"As the dawn came and the lamplight grew pale in the fresher beams, his pulse began to fail; but his face even then was scarcely more haggard than those of the sorrowing group of statesmen and generals around him. His automatic moaning, which had continued through the night, ceased; a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features. At twenty-two minutes after seven he died. Stanton broke the silence by saying, 'Now he belongs to the ages.' Dr. Gurley kneeled by the bedside and prayed fervently. The widow came in from the adjoining room, supported by her son, and cast herself with loud outcry on the dead body."
[VIII]
THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SLAVES
Abraham Lincoln's hatred of slavery was inborn, but its development began when he saw human beings sold at auction on the levee at New Orleans and chained and beaten upon the decks of Mississippi River steamboats on their way to market. These horrors were first witnessed by him when he made his voyage on the flat-boat from Gentryville, and the impression was deepened upon his second journey four years later from New Salem. Even to the day of his death the recollection was vivid. He alluded to it frequently while the slave problem was perplexing him and his advisers during the war, and the picture was before his eyes when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. As one of his companions said, "Slavery ran the iron into him then and there."
However, the mind of the boy had been prepared for this impression by the teachings of his mother. In 1804 a crusade against slavery in Kentucky was started by the itinerant preachers of the Baptist Church, and the Rev. Jesse Head, the minister who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, was a bold abolitionist and boldly proclaimed the doctrine of human liberty wherever he went. Lincoln's father and mother were among his most devoted disciples, and when he was a mere child Abraham Lincoln inherited their hatred of human servitude. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he once said in a speech. "I cannot remember when I did not think so and feel so."
Down in a corner of Indiana where the Lincolns lived there were slaves for years after the admission of the State to the Union, in spite of the ordinance of 1787 and the statutes which Lincoln read in his youth. Nor was the fact a secret. The census of 1820 showed one hundred and ninety slaves, but during the next year the State Supreme Court declared them free.
In the following year (1822) occurred a great moral revolution on the frontier. Then commenced the struggle between the friends and opponents of slavery which lasted until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Abraham Lincoln, with the preparation I have described, was from the beginning an active participant, and gradually became a leader in one of the greatest controversies that has ever engaged the intellectual and moral forces of the world.
In 1822, eight years before the Lincoln family left Indiana, an attempt was made to introduce slavery into Illinois, and was defeated by Edward Coles, of Virginia, the Governor, who gave his entire salary for four years to pay the expense of the contest. The antislavery members of the Legislature contributed a thousand dollars to the fund, which was spent in the distribution of literature on the subject. For a time the storm subsided, but the deep hatred of the iniquity was spreading through the North, and abolition societies were being organized in every city and village where the friends of human freedom existed in sufficient numbers to sustain themselves against the powerful proslavery sentiment. Occasionally there was a public discussion, but the controversy raged most fiercely at the corner groceries, at the county court-house, and at other places where thinking men were in the habit of assembling, and Lincoln was always ready and eager to enter the debates. His convictions were formed and grew firmer as he studied the question, and his moral courage developed with them. It was a good deal of an ordeal for an ambitious young man just beginning his career to attack a popular institution, in the midst of a community many of whom had been born and educated in slave States and considered what he believed a curse to be a divine institution. Nevertheless, the sense of justice and humanity stimulated Abraham Lincoln to take his place upon the side of freedom, and he never lost an opportunity to denounce slavery as founded on injustice and wrong.
His first opportunity to make a public avowal of his views occurred in 1838, when the Illinois Legislature passed a series of resolutions declaring that the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slave-holding States by the Federal Constitution, and "that we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies and of the doctrines promulgated by them." Lincoln and five other members of the Legislature voted against these resolutions; and in order to make his position more fully understood by his constituents and the members of the Whig party throughout the State, he prepared a protest, which he persuaded Dan Stone, one of his colleagues from Sangamon County, to sign with him, and, at their request, it was spread upon the journal of the House, as follows: