who in two months more was to become vice-President of the Confederate States, as follows:

Your obliging answer to my short note is just received, and for which please accept my thanks. I fully appreciate the present peril the country is in, and the weight of responsibility on me. Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly or indirectly, interfere with the slaves, or with them about the slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington. I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended, while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That, I suppose, is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

To his trusted friend, Senator Lyman Trumbull, Lincoln did, indeed, confide a letter, containing a statement of his attitude toward the South, for conditional publication. The letter was written on the importunity of General Duff Green, but not entrusted to him, and was to be delivered to him for publicity, provided, first, that Trumbull thought it not unwise to do so "on consultation with our dis

creet friends"; and secondly, provided that the twelve United States Senators from the States of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, would sign the following declaration to be published conjointly with Lincoln's statement:

We recommend to the people of the States we represent respectively, to suspend all action for the dismemberment of the Union, at least until some act deemed to be violative of our rights shall be done by the incoming administration.1

Which of course was never done! Few circumstances in Lincoln's life more fittingly illustrate his consummate skill in handling a delicate situation to the advantage of his cause than this. Had his letter to General Green been given to the public, it would have enlightened it—in addition to the obligation it imposed upon the representatives of the States next to secede upon two points of general interest only. One of these was, that the President-elect was not averse to the people's having an opportunity to express their will through an amendment to the Constitution (which he himself did not desire); the other matter, copied from the late Republican plat

I This single sentence of Lincoln's condenses the burden of A. H. Stephens's remarkable speech before the Georgia convention three weeks later.

form, admitted the right of "each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively," together with a repudiation of any "lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext." Both of these subjects, two months afterward, were embodied in the First Inaugural, and must have been already determined upon for treatment in that address.

The public mind, growing daily more feverish since the national election, became intensely solicitous over the fate of the Union. It eagerly watched for some expression of prospective policy from the man, suddenly drawn from the citizenry of a small western town and as yet unpracticed in statecraft, upon whom any rescue from the critical drift toward disintegration clearly rested. Although not widely announced, the new leader's permanent temper in the execution of his task had been heard. On November 20, to his fellow-townsmen, at a meeting to celebrate his election, he said: "I thank you in common with all those who have thought fit by their votes to endorse the Republican cause. I rejoice with you in the success which has thus far attended that cause. Yet in all our rejoicings, let us neither express nor cherish any hard feelings toward any citizen who by his vote has differed with us. Let us at all times remember that all

American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling.”

Literature contains no more golden or precious words. Here was the initial expression of that wonderful charity which was to give endurance to his work as well as immortality to what he said. It was the feeling which was one day to be enshrined in language of faultless beauty, when his spirit had been mellowed by sorrow and service.

There was a distinctive strain of the spiritual and the prescient in Abraham Lincoln. He was in every sense of the word a child of the earth. His reactions were strikingly human. In one accent or another they seem to have touched, for a note of harmony, every chord of individual experience. Whatever share of genius posterity will finally ascribe to him, it will doubtless find a basis for the judgment in his possession of strains both romantic and classic. There were moments when sweetness and tenderness gave charm to what he said or did. He could rise to feelings that were, on the occasion, majestic in manner and effect. Yet he could be ludicrous. He had instincts that were genuinely dramatic. He was by nature a gentleman, honest, upright, sincerely desirous of self-improvement. Ever thoughtful