CHAPTER SECOND · Russian life and society as seen in 1866-'67 : $b by Appleton and Longfellow, two young travellers from the United States of America, who had been officers in the Union army, and a journey to Russia with General Banks in 1869. With sketches of Alexander II. and Abraham Lincoln, and emancipation in the empire of Russia and the republic of the United States of America.

LINCOLN AND EMANCIPATION

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

“All merit comes From braving the unequal: All glory comes from daring to begin: Fame loves the state That, reckless of the sequel, Fights long and well, whether it lose or win.” —_Eugene F. Ware_

I have always regretted that I never had the privilege of making the acquaintance of President Lincoln. I remember having met him one summer at Washington during the war, as he was driving to the Soldiers’ Home,—a few miles out of the city where he passed the hot season,—in an open carriage with an escort of cavalry, which was a rare sight for a President of the United States, until the requirements of war and the treasonable elements which pervaded society in Washington seemed to make such a precaution advisable. This was civil war with its unseen dangers in the nation’s capital. I can just remember his sad face, which appeared full of the responsibilities of the situation, as he drove along.

LINCOLN AND EMANCIPATION.

The antislavery movement in the United States, began in the mountains of the South by Benjamin Lundy, of Wheeling, West Virginia. He published a paper called “The Genius of Universal Emancipation,” first at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, afterwards at Jonesville, East Tennessee, and in 1824, he removed it to Baltimore, Md.

In 1825, Miss Frances Wright, a youthful and enthusiastic philanthropist, established ten miles east of Memphis, Tenn., a manual training school, in which each negro was to be freed as soon as he proved himself capable of self support. She was a friend of Lafayette, who was keenly interested in the plan, but it failed, and she took her slaves to Hayti, where she settled them on land granted by the Haitian government, freed them, and left them there.

All this was before the organization of the New England Antislavery Society, which was formed in 1832, by William Lloyd Garrison, returning from Baltimore where he had been associated with Lundy.

On December 6, 1847, Abraham Lincoln took his seat in the Thirtieth Congress as a member from the state of Illinois. He was thirty-eight years of age, and six feet four inches in height. His character and principles are thus briefly and truthfully described by J. G. Holland, in reviewing his public career:—

“He introduced them to a new national life. He has given them a statesman without a statesman’s craftiness, a politician without a politician’s meannesses, a great man without a great man’s vices, a philanthropist without a philanthropist’s impracticable dreams, a Christian without pretensions, a ruler without the pride of place and power, an ambitious man without selfishness, and a successful man without vanity.”

His position in the Thirtieth Congress on all the principal points at issue were of the Whig party, and in the second session he began his work for the abolishment of slavery in the District of Columbia in which the national capital is situated, by introducing on the 16th of January, 1849, a measure which he intended as a substitute for a resolution introduced by Mr. Gott of New York, instructing the Committee of the District of Columbia to report a bill prohibiting the slave trade in the District. Mr. Lincoln’s substitute provided that no person not within the District, and no person thereafter born within the District should be held to slavery within the District, or held to slavery without its limits, while it provided that those holding slaves in the slave states might bring them in and take them out again when visiting the District on public business. It also provided for the emancipation of all the slaves legally held within the District, at the will of their masters, who could claim their full value at the hands of the Government, and that the act itself should be subject to the approval of the voters of the District. It had also a proviso to restore to their owners all fugitive slaves escaping into the District.

Mr. Lincoln regarded slavery as property under the Constitution. Legally he believed slavery to be right, morally he believed it to be wrong.

On the presentation of this bill Mr. Lincoln had a considerable number of influential supporters in the District, but they subsequently withdrew, and the subject was given up, to be revived again, under circumstances impossible to be foretold, thirteen years after.

Speaking in 1859, on the slave power, he said:—“Broken by it, I, too, may be, bow to it I never will. The probability that we may fail in the struggle, ought not to deter us from the support of a cause which I deem to be just, and it shall not deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world besides, and I, standing up boldly and alone, and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before high Heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love.”

On March 4th, 1861, Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated President of the United States, and several of the slaveholding states rebelled against the authority of the National Government, passed ordinances of secession, and with other states joined to them attempted to gain possession of the national capital, thereby bringing on the great war of 1861, which lasted four years, and ended in the preservation of the Union and the re-establishment of the national authority over every state and territory.

In the effort to reclaim the recalcitrant states and restore peace to the country, every expedient was used, and when, by proclamation of President Lincoln, Congress assembled in extra session on the Fourth of July, 1861, Mr. Trumbull of Illinois introduced a bill in the Senate to emancipate all the slaves in the rebel states.

At that time one-eighth of the whole population of the United States were colored slaves, located in the southern portion. They had been held in slavery two hundred and fifty years, having originally, and as required thereafter, been brought to this country in slave ships principally from the coast of Africa and the brisk and remunerative traffic still continued. The extra session closed on August 6, 1861, having lasted but little more than a month. In the meantime Major General John C. Fremont having been placed in command of the Department of the West, with headquarters at St. Louis, on the 25th of July, 1861, contemplating the restoration of order in Missouri, and the reclaiming of the control of the Mississippi River, proclaimed martial law, declared the property of all those who should take up arms against the United States confiscated to the public use, and their slaves, if they had any, were declared free men. In other words, he proclaimed freedom to the slaves of rebels, but, fearing that this would alarm Unionists in the South, Mr. Lincoln desired General Fremont, as of his own motion, so to modify his proclamation as to make this freedom apply only to such slaves as were engaged in the rebel service.

General Fremont had taken this step without consultation or notice. The President wished him to conform to a confiscation act passed by Congress, but Fremont wished the President to order the change desired, as, if he should do it of his own motion, it would imply that he thought himself wrong, stating the difficulties under which he labored, with the communication with the government so difficult and the development of perplexing events so rapid in the department under his command. This the President did in a despatch under date of September 11, 1861, in these words:—

“It is therefore ordered, that the said clause of said proclamation be so modified, held and construed, as to conform to, and not to transcend the provisions on the same subject contained in the Act of Congress entitled ‘An Act to Confiscate Property’ ... approved August 6, 1861, and that such act be published at length with this order.”

Before this order had been received, or on the day following its date, General Fremont, though acquainted with the President’s wishes, manumitted two slaves of Thomas L. Snead of St. Louis, in accordance with the terms of his proclamation.

Lincoln believed that the time had not come for the liberating the slaves of rebels by proclamation, if he had, the Act of Congress would not have stood in the way. The Act was the embodiment of his own policy at that time. He had undertaken to preserve the Union and the rights of all the states. A record was to be kept of the slaves of loyal masters, and for their repayment for them Congress would provide. Slavery could only be interfered with as a military necessity, an essential means of saving the Union. He was assailed on the one side for being too slow, and on the other for being too precipitate.

In March, 1862, the following resolution recommended by President Lincoln passed both houses of Congress, only a few members of the border states voting for it:—

“Resolved, That the United States ought to coöperate with any state which may gradually adopt abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in its discretion, to compensate for inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system.”

Before the close of the session the President invited the senators and representatives of the slaveholding states not in rebellion, to a conference at the White House, at which he admonished them that if they had all voted for the resolution the war would then have been substantially ended.

“If the war,” said he, “continues long, as it must if the object be not sooner attained (i. e. the restoration of the Union without disturbance of the institution of slavery) the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will have nothing in lieu of it. Much of its value is gone already. How much better for you and for your people to take the step which at once shortens the war, and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event.... I do not speak of emancipation at once, but of a decision at once, to emancipate gradually. Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply, and in abundance, and when numbers shall be large enough to be company and encouragement for one another, the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.”

The time for the voluntary abolishment of the slave system was at any date previous to 1900.

In this session slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia, completing the work begun in 1849, and recognizing the two principles of colonization and compensation. This session also passed the confiscation act by which the traitor to the general government forfeited his slaves, as well as any other property, and Congress decided in advance, that the slaves thus confiscated and held by the government should be declared free.

Then the public at the north, these measures having been enacted, demanded a sweeping proclamation of emancipation. The antislavery element clamored for swifter and more radical recognition, aroused and sustained by the eloquence of the spoken and written word.

These were the clarion notes of Whittier’s “Voices of Freedom”:—

“If we have whispered truth Whisper no longer: Speak as the tempest does, Sterner and stronger.

Still be the tones of truth Louder and firmer: Startling the haughty South With the deep murmur.”

To which the President made reply:—

“What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it could help to save the Union.... I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

He understood that his oath of office stood in the way of the present accomplishment of that wish, but that for the preservation of the Constitution and the Union measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful. That to preserve slavery he could not permit the wreck of government, country and constitution all together. He objected to General Fremont’s order of emancipation because he did not then consider it a necessity. He objected to the arming of the blacks, as suggested by the Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, for the same reason; also to an attempt by General David A. Hunter for a military emancipation, believing as he did in compensated emancipation. But the border states, toward whom he had fulfilled his whole duty, turned a deaf ear to his expostulations, and by this attitude relieved him of further responsibility toward them.

COLONIZATION.

Congress placed at the President’s disposal a sum of money to be used for experiments with the colonization of the blacks, his choice of location being the Spanish American republics of Central and South America. In August, 1862, he invited a representative company of negroes to visit the White House and address him on the subject; the President asserting his conviction that both the whites and negroes would suffer by living in association with each other. He offered them the benefit of the fund intrusted to him for the purposes of colonization. But the Spanish American republics protested against black colonies in their midst. Liberia and Hayti only would receive them, and the blacks were not disposed to emigrate to those countries, and so that project faded as all such projects have failed in relation to sending the colored population out of the country. The President’s plan was one of benevolent solicitude for a race which he hoped to make self-reliant and independent.

And it came to pass, that in the midsummer of 1862, President Lincoln called a meeting of his Cabinet and laid before them a draft of a proclamation of emancipation, which involved the freedom of all human beings held in slavery in the United States, amounting to four millions then living, and affecting untold millions then unborn, and revolutionizing the social status of more than a third part of the nation, but the Secretary of State, William H. Seward, while approving of the proclamation, opposed its issue at that time, immediately after so many reverses, and advised its postponement until it should have some military success to support it, that it should not have the appearance of an appeal for help. So the proclamation waited until the invasion of Maryland brought on the battle of Antietam resulting in the victory won by McClellan, when Mr. Lincoln brought forward his second draft of the instrument,—even then a preliminary proclamation,—which was issued on the 22d of September, 1862, the battle having been fought on the 17th; Mr. Lincoln being reported as saying that he made a resolve that when McClellan should drive Lee over the river he would send the proclamation after him.

This proclamation declared free the slaves of those states, and those sections of states, which should be in rebellion on the 1st of January, 1863, thus affording an opportunity for all rebel states which wished to preserve their ownership of slaves, to do so by returning to their allegiance to the Federal Government.

September 24, 1862, the President issued a proclamation suspending the writ of _habeas corpus_, as the ordinary processes of law were not sufficient to restrain disloyal persons from hindering the execution of a draft of militia, which had been ordered, and from giving aid and comfort to the insurrection. This suspension lasted for two months, or until the 22d of November, 1862, and persons held in military custody were released on parole.

On the 1st of January, 1863, the final proclamation of emancipation was issued. It was as follows:—

PROCLAMATION OF EMANCIPATION.

Whereas, on the twenty-second of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

“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, and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the states and parts of states, if any, in which the people thereof respectively shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any state or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such state shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such state, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the day first above mentioned, order and designate, as the states and parts of states wherein the people thereof respectively are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemine, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terre Bonne, Lafourche, St. Marie, St. Martin and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkely, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued).

And, by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated states and parts of states, are, and henceforward shall be free, and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free, to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence, and I recommend to them that in all cases, when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service. And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my name, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three and of the

[L. S.] Independence of the United States the eighty-seventh, Abraham Lincoln.

By the President. William H. Seward, _Secretary of State_.

In the cabinet meeting to which the preliminary proclamation was submitted, by request of Mr. Seward the words “and maintain” were inserted after “recognize” in the third paragraph of that document in the second paragraph of the final proclamation, the President in his wisdom, having omitted the words, as it was not his way to promise more than he was sure he could perform, and he was not prepared to say that he thought he was able to maintain this. Thus the story is told on the best authority.

Another paragraph is said to have been written by the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, who had prepared a proclamation from which the President only selected the sentence beginning “And upon this Act,” and ending with “Almighty God,” with the exception of the word “sincerely” and the phrase “upon military necessity” which are the President’s own. It is said that Mr. Lincoln voluntarily revealed the authorship of the words attributed to Seward and Chase.

SLAVES STILL HELD IN LOYAL STATES.

By this proclamation of emancipation the loyal slave states were allowed to retain the institution of slavery, which was secured to them by the Constitution, and in order to reach them certain articles of amendment to the Constitution of the United States must be acted upon by the legislatures of the several states, three-fourths of the number of which would make the articles valid. No servile insurrection or tendency to violence marked the execution of the provisions of the proclamation relative to the arming of the negroes.

At the session of Congress beginning in December, 1863, the Fugitive Slave Law was repealed.

At the national Republican convention which met at Baltimore, June 8, 1864, and nominated Lincoln for re-election, one of the resolutions advocated a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Another declared that the government owed protection to all its soldiers, without distinction of color, and at the session of congress which opened the following December, an amendment to the Constitution was passed abolishing slavery in all the states. It needed now to be adopted by the vote of the states, and the necessity was pressing, for in order to place in their hands a weapon of self-defence against re-enslavement the negroes must be given the right to vote.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT.

Article XIV. Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice-president of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

Section 3. No person shall be a senator, or representative in congress, or elector of president, or vice-president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

But neither the United States, nor any state, shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5. The congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

The Fourteenth Amendment was proposed to the legislatures of the several states by the thirty-ninth congress on June 16, 1866, and after delay caused by withdrawals of ratifications and of rejections of ratifications by many of the states, on July 28, 1868, it was announced by the Secretary of State that it had become valid to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution of the United States.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT.

Article XV. Sect. 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any state, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The fifteenth amendment was proposed to the legislatures of the several states by the fortieth Congress on February 27, 1869, and was declared, in a proclamation of the Secretary of State, dated March 30, 1870, to have been ratified by the constitutional number of states, and to have “become valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution of the United States.”

AFTER EMANCIPATION.

The history of the war shows that one hundred and seventy-eight thousand nine hundred and seventy-five negroes, took part either in the army or the navy of the United States, and the losses these troops sustained from sickness, wounds, killed in battle and other casualties incident to war, were sixty-eight thousand one hundred and seventy-eight.

The war was over in the spring of 1865. Then came the reconstruction period, and in 1876, the Democratic party, most influential in the Southern States, unqualifiedly accepted in its national platform all the results of the war, including the war amendments to the Constitution.

Yet, while the race progressed with marvellous rapidity through educational facilities eagerly sought for, and secured to them from private and public sources, the condition of the freed slaves and their descendants has not improved so materially as was anticipated.

President Lincoln’s solicitude has not been proven false or exaggerated, “both the whites and negroes” _have_ suffered “by living in association with each other.”

The tendency is to divide the whites from the blacks, the whites avoiding those sections where the races are placed on an equality in labor. The large plantations are being let out to colored tenants while the landlord seeks a more congenial environment in the cities, the poor whites seeking occupation in the manufacturing industries which have arisen and are being developed.

It is asserted that the number of counties in the South in which the negroes outnumber the whites, counties containing the best cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar lands, has risen from 237 in 1860, to 279 in 1900, and that within these counties there are, on the average, 130 negroes to every 100 whites, and that in 1860, there were 71 counties in which the negroes were more than twice as numerous as the whites, which number in 1900, had increased to 108, and 92 per cent of the colored race is found in the states which were in rebellion in 1861.

Notwithstanding the investment with citizenship which was supposed to remove from the slave the disqualification of having no standing in court, from the time of emancipation to the present, negro lynchings in the southern and western portions of the United States have shocked the civilized world by their frequency and cruelty; victims of both sexes having been burnt at the stake without any pretense of a form of trial, while local juries were unwilling to indict or condemn those who thus transgressed constitutional law.

The Fourteenth Amendment has been virtually annulled, and the white vote is apportioned on a fictitious representation, and based upon a black majority.

Measures, more or less disguised as to their purpose, have been passed by several southern states, tending to disfranchise the negroes, showing an inclination to gradually return to former conditions, until they have once more assumed their original bold attitude, and in the Fifty-eighth Congress, which assembled December 7, 1903, notice was given that the United States Senator from Tennessee would introduce a bill for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, “with a view to a permanent solution of the vexing negro question, by eliminating the enfranchised negro as a political factor.” It was said that the Senator would be supported by every Southern member in Congress, and not a few members of other sections of the Union. An ex-governor of Virginia was quoted as saying in New York, that there is only one solution, and that is that the Nation must recede from its position on negro suffrage, and plans to that effect have been announced in several southern states.

AN APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY.

On their own behalf, in a mass meeting held in Boston, November 7, 1903, forty years after Emancipation, and three years after the outside limit of time, 1900, set in the resolution recommending the co-operation of the Federal Government in the gradual abolishment of slavery, with compensation, passed in March, 1862, the following appeal, involving the rights of 10,000,000 colored people of the United States, was addressed to the country by the Boston Negro Suffrage League:—

“We appeal to the conscience of the country to rally to our help, to restore to us rights bought by us with a great price, the price of nearly three centuries of faithful service and of blood shed by us in four wars. We appeal to the American people in their strength, to have regard for us in our weakness, and to grant us fair play and equal opportunities with others, to make the most and the best of ourselves in their midst. We call upon a Christian nation to treat us as fellow Christians, as human beings. We implore a boastfully free republic to save us from re-enslavement, to mete out to us even-handed justice, and to throw over us everywhere the impartial protection of her laws and Constitution.”

DEATH OF LINCOLN.

“So he grew up, a destined work to do, And lived to do it: four long-suffering years. Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through, And then he heard the hisses changed to cheers,

The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise, And took both with the same unwavering mood: Till, as he came on light, from darkling days, And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood,

A felon hand, between the goal and him, Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest— And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim, Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest.

· · · · ·

The Old World and the New, from sea to sea, Utter one voice of sympathy and shame! Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high, Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came.”

—_London Punch_, May 6, 1865.

Re-elected President of the United States for another term of four years, and having seen the termination of the war, Abraham Lincoln died in Washington by the hand of an assassin. He was shot by J. Wilkes Booth, a member of a family of actors, in a private box of Ford’s Theatre, a few minutes past ten o’clock on the evening of April 14, 1865, and was carried across the street to a private house, 516 Tenth Street, where he died at 7.22 the next morning without recovering consciousness. Reverent and devout by nature, his utterances had often impressed the people with a sense of his own firm reliance on the Divine arm. “I have been driven many times to my knees,” he once remarked, “by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” So when the bewildering news of his death burst upon the world, that was the characteristic most forcibly brought to mind, and “God lives” was the chosen message flashed over the wires from a high state official to quell the tumult of indignation which thrilled every corner of the great Republic. At his obsequies the funeral procession was so long that the head of it had begun to disperse at the Capitol, before the rear had passed the Treasury Department on its way from the Executive Mansion.

At the cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, where he was buried May 4, 1865, the procession being under the immediate charge of Major General Joseph Hooker, Bishop Simpson quoted his words spoken in relation to the slave power, in 1859, beginning “Broken by it, I, too, may be, bow to it I never will.”

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS.

On the evening of April 16th, just before sunset, when the news of the assassination came to our camp, during an exhausting march from Appomattox Court House after Lee’s surrender, to guard the railroad at Nottaway C. H., a courier rode up with a despatch for General Charles S. Wainwright of whose staff I was a member, announcing the event in a few words.

The effect upon us was tremendous, we could not believe that it was true, and I thought at the time that it must lead to some uprising or revolution. It was a shock to both soldiers and citizens that they could hardly realize. But his work was done, his life was complete, and he was allowed to die in all the glory and dignity of an unselfish triumph.

In a building corner of Broadway and 10th Street, New York, between what was then Stewart’s great dry goods establishment and Grace Church, I had from 1874 to 1879, a little den. It looked, like all my rooms, very cozy, with a medley of boyish, college, and army trophies hanging about, and endless souvenirs of travel and previous years experience on the walls, and in graceful confusion. Many of my old half discarded things had fallen into place, and I wrote under the light of a Russian double candlestick with a soft green shade, while my gas was being put in order. My old army toggery I had arranged in a trophy—sword, belt, sash, cap, pistol, spurs, blouse of Second Lieutenant of Artillery (Fifth Massachusetts Battery, Light Artillery) with the holes through the right sleeve and the blood on the lining, corps and other military badges, etc., and as a background the American flag, in silk, given me by some dear friends with whom I often stayed at Weston, Mass., and which I carried with me in the army, and had suspended in my winter quarters on the Rappahannock River, Va., 1863-’4. As I now look at them I can see on my sword knot the very same crape which was twisted round it by my servant “Joe,” when all the army went into mourning for the death of Abraham Lincoln. It is to me a precious relic, and one such as I imagine there are few preserved.

In April, 1879, I wrote what follows in a letter to the Boston _Transcript_:—

“The writer paid a visit yesterday to that remarkable picture now on exhibition at Doll and Richards’, 2 Park Street, (Boston) by Albion H. Bicknell, representing President Lincoln at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg. Oh, that word! What a story does it tell! It was the central turning point of the war, just as Bull Run was the beginning, and Appomattox the end.

As you look at that wonderful painting, and gaze at the different men there—men who were towers of strength for the Union,—you find, as you count them off one by one, that more than two-thirds of those who were there that bright autumn afternoon, November 19, 1863, have ere this passed on,—Seward, Andrew, Everett, Meade, Chase, Wilson, Stanton, Morton, Greeley, Sumner, Welles, Johnson, Hamlin, Fessenden,—are with us no more.

The landscape, with the trees and the sky and the flavor of autumn in the air, is admirable. The grouping is simple, natural and effective, and the likenesses of the different persons are remarkable. There they are, honest and earnest American citizens, in the prosaic dress of the day,—real, not ideal,—some few of them in uniform, but a majority in the habiliments of civil life. You can almost catch the serious words of President Lincoln, just as he delivered them in that terse speech which will go down to posterity as his masterpiece of oratory.”

STATUE AT SPRINGFIELD, ILL.—

GRANT’S LONGEST SPEECH.

Early in the year 1874, a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln was placed over his grave at Springfield, Illinois. It was unveiled with appropriate ceremonies and in the presence of over 25,000 people. Prayer was offered by Bishop Wayman of the (colored) Methodist Church, and an oration was delivered by Senator Oglesby of Illinois. President Ulysses S. Grant, Vice President Henry Wilson, ex-Vice President Schuyler Colfax and General William T. Sherman were present, and all made brief addresses, that of General Grant said to be the longest speech he ever delivered. It was as follows:—

“Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: On an occasion like the present, it is a duty on my part to bear testimony to the great and good qualities of the patriotic man whose earthly remains now rest beneath the dedicated monument. It was not my fortune to make the personal acquaintance of Mr. Lincoln till the beginning of the last year of the great struggle for national existence. During those years of trouble and despondency, amongst the many patriotic men of the country, Abraham Lincoln never for a moment doubted that the final result would be in favor of peace, union, and freedom to every race in this broad land. His faith in an all-wise Providence directing our arms to this final result, was the faith of the Christian that his Redeemer liveth. Amid obloquy, personal abuse and hate undisguised, which were given vent to without restraint through the press, upon the stump, and in private circles, he remained the same staunch, unyielding servant of the people, never exhibiting revengeful feelings towards his traducers, he, rather, pitied them, and hoped for their own sakes, and the good name of their posterity, they might desist. It did not occur to him for a single moment that the man Lincoln was being assailed, but that a treasonable spirit, one waiting to destroy the fairest government the sun ever shone upon, was giving vent to itself on him, as the chief executive of the nation, only because he was such executive. As a lawyer in your midst, he would have avoided all that slander, for his life was a pure and simple one, and no doubt he would have been a much happier man; but who can tell what might have been the fate of the nation but for the pure, unselfish, and wise administration of Lincoln?

From March, 1864, to the day when the hand of an assassin opened the grave for Mr. Lincoln when President of the United States, my personal relations with him were as close as the nature of our respective duties would permit. To know him personally was to love and respect him for his great qualities of head and heart, and for his patience and patriotism.

With all his disappointments from failures on the part of those to whom he intrusted command, and treachery on the part of those who had gained his confidence but to betray it, I never heard him utter a complaint, nor cast censure for bad conduct or bad faith. It was his nature to find excuses for his adversaries. In his death the nation lost its greatest head. In his death the South lost its most just friend.”

Lincoln said to Grant, when as Lieutenant General he placed him in charge of all the Armies:—

“The particulars of your plans I neither know, nor seek to know. You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any restraints nor constraints upon you.”

* * * * *

Boston is fortunate in having in Park Square the emancipation group by Thomas Ball, of Lincoln breaking the fetters of a negro slave, the gift of Hon. Moses Kimball to the city.

In Chicago, October 1, 1893, during the World’s Columbian Exposition, I went to see the statue of Abraham Lincoln by Saint Gaudens in Lincoln Park. It is splendid in every way, one of the finest certainly in the country and perhaps in the world, and in 1903, a bronze statue of Lincoln, cast in heroic mould with uplifted arm, was erected on a hill in a town in Illinois from which point it may be seen for twenty miles in every direction.

The theatre building where he was shot was never afterwards used for entertainments, but for many years contained a collection of curios from the battle fields, which was subsequently removed to the National Museum, and it has since been attached to the War Department as an office building for a bureau.

August 5, 1901, I visited the house where he died, now containing the Oldroyd Lincoln Memorial Collection, consisting of over 3000 articles pertaining to the martyred President.