accepting the burden of cares and responsibilities so suddenly thrown upon him, he put his whole heart in the work before him, and not even the disasters of 1862, that gloomiest year of the war, could for a moment shake his confiding spirit. People were not wanting who found fault with the buoyant temper he displayed at that period; but his apparent cheeriness was of as much avail as our armies in bringing about the triumph which at last came. Of the struggle which resulted in this triumph we shall give no details, only referring briefly to some of the more important actions of the President. The most momentous of these, without doubt, was the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on the 22d of September, 1862, and to take effect on the 1st of January, 1863, by which slavery was at once and forever done away with in the United States. In his message to Congress, the President thus explains this act: "In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth. The way is plain, peaceful, glorious, just-a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless." In 1864, by a respectable majority in the popular vote and a large one in the electoral college, Mr. Lincoln was re-elected to the Presidency. At the period of his second inauguration, the complete triumph of the Federal authority over the seceded States was assured. The last battles of the war had been fought. War had substantially ceased. The President was looking forward to the more congenial work of pacification. How he designed to carry out this work we may judge from the following passage in his second inaugural: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all that may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Unfortunately, the kind-hearted Lincoln was not to carry out the work of pacification to which he looked forward with such bright anticipations. But a little more than a month after his second inauguration on the night of the 14th of April, 1865-John Wilkes Booth, one of a small band of desperate conspirators, as insanely foolish as they were wicked, fired a pistol-ball into the brain of the President as he sat in his box at the theatre. The wound proved fatal in a few hours, Mr. Lincoln never recovering his consciousness. The excitement which the assassination of the President occasioned was most intense. The whole country was in tears. Nor was this grief confined to our own people. England, France, all Europe, and even the far-off countries of China and Japan, joined in the lamentation. Never was man more universally mourned, or more deserving of such widespread sorrow. The funeral honors were grand and imposing. His body, having been embalmed, was taken to his home at Springfield, Illinois, passing through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, and other large towns and cities. The entire road seemed to be lined with mourners, while in the chief cities the funeral ceremonies were equally solemn and magnificent. T ANDREW JOHNSON, HE constitutional successor to President Lincoln, was born in Raleigh, N. C., December 29th, 1808. Prevented by the poverty of his parents from receiving any schooling, he was apprenticed, at the age of ten, to a tailor. On the expiration of his apprenticeship, he went to Greenville, Tenn., where he married. By his wife he was taught to write and to cipher, having already learned to read. Taking considerable interest in local politics, he formed a workingman's party in the town, by which he was elected alderman, and afterward Mayor. In 1835, he was elected to a seat in the Legislature. |