N PROCLAMATION BEFORE THE CABINET.

R. FRANK B. CARPENTER IN 1864.

non Cameron, first Secretary of War under President Lincoln. of ex-President Andrew Jackson.

He was a man of fine fiber, and thus a brain of superior power was contained in a small but rather elongated skull. Horatio Seymour once spoke of him as a man "who wore a No. 7 hat and a No. 14 boot." His movements were rather angular, but never awkward, and he was never burdened with that frequent curse of unfortunate genius, the dreadful oppression of petty self-con

sciousness.

It was a most remarkable character, that of Abraham Lincoln. He had the most comprehensive, the most judicious mind; he was the least faulty in his conclusions of any man that I have ever known. He never stepped too soon, and he never stepped too late. Just consider, if you can, the problem that

was before him when he became President: One third of the country in open rebellion-not merely in rebellion on account of this peculiar property in slaves that we have spoken of, but also because its people had an intense conviction that they had the right, under the Constitution, to leave the Union when they thought it was advantageous to do so.

They had come into the Union, they had accepted the Constitution, and they could n't admit that that was an irrevocable transaction. The right of rebellion had been talked of in every quarter. Every man has a right to rebel, we were told, if only he is willing to take the consequences. That was the doctrine of our seceding countrymen in the South.

They were defending their property as we would defend ours, and they were defending what they considered to be an inherent right, the right of every freeman to say whether he will submit to the government that is over him, or rebel and take the consequences. And I am bound to declare that the most of them were just as sincere in their purpose and their passion as we were in

ours.

Mr. Lincoln was not what you would call an educated man. The college that he had attended was that which a man attends who gets up at daylight to hoe the corn, and sits up at night to read the best book he can find, by the side of a burning pine-knot. What education he had, he had picked up in that way.