In Tom's boyhood, the names of the three were household words and names by which to conjure. The arrows the three shot at Lincoln pierced his heart, but his gentle patience never gave way. He bore with their well-meant but unjust criticism as he bore with so much else in those dark days, careless of hurt to himself, if he could but serve his country and do his duty as he saw it to do. A clear light shone upon one great duty and this he did. On September 22, 1862, he signed his famous Emancipation Proclamation, which with its sequence the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ended forever slavery wherever the Stars-and-Stripes waved. In the early days of that great September, even a boy could feel in the tense atmosphere of the White House that some great event was impending. Nobody knew upon just what the master mind was brooding, but the whole world was to know it soon. It was not until Lincoln had written with his own hand in the solitude of his own room the charter of freedom for the Southern slaves that he called together his Cabinet, not to advise him about it, but to hear from him what he had resolved to do. The messenger who summoned the Cabinet officials to that historic session was none other than Uncle Moses. Tom of course had long since told the story of his flight for freedom, including Unk' Mose's stout-hearted attack at the very nick of time upon the overseer. Lincoln was touched by the tale of the old negro's fine feat. He had Tom bring Moses to see him and Moses emerged from that interview the proudest darkey in the world, for he was made a messenger and general utility man at the White House. Part of his duty was to keep in order the room where the Cabinet met and to summon its members when a meeting of it was called. Uncle Moses, pacing slowly but majestically from the White House to the different Departments, bearing a message from the President to his Cabinet ministers, was a very different person from the Unk' Mose who had cared for Tom and Morris in the Alabama canebrake. The scarecrow had become a man. On these little journeys, Tad Lincoln often went with him, his small white hand clutching one of Mose's big gnarled, black fingers. Although Moses knew nothing of it at the time, the day he bore the summons to the meeting at which the Proclamation that freed his race was read was the great day of his life. It is well for any man or boy even to touch the fringe of a great event in the world's history.
"I dun car'd de freedum Proc-a-mation," Uncle Moses used to say with ever-deepening pride as the years rolled by. In his extreme old age, he came to think he really had carried the Proclamation to the Cabinet, instead of simply summoning the Cabinet to the meeting at which the Proclamation was first read. Memory plays queer tricks with the old. So Unk' Mose's tale lost nothing in the telling, year after year.
The next evening the Cabinet gathered at a small party at the residence of Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury. John Hay was there. He wrote that evening in his diary: "They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life; they breathed freer; the President's Proclamation had freed them as well as the slaves. They gleefully and merrily called themselves Abolitionists and seemed to enjoy the novel accusation of appropriating that horrible name." The Proclamation made it respectable to be an Abolitionist. Every great reform is disreputable until it succeeds.
The Proclamation seemed to have freed the President too. When a man has made a New Year's gift of freedom to millions of men in bondage—emancipation was to take place wherever the Stars-and-Stripes flew on January 1, 1863—such a man must have a wonderful glow of reflected happiness. Always gentle, he grew gentler. Always with a keen eye for humorous absurdity, he grew still more fond of it.
Tom was sent for one day and hurried to the President's office. Lincoln was stretched out at full length, his body in a swivel-chair, his long legs on the sill of the open window. He was holding a seven-foot telescope to his eyes, its other end resting upon his toes. He was looking at two steamboats puffing hard up the Potomac. What news did they bring? As the boy knocked, the President, without turning his head, called out: "Come in, Tommy."
Tom opened the door and as he did so John Hay pushed excitedly by him, a telegram in his hand, saying:
"Mr. President, what do you think Smith of Illinois has done? He is behaving very badly."
"Smith," answered Lincoln, "is a miracle of meanness, but I'm too busy to quarrel with him. Don't tell me what he's done and probably I'll never hear of it."