President Lincoln " was the written inscription under a photograph of Lincoln which was found in the pocket of a dead soldier after the battle of Fredericksburg. By the President's mercy he had been spared a dishonorable death to die on the field of honor.

The oft-told story of Lincoln and the sleeping sentinel has the power to move the heart far more than any feat of arms in the Civil War. The sentinel was a young soldier from Vermont, who was condemned to die in a camp near Washington because he had fallen asleep while on guard duty. The offence was particularly serious at the time, because the safety of the capital depended on the watchfulness of the sentries. The officials determined to make an example of the Green Mountain youth. Every effort to save him had failed when the captain and the members of his company, all neighbors of the doomed offender, went to the White House and saw Lincoln.

A few hours afterward the boy was astonished to receive a visit from the President of the United States, who asked him about his parents, their farm, his work, and his life generally. He told the President the simple story of his old home among the hills, and took from his pocket a picture of his mother. Lincoln told him he was too good a boy to be shot

for merely falling asleep once. He himself had been brought up on a farm and knew how hard it must be for a country boy to keep awake nights when new to army habits and duties. He promised to free him, but he would have to present a heavy bill for his services.

The soldier's happy face reflected a grateful heart. He was sure his father would raise what money he could by mortgaging the farm and pay the charge. Lincoln said that would not be enough; the boy alone could pay the bill and only by proving himself to be as brave and faithful as any soldier of the Union. His hand rested on the head and his kindly eyes looked full into the honest face of the boy, who pledged his life that he would not disappoint his benefactor.

The President's bill was presented not long afterward. It was in the Peninsular Campaign and in the boy's first battle. In a desperate charge across a river and upon some blazing rifle pits he was among the first to face and among the last to turn his back on the enemy. When retreat was sounded, he swam in safety to the friendly bank of the stream.

But he felt he had not yet paid the President's bill. He plunged into the water again and again, and swam to and fro under the shot of the foe in the work of rescuing wounded comrades, until he

had brought back the last of them, but with a bullet in his own loyal breast. Then he was ready to close his account with earth. He had paid the President's bill in full, and with his dying breath he blessed the mercy of Lincoln for trusting him and permitting him to give his life for the Union.

LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR

His life-long hatred of slavery. - Why he was not an Abolitionist. His courage and wisdom in resisting rash counsels. — Could not free the slaves as President, but only as Commander-inchief and as a military, not as a moral measure. General Butler's declaration that slaves were contraband of war, May, 1861. Lincoln's effort to promote gradual, compensated emancipation in the border states. - The slaves in the District of Columbia emancipated by Congress, April 16, 1862. Lincoln first announced to his cabinet, July 22, 1862, his purpose to proclaim emancipation in warring states. -Writing the Proclamation in secret. His vow to God. - A strange scene in the cabinet room, Lincoln first reading from Artemus Ward, and then reading his Proclamation, September 22, 1862. — Emancipation of more than three million slaves proclaimed, January 1, 1863. The Confederacy staggered. One hundred and fifty thousand black troops for the Union in 1864. — The South driven to arming the negroes. - Lincoln's ideals for the freedmen. - His dread of a race_problem. - The thirteenth amendment adopted by Congress, February 1, 1865, and ratified by the states, December 18, 1865.

LINCOLN always hated slavery. Yet he never was an Abolitionist, for the Abolitionists who were ridiculed as long-haired men and short-haired women, or cranks, hated the Constitution and the Union as well as slavery. Because the Constitution recognized the existence of slavery and protected it within the states where it existed, they denounced

it as a league with death and a covenant with hell. Despairing of the abolition of slavery within the Union, they loudly advocated disunion and the separation of the North from the South.

Lincoln, on the other hand, felt a deep passion for the Union, and it was his faith that the principles of liberty and equality, on which it was founded, would surely lead in the end to the gradual emancipation of the slaves. He believed the nation would not permanently remain half free and half slave; that it would become either one thing or the other, and that under the inspiration of the Declaration of Independence and the democratic institutions of the republic, freedom would triumph.

The Abolitionists did not support him when he was a candidate for President, and after he became President their eloquent orator, Wendell Phillips, described him as "the slave hound of Illinois." Lincoln was still for the Union above all else, for he felt if that were lost, the surest guarantee of freedom for white men as well as black would be lost.

If he had permitted the Civil War to become at once a fight against slavery rather than a fight for the life of the Union, he would have driven from his side the slave states on the border and a majority of the people of the free states of the North