From that moment the North stood under the blue and stars, the flag of Nature, sublime and free.
In 1831, Lincoln went down the Mississippi on a flat-boat. He received the extravagant salary of ten dollars a month. When he reached New Orleans, he and some of his companions went about the city.
Among other places, they visited a slave market, where men and women were being sold at auction. A young colored girl was on the block. Lincoln heard the brutal words of the auctioneer—the savage remarks of bidders. The scene filled his soul with indignation and horror.
Turning to his companions, he said, "Boys, if I ever get a chance to hit slavery, by God I'll hit it hard!"
The helpless girl, unconsciously, had planted in a great heart the seeds of the Proclamation.
Thirty-one years afterward the chance came, the oath was kept, and to four millions of slaves, of men, women and children, was restored liberty, the jewel of the soul.
In the history, in the fiction of the world, there is nothing more intensely dramatic than this.
Lincoln held within his brain the grandest truths, and he held them as unconsciously, as easily, as naturally, as a waveless pool holds within its stainless breast a thousand stars.
In these two years we had traveled from the Ordinance of Secession to the Proclamation of Emancipation.
VI.