with acceptance of the Union and without slavery; and he urged that genuine though small beginnings should be encouraged. He regretted that in Louisiana his wish for the enfranchisement of educated negroes and of negro soldiers had not been followed; but as the freedom of the negroes was unreservedly accepted, as provision was made for them in the public schools, and the new State constitution allowed the Legislature to enfranchise them, there was clear gain. "Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it. What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. So new and unprecedented," he ended, "is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals. Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may and must be inflexible. In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper." A full generation has had cause to lament that that announcement was never to be made.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, with solemn religious service the Union flag was hoisted again on Fort Sumter by General Anderson, its old defender. On that morning there was a Cabinet Council in Washington. Seward was absent, in bed with an injury from a carriage accident. Grant was there a little anxious to get news from Sherman. Lincoln was in a happy mood. He had earlier that morning enjoyed greatly a talk with Robert Lincoln about the young man's new experience of soldiering. He now told Grant and the Cabinet that good news was coming from Sherman. He knew it, he said, for last night he had dreamed a dream, which had come to him several times before. In this dream, whenever it came, he was sailing in a ship of a peculiar build, indescribable but always the same, and being borne on it with great speed towards a dark and undefined shore. He had always dreamed this before victory. He dreamed it before Antietam, before Murfreesborough, before Gettysburg, before Vicksburg. Grant observed bluntly that Murfreesborough had not been a victory, or of any consequence anyway. Lincoln persisted on this topic undeterred. After some lesser business they discussed the reconstruction of the South. Lincoln rejoiced that Congress had adjourned and the "disturbing element" in it could not hinder the work. Before it met again, "if we are wise and discreet we shall re-animate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union re-established." Lastly, there was talk of the treatment of rebels and of the demand that had been heard for "persecution" and "bloody work." "No one need expect me," said Lincoln, "to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off." "Shoo," he added, throwing up his large hands like a man scaring sheep. "We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union. There is too much of the desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there is too little respect for their rights. I do not sympathise in these feelings." Such was the tenor of his last recorded utterance on public affairs.

In the afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln drove together and he talked to her with keen pleasure of the life they would live when the Presidency was over. That night Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln went to the theatre, for the day was not observed as in England. The Grants were to have been with them, but changed their minds and left Washington that day, so a young officer, Major Rathbone, and the lady engaged to him, both of them thereafter ill-fated, came instead. The theatre was crowded; many officers returned from the war were there and eager to see Lincoln. The play was "Our American Cousin," a play in which the part of Lord Dundreary was afterwards developed and made famous. Some time after 10 o'clock, at a point in the play which it is said no person present could afterwards remember, a shot was heard in the theatre and Abraham Lincoln fell forward upon the front of the box unconscious and dying. A wild-looking man, who had entered the box unobserved and had done his work, was seen to strike with a knife at Major Rathbone, who tried to seize him. Then he jumped from the box to the stage; he caught a spur in the drapery and fell, breaking the small bone of his leg. He rose, shouted "Sic semper tyrannis," the motto of Virginia, disappeared behind the scenes, mounted a horse that was in waiting at the stage door, and rode away.

This was John Wilkes Booth, brother of a famous actor then playing "Hamlet" in Boston. He was an actor too, and an athletic and daring youth. In him that peculiarly ferocious political passion which occasionally showed itself among Southerners was further inflamed by brandy and by that ranting mode of thought which the stage develops in some few. He was the leader of a conspiracy which aimed at compassing the deaths of others besides Lincoln. Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President, was to die. So was Seward. That same night one of the conspirators, a gigantic boy of feeble mind, gained entrance to Seward's house and wounded three people, including Seward himself, who was lying already injured in bed and received four or five wounds. Neither he nor the others died. The weak-minded or mad boy, another man, whose offense consisted in having been asked to kill Johnson and refused to do so, and another alleged conspirator, a woman, were hanged after a court-martial whose proceedings did credit neither to the new President nor to others concerned. Booth himself, after many adventures, was shot in a barn in which he stood at bay and which had been set on fire by the soldiers pursuing him. During his flight he is said to have felt much aggrieved that men did not praise him as they had praised Brutus and Cassius.

There were then in the South many broken and many permanently embittered men, indeed the temper which would be glad at Lincoln's death could be found here and there and notably among the partisans of the South in Washington. But, if it be wondered what measure of sympathy there was for Booth's dark deed, an answer lies in the fact that the murder of Lincoln would at no time have been difficult for a brave man. Fair blows were now as powerless as foul to arrest the end. On the very morning when Lincoln and Grant at the Cabinet had been telling of their hopes and fears for Sherman, Sherman himself at Raleigh in North Carolina had received and answered a letter from Johnston opening negotiations for a peaceful surrender. Three days later he was starting by rail for Greensborough when word came to him from the telegraph operator that an important message was upon the wire. He went to the telegraph box and heard it. Then he swore the telegraph operator to secrecy, for he feared that some provocation might lead to terrible disorders in Raleigh, if his army, flushed with triumph, were to learn, before his return in peace, the news that for many days after hushed their accustomed songs and shouts and cheering into a silence which was long remembered. He went off to meet Johnston and requested to be with him alone in a farmhouse near. There he told him of the murder of Lincoln. "The perspiration came out in large drops on Johnston's forehead," says Sherman, who watched him closely. He exclaimed that it was a disgrace to the age. Then he asked to know whether Sherman attributed the crime to the Confederate authorities. Sherman could assure him that no one dreamed of such a suspicion against men like him and General Lee; but he added that he was not so sure of "Jefferson Davis and men of that stripe." Then followed some delay, through a mistake of Sherman's which the authorities in Washington reversed, but in a few days all was settled and the whole of the forces under Johnston's command laid down their arms. Twenty years later, as an old man and infirm, their leader left his Southern home to be present at Sherman's funeral, where he caught a chill from which he died soon after. Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, near the borders of Florida. He was, not without plausible grounds but quite unjustly, suspected in regard to the murder, and he suffered imprisonment for some time till President Andrew Johnson released him when the evidence against him had been seen to be worthless. He lived many years in Mississippi and wrote memoirs, in which may be found the fullest legal argument for the great Secession, his own view of his quarrels with Joseph Johnston, and much besides. Amongst other things he tells how when they heard the news of Lincoln's murder some troops cheered, but he was truly sorry for the reason that Andrew Johnson was more hostile to the cause than Lincoln. It is disappointing to think, of one who played a memorable part in history with much determination, that in this reminiscence he sized his stature as a man fairly accurately. After several other surrenders of Southern towns and small scattered forces, the Confederate General Kirby Smith, in Texas, surrendered to General Canby, Banks' successor, on May 26, and after four years and forty-four days armed resistance to the Union was at an end.

On the night of Good Friday, Abraham Lincoln had been carried still unconscious to a house near the theatre. His sons and other friends were summoned. He never regained consciousness. "A look of unspeakable peace," say his secretaries who were there, "came over his worn features." At 7.22 on the morning of April 15, Stanton, watching him more closely than the rest, told them what had passed in the words, "Now he belongs to the ages."

The mourning of a nation, voiced to later times by some of the best lines of more than one of its poets, and deeper and more prevailing for the lack of comprehension which some had shown him before, followed his body in its slow progress—stopping at Baltimore, where once his life had been threatened, for the homage of vast crowds; stopping at New York, where among the huge assembly old General Scott came to bid him affectionate farewell; stopping at other cities for the tribute of reverent multitudes—to Springfield, his home of so many years, where, on May 4, 1865, it was laid to rest. After the burial service the "Second Inaugural" was read over his grave, nor could better words than his own have been chosen to honour one who "with malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gave him to see the right, had striven on to finish the work that he was in." In England, apart from more formal tokens of a late-learnt regard and an unfeigned regret, Punch embodied in verse of rare felicity the manly contrition of its editor for ignorant derision in past years; and Queen Victoria symbolised best of all, and most acceptably to Americans, the feeling of her people when she wrote to Mrs. Lincoln "as a widow to a widow." Nor, though the transactions in which he bore his part were but little understood in this country till they were half forgotten, has tradition ever failed to give him, by just instinct, his rank with the greatest of our race.

Many great deeds had been done in the war. The greatest was the keeping of the North together in an enterprise so arduous, and an enterprise for objects so confusedly related as the Union and freedom. Abraham Lincoln did this; nobody else could have done it; to do it he bore on his sole shoulders such a weight of care and pain as few other men have borne. When it was over it seemed to the people that he had all along been thinking their real thoughts for them; but they knew that this was because he had fearlessly thought for himself. He had been able to save the nation, partly because he saw that unity was not to be sought by the way of base concession. He had been able to free the slaves, partly because he would not hasten to this object at the sacrifice of what he thought a larger purpose. This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South. That fact came to be seen in the South too, and generations in America are likely to remember it when all other features of his statecraft have grown indistinct. A thousand reminiscences ludicrous or pathetic, passing into myth but enshrining hard fact, will prove to them that this great feature of his policy was a matter of more than policy. They will remember it as adding a peculiar lustre to the renovation of their national existence; as no small part of the glory, surpassing that of former wars, which has become the common heritage of North and South. For perhaps not many conquerors, and certainly few successful statesmen, have escaped the tendency of power to harden or at least to narrow their human sympathies; but in this man a natural wealth of tender compassion became richer and more tender while in the stress of deadly conflict he developed an astounding strength.

Beyond his own country some of us recall his name as the greatest among those associated with the cause of popular government. He would have liked this tribute, and the element of truth in it is plain enough, yet it demands one final consideration. He accepted the institutions to which he was born, and he enjoyed them. His own intense experience of the weakness of democracy did not sour him, nor would any similar experience of later times have been likely to do so. Yet if he reflected much on forms of government it was with a dominant interest in something beyond them. For he was a citizen of that far country where there is neither aristocrat nor democrat. No political theory stands out from his words or actions; but they show a most unusual sense of the possible dignity of common men and common things. His humour rioted in comparisons between potent personages and Jim Jett's brother or old Judge Brown's drunken coachman, for the reason for which the rarely jesting Wordsworth found a hero in the "Leech-Gatherer" or in Nelson and a villain in Napoleon or in Peter Bell. He could use and respect and pardon and overrule his far more accomplished ministers because he stood up to them with no more fear or cringing, with no more dislike or envy or disrespect than he had felt when he stood up long before to Jack Armstrong. He faced the difficulties and terrors of his high office with that same mind with which he had paid his way as a poor man or navigated a boat in rapids or in floods. If he had a theory of democracy it was contained in this condensed note which he wrote, perhaps as an autograph, a year or two before his Presidency: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.—A. LINCOLN."