The mass of examples of Lincoln's leniency, mercifulness, and lack of
rigor, lead one to believe he could not be inexorable. But there was
one crime to which he was unforgiving--the truckling to slavery. The
smuggling of slaves into the South was carried on much later than a
guileless public imagine. Only fifty years ago, a slave-trader
languished in a Massachusetts prison, in Newburyport, serving out a
five years' sentence, and still confined from inability to procure the
thousand dollars to pay a superimposed fine. Mr. Alley, congressman of
Lynn, felt compassion, and busied himself to try to procure the
wretch's release. For that he laid the unfortunate's petition before
President Lincoln. It acknowledged the guilt and the justice of his
condemnation; he was penitent and deplored his state--all had fallen
away from him after his conviction. The chief arbiter was touched by
the piteous and emphatic appeal. Nevertheless, he felt constrained to
say to the intermediary:
"My friend, this is a very touching appeal to my feelings. You know
that my weakness is to be, if possible, too easily moved by appeals to
mercy, and if this man were guilty of the foulest murder that the arm
of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him on such an appeal. But the
man who could go to Africa, and rob her of her children, and sell them
into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is
furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved
murderer, that he can never receive pardon at my hands. No! he may rot
in jail before he shall have liberty by any act of mine!"
* * * * *