Imagine Lincoln, sitting in far-away Springfield, helpless to act, while Buchanan permitted a foreign government to be set up within the United States, and promised to use no force against the rebels lest war might follow.
Think of the newly-chosen leader of the American people compelled to silence and impotence while the President refused to send relief to loyal Major Anderson and his handful of soldiers besieged in Fort Sumter by rebels whose arms had been furnished by the government they sought to destroy!
The lines in Lincoln’s face deepened. His eyes grew more sorrowful. The stooping shoulders stooped still lower. There was that in his look sometimes that compelled mingled awe and pity.
For Lincoln loved his country with the love that a father has for his child, and the pent-up agony that showed in his lean visage as he watched the attempt to break up the great republic might not yet find utterance.
It was useless for him to repeat that he did not hate the South; that he did not favor the political and social equality of negroes and whites; that he was not an abolitionist; that, although he considered slavery wrong and would oppose its extension to Kansas and all other free soil of the United States, he would do nothing to interfere with it in the States where it had Constitutional rights.
Yet he waited patiently and silently, believing that he could persuade the South that he was not an enemy, and in that time of slow anguish his soul turned to God for help.
The careless, foot-free, waggish woodchopper of New Salem had scoffed at religion, and written a bitter attack on the Bible, which a wiser friend had snatched from his hands and burned. The President-elect with the cares of a mighty nation in its death throes descending upon his shoulders, stretched his hands child-like to a power greater even than the “omnipotent and sovereign people.”
Fac-simile of Lincoln’s letter of acceptance
Mr. Herndon, his law partner, has given us an unforgetable picture of Lincoln a day before his departure for the White House: