who could have come to the head of affairs in 1861 bringing with
him none of the embittered resentments growing out of the anti-slavery
battle. Whilst Seward, Chase, Sumner and the rest had been engaged in
hand-to-hand combat with the Southern leaders at Washington, Lincoln, a
philosopher and a statesman, had been observing the course of events
from afar, and like a philosopher and a statesman. The direst blow that
could have been laid upon the prostrate South was delivered by the
assassin's bullet that struck him down.

But I digress. Throughout the contention that preceded the war, amid the
passions that attended the war itself, not one bitter, proscriptive word
escaped the lips of Abraham Lincoln, whilst there was hardly a day that
he was not projecting his great personality between some Southern man or
woman and danger.

Under the date of February 2, 1848, and from the hall of the House of
Representatives at Washington, whilst he was serving as a member of
Congress, I find this short note to his law partner at Springfield:--

"DEAR WILLIAM: I take up my pen to tell you that Mr. Stephens, of
Georgia, a little, slim, pale-faced, consumptive man, with a voice
like Logan's (that was Stephen T., not John A.), has just concluded
the very best speech of an hour's length I ever heard. My old,
withered, dry eyes (he was then not quite thirty-seven years of
age) are full of tears yet."

From that time forward he never ceased to love Stephens, of Georgia.

After that famous Hampton Roads conference, when the Confederate
commissioners, Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter, had traversed the field
of official routine with Mr. Lincoln, the president, and Mr. Seward, the
secretary of state, Lincoln, the friend, still the old Whig colleague,
though one was now president of the United States and the other
vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, took the "slim, pale-faced,
consumptive man" aside, and, pointing to a sheet of paper he held in his
hand, said: "Stephens, let me write 'Union' at the top of that page, and
you may write below it whatever else you please."

In the preceding conversation Mr. Lincoln had intimated that payment for
the slaves was not outside a possible agreement for reunion and peace.
He based that statement upon a plan he already had in hand, to
appropriate four hundred millions of dollars to this purpose.

There are those who have put themselves to the pains of challenging th