the son of a constituant who was sentenced to be shot for desertion. He heard the story with his usual patience (although he was worried and worn out with incessant toil and calls, and anxious for rest), and then he replied: "Some of the Generals complain that I impair discipline and subordination in the army by my pardons and respites, but it makes me feel rested after a hard day's work if I can find some good excuse for saving a man's life, and I can go to bed happy, as I think how joyous the signing my name will make him and his family and his friends." And then with a smile beaming over the careworn face he signed the name that saved that young man's life. An officer in command of a division of the Army of the Potomac, said: "The first week of my command there were twenty-four deserters sentenced by court martial to be shot, and the warrants for their execution were sent to the President to be signed. He refused. I went to Washington and had an interview with the President. I said, Mr. President, unless these men are made an example of the army is in danger; mercy to the few is cruelty to the many. He replied, 'General, there are already too many weeping widows in the United States. For God's sake, don't ask me to add to the number, for I won't do it. Put them in the ranks and try them again.'” A touching incident is related by one of the door-keepers. A poor woman from Philadelphia had called at the Executive Mansion for three days to see the President, with her baby in her arms. Her husband had deserted. He was arrested, tried and condemued to be shot. The sentence was to be executed on Saturday. On Monday previous she left home to see the President. Said Daniel, the door-keeper, "She had been waiting in the anteroom three days; there was such a crowd there had been no chance for her to get in. Late in the afternoon of the third day the President was going through the passage to his private rooms to get some rest. On his way through he heard the baby cry. He instantly went back to his office and rang the bell. Daniel, said he, is there a woman with a baby in the anteroom? I said there was. He said, send her to me at once. She went in and told her story, and the President pardoned her husband. As the woman came out from his presence weeping and her lips moving in prayer and thankfullness, said Daniel, I went up to her, and pulling her shawl, I said, madam, it was the baby that done it." After that day the door-keeper had standing orders from the President, that no matter how great the throng, if Senators or Representatives had to wait or be turned away without an audience, he must see before the day is closed every one that came to him with a petition for the saving of life.

This tender sensibility of the President came gradually under the control of his judgment, and the counsels of others sometimes constrained him to a

severity which he hated, so at length the order for the merited restraint or punishment of public offenders, was usually, though always reluctantly, ratified by him. But his sympathy with men in whatever condition, of whatever opinion, in whatever wrongs involved, was so natural, constant and controlling that he was always inclined, as well as predetermined, to the widest and most generous theory possible. A volume might be written of similar incidents to these, the sufferings and miseries that the war had brought upon the Nation and people bore continually with sorrow and anguish on his sympathetic heart. We have no example of any man more considerate of human infirmity and weakness. He could always find so many excuses and apologies for the faults and sins of others, and he would always treat them with mercy and tenderness, unless he had evidence that the transgressions were purposely and maliciously committed.

These virtues-mercy, sympathy and charity-which so ennoble and make God like our common humanity, were the governing principles of Mr. Lincoln's administration, and has given to the world an example which stands out in history as the grandest exhibition of devotion to the Constitution and laws, and to freedom and humanity. In a case calling for exemplary justice, the President could be severe. Soon after his first inauguration a case occurred which illustrates this characteristic. Hon. J. B. Alley of Lynn, Massachusetts, was the bearer to the President of a petition for the pardon of a person confined in the Newburyport jail for being engaged in the slave trade. He had been sentenced to five years' imprisonment and to pay a fine of one thousand dollars. The petition was accompanied by a letter, in which the prisoner acknowledged his guilt and justice of his sentence; he had served his term of imprisonment, but was still held for the payment of his fine. Mr. Alley read the letter to the President, who was much moved by its appeals, and when he himself had read the petition, he looked up and said: "My friend, that is a very touching appeal to my feelings. You know my weakness is to be, if possible, too easily moved by appeals for mercy, and if this man were guilty of the foulest murder that the arm of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him on such an appeal, but the man who could go to Africa, and rob her of her children and sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer, that he can never receive pardon at my hands, No; he may rot in jail before he shall have liberty by any act of mine." To the soldier who had deserted, or the boy found sleeping on his post, the President could extend mercy and pardon, but to the man guilty of the crime of kidnaping and man-stealing and man

selling, with all the cruelties attending that nefarious business, from him, the executive officer of the people, no pardon could be obtained.

Mrs. M., a Californian of '49, and an old and early friend of Mr. Lincoln, visited Washington in the Winter of '63 and '64, and was a frequent visitor at the White House. She thus relates her last interview with the President: “The morning before I left Washington for California I called on the President. After some conversation relative to my return, I said, 'Mr. Lincoln, I have with me three beautiful copies of your emancipation proclamation. They are lithographed, the original was executed with a pen by a young artist of San Francisco. I would esteem it as a great and highly appreciated favor to have your autograph to each one of them.' He replied: "You shall have my name to them, and with pleasure.' After he had signed them I then said: 'Mr. Lincoln, allow me to kiss the hand that gave freedom, happiness and manhood to so many millions of human hearts.' As he reached out, with a smile, his lean, bony hand, he said: 'I suppose this act of mine, giving freedom to the colored race in the Confederate States, will be considered by the world as the prominent act and feature of my administration, but I do not so regard it. With me the consideration that has been paramount to all others, is the restoration of the Union, and the unity and security of the Republic, and when I have, through the support of the loyal citizens, accomplished this, the issue of which, I think, is now no longer in doubt, all others will be of comparative secondary importance.'

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Mrs. M. continued: "Those beautiful souvenirs which I received from the President, one was presented to Senator C. Cole, one to D. W. Chusman, ex-United States Assistant Treasurer, San Francisco, and the third was retained by the recipient, and they are prized as mementos consecrated to friendship and memory, valued above all price."

Ex-Governor Rice relates the following pleasing incident: "While officially resident in Washington, during the late war, I once had occasion to call upon President Lincoln with the late Senator Henry Wilson, upon an errand of a public nature, in which we were mutually interested. In the recognized order of precedent a member of the House of Representatives, as I then was, could not, in times of pressure for audience with the President, gain admittance so long as there were Cabinet Ministers, members of the Diplomatic Corps, Senators, or Justices of the Supreme Court, desiring audience with him, and all civilians must wait their opportunity until after members of Congress and officers of the army and navy and of the civil service, and others had their turns respectively. Having a joint errand with Senator Wilson, I could avail myself of earlier admission; but we were obliged to wait some time in the ante-room before we could be received, and

when at length the door was opened to us, a small lad, about ten or twelve years old, who had been waiting for admission several days without success, slipped in between, and approached the President in advance. The latter gave the Senator and myself a cordial but brief salutation, and turning immediately to the lad, said: 'Who is the little boy?? During their conference the Senator and myself were apparently forgotten. The boy soon told his story, which was, in substance, that he had come to Washington seeking employment as a page in the House of Representatives, and he wished the President to give him such an appointment. To this the President replied that such appointments were not at his disposal, and that application must be made to the door-keeper of the House at the capitol. But, sir,' said the lad, still undaunted, 'I am a good boy, and have a letter from my mother and one of the Supervisors of our town, and one from my Sunday-school teacher, and they all told me that I could earn enough one session of Congress to keep my mother and the rest of us comfortable all the remainder of the year.' The President took the lad's papers and ran his eye over them with that penetrating and absorbent look so familiar to all who knew him, and then took his pen and wrote on the back of one of them: If Captain Goodnow can give a place to this good little boy I shall be gratified,' and signed it, 'A. Lincoln.' The boy's face became radiant with hope and he walked out of the room with a step as light as though all the angels were whispering their congratulations. Only after the lad had gone did the President seem to realize that a Senator and another had been waiting some time to see him."

Think for a moment of a President of a great Nation and that Nation engaged in one of the most terrible wars waged against men, himself worn down with anxiety and labor, subjected to the alterations of success and defeat, racked by the complaints of the envious, the disloyal and the unreasonable, pressed to the decision of grave questions of public policy, and incumbered by the numberless incidents of civil and military responsibility, yet able so far to forget them all as to give himself up for the time being to the errand of a little boy who had braved an interview uninvited, and of whom he knew nothing. But he had a story to tell of his widowed mother and of his ambition to serve her. The word mother was a talisman that opened the President's heart on all occasions.

THIRTY-EIGHTH

CHAPTER XXXVII.

CONGRESS-PRESIDENT'S

MESSAGE- GENERAL GRANT MADE

. LIEUTENANT-GENERAL.

The Thirty-eighth Congress met December 7, 1863, and the House of Representatives was promptly organized by the election of Hon. Schuyler Colfax, Republican, Speaker, he receiving 101 votes out of 181. In the Senate, the Senators from West Virginia were admitted to their seats by a vote of 36 to 5. California was represented in the Senate by Hons. John Conness and James A. McDougall, and in the House by Hons. Cornelius Cole, Wm. Higby and Thomas Shannon. The President sent in his annual message on the 9th. It informed Congress and the country that our foreign relations were in the main highly satisfactory. An important point had been gained in the course of our correspondence with Great Britain—the issuing of an order by that Government forbidding the departure of formidable rams that were building in English ports for the rebel service.

The proceedings of the French in Mexico gave rise to questions which were likely to be of permanent importance to the welfare of both countries. The French Minister expressed a desire that the United States would express its acquiescence in the establishment of the Archduke Maximilian on the throne of Mexico, and its willingness to enter into peaceful relations with that Government when established. In reply to this request, Mr. Seward, on the 23d of October, stated, "that our Government would maintain a position of complete neutrality in the war between France and Mexico, and that it had not the least intention or desire to interfere with the action of the people of Mexico in their choice of whatever institutions of Government they may, in the exercise of an absolute freedom, establish." While the position of the administration at that time in regard to the war in Mexico was neutrality, neither the President nor the people indicated any purpose to acquiesce in the imposition of a foreign Prince upon the Mexican people by foreign armies; and on the 4th of April, 1864, the House of Representatives adopted the following resolution : 'Resolved, That the Congress of the United States are unwilling