The ballots were inscribed on wooden blocks, and read as follows:
President, Abraham Lincoln
and underneath, in brackets,
[Abram J. Dittenhoefer] Elector
A few weeks later I took one of these wooden block ballots with me to Washington and showed it to the President. He asked me if I would not give it to him as a souvenir, which I was very glad to do.
Horace Greeley and Preston King were the two electors-at-large. Although Greeley had violently opposed the renomination of Lincoln, wise counsels put him at the head of the Presidential electors, a compliment that Mr. Greeley told me highly gratified him, in view of his previous attitude toward the President.
When Mr. Greeley became the Democratic candidate for President in 1872 and many Republicans seceded from the Republican party, Mr. Greeley requested me to act as chairman of the executive committee of the Liberal Republican Central Committee in New York City, and I consented to do so. Chauncey M. Depew, who also identified himself with the Liberal Republican organization, became the candidate of the party for Secretary of State of New York. I afterward regretted that I had joined in that movement, and my regret was intensified when Greeley’s campaign turned out to be so great a fiasco.
Lincoln’s assassination, April 12, 1865, thwarted the generous, noble-hearted plans which he had devised for the restoration of the Union, and resulted in imposing upon the Southern people by Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, the corrupt “carpet-bag” régime.
Lincoln’s place in the history of civilization is immutably fixed. During the last ten years of his career, he was the greatest of all living men. As statesman and reformer he belongs not alone to America, but to the whole world.
George Washington established this Republic, but the curse of human slavery adhered to the otherwise splendid Government he was so largely instrumental in creating.