They met and shook hands with the old fervor and renewed their friendship.
The informal reception over, Lincoln sent for his old friend, and the latter began to urge his claims.
After having given him some good advice, Lincoln kindly told him he was incapable of holding any such position as he asked for. The disappointment of the Illinois friend was plainly shown, and with a perceptible tremor in his voice he said, “Martha’s dead, the gal is married, and I’ve guv Jim the forty.”
Then looking at Lincoln he came a little nearer and almost whispered, “I knowed I wasn’t eddicated enough to git the place, but I kinder want to stay where I ken see ‘Abe’ Lincoln.”
He was given employment in the White House grounds.
Afterwards the President said, “These brief interviews, stripped of even the semblance of ceremony, give me a better insight into the real character of the person and his true reason for seeking one.”
GOT HIS FOOT IN IT.
William H. Seward, idol of the Republicans of the East, six months after Lincoln had made his “Divided House” speech, delivered an address at Rochester, New York, containing this famous sentence:
“It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must, and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”