Colonel H. S. Huydekoper in his pamphlet of Personal Notes and Reminiscences, says:

The eighteen hundred soldiers enlisted as above described, were formed into two regiments, which did excellent service till the end of the war. Not a man ever deserted, and all proved loyal to their new allegiance. From other prisons, other men were subsequently enlisted, making in all 5,738 reconstructed Rebels who served under the old flag before the close of the war.*

Thus Lincoln was ready for his second administration with a Cabinet considerably changed; but his secretaries of state, war and navy remained with him.

The story of Andrew Johnson does not belong to this volume. Yet it must be recorded that the auspices under which he assumed the office of vice-president were inauspicious from the beginning. It was widely if not generally believed by those who saw him inducted into office, that the vice-president was intoxicated at the time. Honorable John W. Forney thus recorded his experience:

I can never forget President Lincoln's face as he came into the Senate chamber while Johnson was delivering his incoherent harangue. Lincoln had been detained signing the bills that had just passed the old Congress, and could not witness the regular opening of the new Senate until the ceremonies had fairly commenced. He took his seat facing the brilliant and surprised audience and heard all that took place with unutterable sorrow. He then spoke his own short inaugural from the middle portico of the Capitol, and rode quickly home. Bitter maledictions were

*A story is related concerning a regiment of a thousand men who were enlisted at Alton, Illinois, and Camp Douglas, in Chicago. They left Chicago on two special trains. Each man had in his pocket two hundred dollars bounty in United States greenbacks, and none of them had any other money. During the period of their imprisonment the most of them had become habitual card players, if they had not previously been so. It is said that before they reached their destination a very few individuals had the lion's share of the money. Perhaps never before on earth was there so equitable an experiment in the results of starting men out in life on the basis of an equal division of property. The equal division appears not to have lasted very long.

immediately hurled against the new Vice President. I hastened to his defense to the best of my ability, believing the affair to have been an accident. Threats of impeachment were common in both parties, especially among the Democrats; and the crusade got so fierce at last, that I found myself included among those who had helped Mr. Johnson to his exposure. But no voice of anger was heard from Abraham Lincoln. When nearly all censured, and many threatened, Mr. Lincoln simply said, “It has been a severe lesson for Andy, but I do not think he will do it again."

So it came about that, soon after one o'clock on March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln stood for the second time upon a platform at the eastern portico of the capitol and took the oath of office as president of the United States. The morning was cold, stormy and cloudy, but at noon the rain ceased and the sun came forth. The procession from the White House was dignified and solemn. In the group that surrounded the platform, large numbers of wounded soldiers were conspicuous. Behind the president as he took his place upon the platform were the judges of the Supreme Court in their official robes, the diplomatic corps in their uniforms, and distinguished officers of the government both in military and civil life. Among these appeared the tall form of the president advancing to take the oath of office. Stephen A. Douglas was not there to hold his hat. Roger B. Taney was not there to administer the oath of office. Both these distinguished men were dead. Salmon P. Chase, the new chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, stepped forward with a Bible open at the fifth chapter of Isaiah, which the president reverently kissed, and which the chief justice later presented to Mrs. Lincoln.

The oath of office was administered by the man who had sought to supplant Lincoln, and to whom Lincoln had returned good for evil by placing him in this highest judicial position.

The second inaugural address measures the intellectual power and the moral purpose of Abraham Lincoln at high-water mark.

Noble as was the Gettysburg Address, this rises to a still higher level of nobility. Perhaps there is no state paper in the history of the government of modern nations that breathes so distinctly a religious tone. The first inaugural was conciliatory, patient and persuasive; the second embodied a spirit as generous and devout as it was wise and statesmanlike. It is the greatest of the addresses of Abraham Lincoln, and registers his intellectual and spiritual power at their highest altitude.

In a clear voice, which sometimes trembled with emotion, Lincoln read his second inaugural:

Fellow Countrymen :-At this second appearing 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 very 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 attention and engrosses the energies 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 avoid 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 with war,-seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide the 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 colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized 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 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 anticipated 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 prayer 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 these 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 there 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 bondsman'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 by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, that "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us 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 orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

CHAPTER XXII

LIBERTY AND UNION

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THE Proclamation of Emancipation was a war measure. cording to the president's interpretation of his own constitutional prerogative, he had no authority to issue such a proclamation on other grounds than those of military necessity. The proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, and it became immediately effective in states that were then in rebellion against the government wherever the armies of the United States controlled the situation. The area within which the proclamation cperated widened with each success of the Federal Army. Great numbers of slaves in territory still held by the Confederates escaped through the lines and sought shelter and protection from the Union Army. What to do with them was a question, nor had it been certain in the early days of the war by what legal right they could be held. General Butler had proclaimed them "contraband of war." This ingenious definition availed, and was employed with great freedom and elasticity until the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued. After that negroes escaping from bondage in the states in rebellion were free whenever they could get to where their freedom could be made effective. A hundred thousand negro soldiers were soon bearing arms and fighting for their own freedom; and that number before the end of the war was practically doubled.

As the end of the war grew visibly near, the question became a pressing one whether the Emancipation Proclamation, distinctly issued as a war measure, would hold after the war was over. Lincoln himself believed that, with the return of peace, the voters