At one of these receptions, when a paymaster in full major’s uniform was introduced, he said:
“Being here, Mr. Lincoln, I thought I would call and pay my respects.”
“From the complaints made by the soldiers,” responded the President, “I guess that is all any of you do pay.”
[Ward Lamon, when Lincoln had appointed him] Marshal of the District of Columbia, accidentally found himself in a street fight, and, in restoring peace, he struck one of the belligerents with his fist, a weapon with which he was notoriously familiar. The blow was a harder one than Lamon intended, for the fellow was knocked senseless, taken up unconscious, and lay for some hours on the border of life and death. Lamon was alarmed, and the next morning reported the affair to the President.
On another occasion a young soldier had fallen out of ranks when his regiment passed through Washington, and, getting drunk, failed to join his regiment when it left the city. To the friend who came to secure a pardon, Mr. Lincoln said: “Well, I think the boy can do us more good above ground than under ground,” and he wrote out the pardon.
In all such cases as the above, where the ordinary human weakness was the motive, Mr. Lincoln’s heart was tender as a woman’s, but to prove that he could entertain no sympathy for a cool, deliberate, mercenary crime, he was approached by the Hon. John B. Alley, of Massachusetts, one day, with a petition for the pardon of a man who had been convicted of engaging in the slave trade, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and the payment of a fine of one thousand dollars. His term of imprisonment had expired, but in default of payment of the fine, he was still held. In answer to the appeal for pardon Mr. Lincoln said: “You know my weakness is to be, if possible, too easily moved by appeals for mercy, and if this man were guilty of the foulest murder that the arm of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him on such an appeal; but the man who would go to Africa and rob her of her children and sell them into an interminable bondage with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hands. No, he may rot in jail before he shall have liberty by any act of mine.”
Upon another occasion the wife of a rebel officer, held as a prisoner of war, begged for the relief of her husband, and to strengthen her appeal said that he was a very religious man. In granting the release of her husband, Mr. Lincoln said: “Tell your husband when you meet him that I am not much of a judge of religion, but that in my opinion the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government because they think that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread in the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which men can get to heaven.”
One day news of a great battle in progress reached Mr. Lincoln, and his anxiety was so great that he could eat nothing. Soon after he was seen to take a Bible and retire to his room, and in a few minutes he was overheard in one of the most earnest prayers for the success of our arms. Later in the day a Union victory was announced, and Mr. Lincoln, with a beaming face, exclaimed: “Good news! good news! The victory is ours, and God is good.”
AN ARMY NEWSBOY’S ROMANCE.
So many acts of heartlessness and cruelty during the great civil war have been recorded that it is a real pleasure to have an opportunity to record an act of manly kindness on the part of a gallant Confederate soldier to a Yankee boy. In the town of Bennington, in the Green Mountains of Vermont, in the spring of 1861, there lived a poor woman with six children, five boys and one little girl, the youngest of the former a stripling 14 years old. When the wires flashed the news from Washington all over our land that the rebels had fired upon the old flag at Fort Sumpter, the four older boys responded to the country’s call and hurried to the seat of war. The younger lad, his heart fired with genuine Green Mountain patriotism, ran away from home and, eluding pursuit, made his way to the camp on the Potomac. But his ardor was somewhat dampened by the discovery of the fact that he could not, in consequence of his youth and diminutiveness, enlist as a soldier. Determined to remain at the front; and having, as the saying is, to scratch for a living, he went to selling newspapers to the soldiers. Leaving the camp between New Baltimore and Warrenton about the 10th of November, 1862, he went to Washington for a supply of papers. Having accomplished his object, the young lad set out on horseback for the camp, having to travel a distance of thirty miles. A change of position by the army during his absence had occurred, and as a consequence he ran into the rebel picket line and was taken to General J. E. B. Stuart’s headquarters, at a hotel in Warrenton, and from there sent to Libby Prison, in Richmond, arriving there November 13. Major Turner was in command of the prison, and when the young prisoner was brought into his presence, observing that he was a mere boy, the Major spoke kindly to him, and, after his name had been enrolled, asked him the customary question, if he had any money or valuables about his person. The frightened boy had managed to conceal his money, $380, in his boots, and in answer to the question, put his hand down, and while a tear-drop glistened in his bright eye and his boyish lip quivered, he brought it forth and handed it to the rebel major, and trying hard to choke down the swelling in his throat, he told of his widowed mother at home, his four brothers in the army, his having made his money selling papers, and saving it to send with his brothers’ wages to his mother. The Major folded the boy’s passes around the money and said to him: “You shall have this again, my boy, when you are permitted to go from here.” Six weeks afterward the lad was paroled, and, repairing to Major Turner’s office, the kind officer, handing him the package of money and the passes, just as he received them, said: “Here is your money, my boy.” With trembling hands, but a joyous heart, the little fellow took the package. He was sent to Washington, and a few weeks afterward was going his old rounds selling newspapers. The boy was Doc Aubrey, the newsboy of the Iron Brigade, who now resides in Milwaukee.