Such a letter could not be ignored by the great-hearted man to whom it came. He replied,
“Springfield, Illinois, Oct. 19, 1860.
“My dear little Miss:
“Your very agreeable letter of the fifteenth is received. I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughter. I have three sons; one seventeen; one nine, and one seven years of age. They, with their mother, constitute my whole family. As to whiskers, having never worn any, do you think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I should begin now?
“Your very sincere well-wisher,
A. Lincoln.”
It happened, when on the journey to Washington to be inaugurated, that the train stopped at Westfield. Suddenly, in speaking to the people, he remembered.
“I have a little correspondent at this place,” he said, “I would like to see her.”
Some one called out and asked if Grace Bedell was in the crowd that surged around the train. Far back in the crowd the way began to open and a beautiful little girl came forward, timid but happy, to speak to the President-elect, who was also happy to show her that he had taken her advice and begun to grow a beard. The little girl was lifted up to him. He took her in his arms and tenderly kissed her forehead in the midst of the enthusiastic approval of a cheering multitude.
But the story ran the rounds of the East as the uncouth conduct of a backwoods demagogue.
As Europe got its idea of the new President from the New York and New England papers, he was believed by foreign leaders to be the proof of degenerate democracy and the failure of popular government. Throughout the war there was lavished upon him an unceasing tirade of caricature and lampoon. But they had been deceived. The shock of his assassination seemed to tear off the veil that blinded their eyes, and since then all the scholarship of Europe has analyzed his career as showing one of the great characters of the world. History finds that he was a prophet of ideal humanity, the farthest possible from despotic sovereignties. Dynastic states can never fight for a democratic government merely to preserve it, and democracies can never fight merely to preserve a party in power. It may very well be doubted that the North could have won the Civil War if there had not been involved the moral issues of human slavery. England would surely have intervened for the starving workers of their cottonmills, but the workers refused to have their cause supported by fastening slavery upon any part of the human race.
Lincoln Statue—Chicago, Illinois.