peculiar circumstances attending the withdrawal of Mr. Chase, connected with the course taken by his friends prior to the Baltimore Convention, all cause for remembering them was removed by the subsequent action of Mr. Lincoln. Chief-Justice Taney of the Supreme Court died on the 12th of October, and, after giving a full hearing to all who chose to offer advice upon the subject, the President named Mr. Chase as his successor. The possible range of human events could not have offered him a better means for testifying his repudiation of personal animosity and his keen appreciation of patriotic fidelity and capacity.

The appointment to the Supreme Court bench of his old and tried friend and adviser, David Davis, of Illinois, was in a somewhat different way a similar testimonial to personal worth, conferred without regard to political or any other influence to the contrary.

If Mr. Lincoln's utterances and letters, during this period, continually express his increasing religious feeling and his confidence in an overruling Providence, his correspondence with army commanders testifies to his belief that the conduct of military affairs was at last in the right hands. He had his doubts, indeed, as to the wisdom of Sherman's march into Georgia, but he refused to interfere. In a letter to General Grant he said:

"The particulars of your plan I neither know nor seek to know. You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any restraints or constraints upon you."

General Grant's reply contained this comprehensive testimony:

"From my first entrance into the volunteer service of my country to the present day, I have never had cause of complaint. . . . Indeed, since the promotion which placed me in command of all the armies, and in view of the great responsibility and importance of success, I have been astonished at the

readiness with which everything asked for has been yielded, without even an explanation being asked."

How great a relief was thus obtained by the weary Commander-in-Chief can hardly be estimated. How much he was in need of such relief could only be guessed, at the time, by those who loved him and narrowly noted the visible signs that his iron constitution was beginning to yield to the ceaseless drain and strain.

The overthrow of the Rebellion, the return of peace, might possibly bring him easier times. His mind was stronger and clearer than ever, and his education was still going steadily forward; but his bodily frame was bent and at times it drooped a little, for the burdens yet upon him were almost too much for human endurance.

CHAPTER LIV.

A VALEDICTORY.

Putting Emancipation into the Constitution-Sherman in South CarolinaThe Peace Conference in Hampton Roads-Useless Bloodshed-The Second Inaugural.

CONGRESS assembled on the 5th of December, 1864, and the President sent in his Message the next day. In this he tersely reviewed the military and political position of the country, at home and abroad. He called attention to the manifest gains of the country in wealth and population, with reference to its undiminished ability to continue the war. He urged the adoption of an Amendment to the Constitution, forever prohibiting human slavery in the United States. He declared that the Rebels could at any time have peace by simply laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution.

At the previous session of the same Congress an effort to provide for such a Constitutional Amendment as Mr. Lincoln advised had failed. The time was not then ripe for it. It was now plain to all, however, that the full time had come, and the necessary two-thirds vote of the House of Representatives was obtained with moderate difficulty, the Senate being already secure.

The President publicly declared to a crowd who assembled at the White House, to congratulate him, that the Amendment seemed to him the one thing needful. It completed and confirmed the work of the Proclamation of Emancipation, if duly ratified by the several States. He urged those who heard him go home and see that this was done.

to

The war was pressed with untiring vigor, at every point,

through the month of December. In January the army under General Sherman faced northward, sweeping through South Carolina. Charleston fell into its hands like an overripe apple. No force remained with any power to stand in its way, and the Richmond rulers began to realize that their hour was coming. Studying well the terms of peace announced in Mr. Lincoln's message to Congress, but not yet comprehending them, they determined upon a last effort to save something from the impending wreck of the Confederacy.

An informal conference was obtained, February 3, 1865, upon a steamer in Hampton Roads, between the Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, R. M. T. Hunter and J. A. Campbell, representing the Richmond authorities; and Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward. The President's assent to this interview was given at the request of General Grant, but with small hope of profitable results. None such were at all possible. No written propositions were made or offered on either side. No formal report of the conversation was permitted, but the substance of it was at once made public, both at the North and South.

The Confederate commissioners desired to obtain a temporary cessation of hostilities, in the nature of an armistice or truce between two independent powers, each reducing their armaments and postponing the express terms and conditions of a permanent peace and settlement to some future time and after further consideration and negotiation. It was argued that the passions of the two peoples would thus have time to cool, commercial and other relations could at once be resumed, and an end could be reached without further bloodshed. What the commissioners omitted to urge was that the Rebellion would thereby gain much more than it could by a sudden destruction of Sherman's army.

Mr. Lincoln's replies were a substantial reproduction of the doctrines announced in his message to Congress, with the addition of the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery.

The commissioners, sincere as might be their desire to obtain a season of rest and recuperation for the Confederacy, with a covert acknowledgment of its independent, treaty-making existence, or earnest as may have been their personal longing for peace, were neither prepared nor empowered to negotiate for a full surrender. The President neither could nor would discuss any other proposition than precisely that, for he was acting solely as Commander-in-Chief. He really possessed no other than strictly military right and power in the premises, for it was not a case of a treaty with a foreign power.

A Georgia newspaper, on the supposed authority of Mr. Stephens, reports Mr. Lincoln as declaring that he could not recognize another government inside the one of which he alone was President. "That," he said, "would be doing what you so long asked Europe to do, in vain, and be resigning the only thing the Union armies are fighting for." Mr. Hunter replied that the recognition of the power of Mr. Davis to make a treaty was the first and indispensable step to peace.

This was a mere play upon words, substituting the idea of a "treaty of peace" with the Richmond authorities for the other idea of a restoration of the peace of the whole country. To point his reply, and as offering one precedent of a constitutional ruler treating with armed rebels, Mr. Hunter cited the correspondence of Charles the First of England with the Parliament. The newspaper report says:

"Mr. Lincoln's face wore that indescribable expression which generally preceded his hardest hits; and he remarked: 'Upon questions of history I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted in such things, and I don't profess to be; but my only distinct recollection of the matter is that Charles lost his head.""

There was an old personal friendship between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stephens, dating from the time when they were members of Congress together, and the conference assumed therefrom a tone of mutual ease and freedom from constraint; but