“We will turn you in loose here,” proved an “open sesame” to me during
the subsequent months of my occupation at the White House. My access
to the official chamber was made nearly as free as that of the private
secretaries, unless special business was being transacted. Sometimes
a stranger, approaching the President with a low tone, would turn
an inquiring eye toward the place where I sat, absorbed frequently
in a pencil sketch of some object in the room. This would be met by
the hearty tones of Mr. Lincoln,--I can hear them yet ringing in my
ears,--“Oh, you need not mind him; he is but a painter.” There was
a satisfaction to me, differing from that of any other experience,
in simply sitting with him. Absorbed in his papers, he would become
unconscious of my presence, while I intently studied every line and
shade of expression in that furrowed face. In repose, it was the
saddest face I ever knew. There were days when I could scarcely look
into it without crying. During the first week of the battles of the
Wilderness he scarcely slept at all. Passing through the main hall of
the domestic apartment on one of these days, I met him, clad in a long
morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow passage leading to one
of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes,
his head bent forward upon his breast,--altogether such a picture
of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety as would have melted the
hearts of the worst of his adversaries, who so mistakenly applied to
him the epithets of tyrant and usurper. With a sorrow almost divine,
he, too, could have said of the rebellious States, “How often would I
have gathered you together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under
her wings, _and ye would not_!” Like another Jeremiah, he wept over the
desolations of the nation; “he mourned the slain of the daughter of his
people.”
Surely, ruler never manifested so much sympathy, and tenderness,
and charity. How like the last words of the Divine one himself,
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” will the
closing sentences of his last inaugural address resound in solemn
cadence through the coming centuries. Truly and well says the London
“Spectator” of that address: “We cannot read it without a renewed
conviction that it is the noblest political document known to history,
and should have for the nation and the statesmen he left behind him
something of a sacred and almost prophetic character. Surely, none was
ever written under a stronger sense of the reality of God’s government.
And certainly none written in a period of passionate conflict ever so
completely excluded the partiality of victorious faction, and breathed
so pure a strain of mingled justice and mercy.”