on Journal," in Springfield. He read the
telegram aloud, and then said: "There is a little woman down at our
house who will like to hear this. I'll go down and tell her." The
"little woman" was his wife, whom, as Mary Todd, he had won in 1842, and
he knew that she was more anxious that he should be President than he
himself was.

On the 7th of November, 1860, it was known throughout the country that
Lincoln had been elected. From that very hour dates the conspiracy
which, by easy stages and successive usurpations of authority,
culminated in rebellion. It is painful now to revert to the events which
marked its progress. There is not a man living to-day, I trust, that
does not wish they could be blotted out from our history. While watching
the course of these events Mr. Lincoln chanced one day to be talking
with his friend, Newton Bateman, a highly respectable and Christian
gentleman, and Superintendent of Public Instruction in Illinois. I can
only quote a part of the interview, as furnished by Mr. Bateman himself:
"I know there is a God," said Lincoln; "and he hates injustice and
slavery. I see the storm coming. I know that his hand is in it. If he
has a place and work for me,--and I think he has,--I believe I am ready.
I am nothing; but truth is everything, I know I am right, because I know
that liberty is right; for Christ teaches it; and Christ is God. I have
told them that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand,' and Christ
and reason say the same; and they will find it so.

"Douglas doesn't care whether slavery is voted up or down; but God
cares, and humanity cares, and I care; and with God's help I shall not
fail. I may not see the end, but it will come, and I shall be
vindicated; and these men will find that they have not read their Bible
aright."

We are told that, after a pause, he resumed: "Does it not appear strange
that men can ignore the moral aspects of this contest? A revelation
could not make it plainer to me that slavery or the Government, must be
destroyed. The future would be something awful, as I look at it, but for
this rock on which I stand." He alluded to the Testament which he held
in his hand, and which his mother--"to whom he owed all that he was, or
hoped to be"--had first taught him to read.

There is nothing in history more pathetic than the scene when, on the
11th of February, 1861, Abraham Lincoln bade a last farewell to his home
of a quarter of a century.

To his friends and ne