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with any declaration I could make. These political fiends are not half sick enough yet. Party malice, and not public good, possesses them entirely. They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.' At least such is my present feeling and purpose.'

And in this purpose he remained steadfast to the end, though put to yet more trying tests. It has already been mentioned, that with the opening of Congress, and the formation of the Senate Committee of Thirteen and the House Committee of Thirty-three, certain conservative men from the border slave-States endeavored to gain control of the political situation by forming a neutral or mediating party between the disunionists and the Republicans. Their policy was an utter mistake; for, while reprobating present dismemberment, their attitude on the slavery question indicated clearly enough that, if clung to, it would inevitably drive them to the extreme plans of the cottonStates. Some of these would-be " "neutral' States eventually went that direful road; and those which did not were saved only by the restraint of the Union army. But for the present their leaders were sincerely patriotic. From one of the most prominent of these, Hon. John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, to whom Lincoln afterwards made a tender of a Cabinet appointment, he received an inquiry, dated December 10th, concerning his opinions on several points of the slavery controversy, saying:

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"Now, my dear sir, be assured I am not questioning your candor; I am only pointing out, that while a new letter would hurt the cause which I think a just one, you can quite as well effect every patriotic object with the old record. Carefully read pages 18, 19, 74, 75, 88, Senator Douglas and myself with the Republican Plat89, and 267 of the volume of Joint Debates between form adopted at Chicago, and all your questions will be substantially answered. I have no thought of rec

"I am not without hope that a clear and definite exposition of your views on the questions mentioned may go far to quiet, if not satisfy, all reasonable minds that on most of them it will become plain that there is much more misunderstanding than difference, and that the balance are so much more abstract than practical."+ommending the abolition of slavery in the District of

However difficult to resist this appeal, so influential, so respectful, so promising, the President-elect felt himself bound to adhere to his

policy of refusing any public utterance, for reasons which he set forth at some length in a confidential answer, written December 15th.

"I am greatly disinclined," said he, " to write a letter on the subject embraced in yours; and I would not do so, even privately as I do, were it not that I fear you might misconstrue my silence. Is it desired that I shall shift the ground upon which I have been elected? I cannot do it. You need only to acquaint yourself with that ground, and press it on the attention of the South. It is all in print and easy of access. May I be pardoned if I ask whether even you have ever attempted to procure the reading of the Republican platform, or my speeches, by the Southern people? If not, what reason have I to expect that any additional production of mine would meet a better fate? It would make me appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness. To so represent me would be the principal use made of any letter I might now thrust upon the public. My old record cannot be so used; and that is precisely the reason that some new declaration is so much sought.

Lincoln to Raymond, Nov. 28th, 1860. Unpublished MS.

Columbia, nor the slave-trade among the slave-States, even on the conditions indicated; and if I were to make such recommendation, it is quite clear Congress would not follow it.

"As to employing slaves in arsenals and dockyards, it is a thing I never thought of in my life, to my recollection, till I saw your letter; and I may say of it precisely as I have said of the two points above.

"As to the use of patronage in the slave-States, where there are few or no Republicans. I do not expect to inquire for the politics of the appointee, or whether he does or not own slaves. I intend in that matter to accommodate the people in the several localities, if they themselves will allow me to accommodate them. In one word, I never have been, am not now, and probably never shall be in a mood of harassing the people either North or South.

"On the territorial question I am inflexible, as you see my position in the book. On that there is a difference between you and us; and it is the only substantial difference. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is a wrong and ought to be restricted. For this neither has any just occasion to be angry with the other.

"As to the State laws, mentioned in your sixth question, I really know very little of them. I never have read one. If any of them are in conflict with the fugitive-slave clause, or any other part of the Constitution, I certainly shall be glad of their repeal; but I + Gilmer to Lincoln, Dec. 10th, 1860. Unpublished MS.

could hardly be justified, as a citizen of Illinois, or as President of the United States, to recommend the repeal of a statute of Vermont or South Carolina.”

We have given samples of these solicitations coming from Republicans, from Douglas Democrats, and from the adherents of Bell; the following, coming from the fourth political school, will perhaps be found of equal if not greater interest. Its origin is given in the words of the principal actor, General Duff Green, who, in a letter some three years afterwards, thus described it :

"In December, 1860, at the request of the President of the United States, I went to Springfield to see Mr. Lincoln and urge him to go to Washington and exert his influence in aid of the adjustment of the questions then pending between the North and the South. I was authorized by Mr. Buchanan to say to him that if he

came he would be received and treated with the courtesy due to the President-elect. I saw Mr. Lincoln at his own house, and did urge the necessity of his going to Washington and uniting his efforts in behalf of peace, telling him that in my opinion he alone could prevent a civil war, and that if he did not go, upon his conscience must rest the blood that would be shed." +

Whether this proposition came by authority or not, Lincoln could not publicly either question the truth of the envoy or the motive of the mission. In either case the appeal was most adroitly laid. Of course it was impossible to accept or even to entertain it; on the other hand, a simple refusal might be made the basis of very serious misrepresentation. He therefore wrote the following reply:

"SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Dec. 28th, 1860.

"GEN. DUFF GREEN. "MY DEAR SIR: I do not desire any amendment of the Constitution. Recognizing, however, that questions of such amendment rightfully belong to the American people, I should not feel justified nor inclined to withhold from them if I could a fair opportunity of expressing their will thereon through either of the modes prescribed in the instrument.

"In addition I declare that the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and I denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as the gravest of crimes.

"I am greatly averse to writing anything for the public at this time; and I consent to the publication of this only upon the condition that six of the twelve United States senators for the States of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas shall sign their names to what is written on this sheet *Lincoln to Gilmer, Dec. 15th, 1860. Unpublished MS. Duff Green to Jefferson Davis, May 26th, 1863. Unpublished MS.

Lincoln to Duff Green, Dec. 28th, 1860. Unpub. lished MS.

below my name, and allow the whole to be published together. "Yours truly, "A. LINCOLN. "We recommend to the people of the States we represent respectively, to suspend all action for dismemberment of the Union, at least until some act deemed to be violative of our rights shall be done by the incoming administration."

This letter Lincoln transmitted to Senator

Trumbull at Washington, with the following direction:

"General Duff Green is out here endeavoring to draw a letter out of me. I have written one which herewith I inclose to you, and which I believe could not be used to our disadvantage. Still, if on consultation with our discreet friends you conclude that it may that the second clause of the letter is copied from the do us harm, do not deliver it. You need not mention Chicago Platform. If, on consultation, our friends, including yourself, think it can do no harm, keep a copy and deliver the letter to General Green."

While the fact is not definitely known, it is probable that this letter was delivered. Nothing further came of Duff Green's mission except a letter from himself in the" New York in the vaguest generalities. His whole aim had Herald" mentioning his visit and its failure, been to induce Lincoln tacitly to assume responsibility for the Southern revolt; and when real conspirators, they were no longer anxious the latter by his skillful answer pointed out the to have a publication made.

The whole attitude and issue of the controversy was so tersely summed up by Lincoln in a confidential letter to a Republican friend, under date of January 11th, 1861, that we cannot forbear citing it in conclusion :

"Yours of the 6th is received. I answer it only because I fear you would misconstrue my silence. What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance the Government shall be broken up unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the Government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union. They now have the Constitution under which we have lived over seventy years, and acts of Congress of their own framing, with no prospect of their being changed; and they can never have a more shallow pretext for breaking up the Government, or extorting a compromise, than now. There is in my judgment but one compromise which would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory."||

Lincoln to Trumbull, Dec. 28th, 1860. Unpublished MS.

|| Lincoln to Hon. J. T. Hale, Jan. 11th, 1861. Unpublished MS.

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AU LARGE.*

BY GEORGE W. CABLE,

Author of "Old Creole Days," "The Grandissimes," "Grande Pointe," etc.

I. THE POT-HUNTER.

could only near by be seen to stir the tops of the high reeds whose crowding myriads HE sun was just rising, as stretched away south, west, and north, an a man stepped from his open sea of green, its immense distances reslender dug-out and drew lieved here and there by strips of swamp forhalf its length out upon the est tinged with their peculiar purple haze. oozy bank of a pretty Eastward the railroad's long causeway and bayou. Before him, as he telegraph poles narrowed on the view through turned away from the wa- its wide, axe-hewn lane in the overtowering ter, a small gray railway swamp. New Orleans, sixty miles or more platform and frame station-house, drowsing on away, was in that direction. Westward, rails, long legs in the mud and water, were still veiled causeway, and telegraph tapered away again in the translucent shade of the deep cypress across the illimitable hidden quicksands of the swamp whose long moss drapings almost over- "trembling prairie" till the green disguise of hung them on the side next the brightening reeds and rushes closed in upon the attenudawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang ated line, and only a small notch in a far strip the farthest two or three of a few flimsy of woods showed where it still led on toward wooden houses and a saw-mill with its lum- Texas. Behind the Acadian the smoke of ber, logs, and sawdust, its cold furnace and (woman's early industry began to curl from idle engine. two or three low chimneys.

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As with gun and game this man mounted by a short, rude ladder to firmer footing on the platform, a negro, who sat fishing for his breakfast on the bank a few yards up the stream where it bent from the north and west, slowly lifted his eyes, noted that the other was a white man, an Acadian, and brought his gaze back again to hook and line.

He had made out these facts by the man's shape and dress, for the face was in shade. The day, I say, was still in its genesis. The waters that slid so languidly between the two silent men as not to crook one line of the station-house's image inverted in their clear dark depths, had not yet caught a beam upon their whitest water-lily, nor yet upon their tallest bulrush; but the tops of the giant cypresses were green and luminous, and as the Acadian glanced abroad westward, in the open sky far out over the vast marshy breadths of the "shaking prairie," two still clouds, whose under surfaces were yet dusky and pink, sparkled on their seaward edges like a frosted fleece. You could not have told whether the Acadian saw the black man or not. His dog, soiled and wet, stood beside his knee, pricked his ears for a moment at sight of the negro, and then dropped them.

It was September. The comfortable air The "shaking prairie," "trembling prairie," or "prairie tremblante," is low, level, treeless delta land, * Copyright, 1887, by George

VOL. XXXV.-14.

#

But his eye lingered in the north. He stood with his dog curled at his feet beside a bunch of egrets,-killed for their plumage,- the butt of his long fowling-piece resting on the platform, and the arm half-outstretched whose hand grasped the barrels near the muzzle. The hand, toil-hardened and weather-browned, showed, withal, antiquity of race. His feet were in rough muddy brogans, but even so they were smallish and shapely. His garments were coarse, but there were no tatters anywhere. He wore a wide Campeachy hat. His brown hair was too long, but it was fine. His eyes, too, were brown, and, between brief moments of alertness, sedate. Sun and wind had darkened his face, and his pale brown beard curled meager and untrimmed on a cheek and chin that in forty years had never felt a razor.

Some miles away in the direction in which he was looking the broadening sunlight had struck and brightened a single red lug-sail that, for all the eye could see, was coming across the green land on a dry keel. But the bayou, hidden in the tall rushes, was its highway; for suddenly the canvas was black as it turned its shady side, and soon was red again as another change of direction caught the sunbeams upon its tense width and showed that, with much more wind out there than it would having a top soil of vegetable mold overlying immense beds of quicksand.

W. Cable. All rights reserved.

90

find by and by in here under the lee of the swamp, it was following the unseen meanderings of the stream. Presently it reached a more open space where a stretch of the water lay shining in the distant view. Here the boat itself came into sight, showed its bunch of some half-dozen passengers for a minute or two, and vanished again, leaving only its slanting red sail skimming nautilus-like over the vast breezy expanse.

Yet more than two hours later the boat's one blue-shirted, barefoot Sicilian sailor in red worsted cap had with one oar at the stern just turned her drifting form into the glassy calm by the railway station, tossed her anchor ashore, and was still busy with small matters of boat-keeping, while his five passengers clambered to the platform.

The place showed somewhat more movement now. The negro had long ago wound his line upon its crooked pole, gathered up his stiffened fishes from the bank, thrust them into the pockets of his shamelessly ragged trousers, and was gone to his hut in the underbrush. But the few amphibious households round about were passing out and in at the half-idle tasks of their slow daily life, and a young white man was bustling around, now into the station and now out again upon the platform, with authority in his frown and a pencil and two matches behind his ear. It was Monday. Two or three shabby negroes with broad, collapsed, glazed leather travelingbags of the old carpet-sack pattern dragged their formless feet about, waiting to take the train for the next station to hire out there as rice harvesters, and one, with his back turned, leaned motionless against an open window gazing in upon the ticking telegraph instruments. A black woman in blue cotton gown, red-and-yellow Madras turban, and some sportsman's cast-off hunting-shoes, minus the shoe-strings, crouched against the wall. Beside her stood her shapely mulatto daughter, with head-covering of white cotton cloth, in which female instinct had discovered the lines of grace and disposed them after the folds of the Egyptian fellah head-dress. A portly white man, with decided polish in his commanding air, evidently a sugar-planter from the Mississippi "coast" ten miles northward, moved about in spurred boots, and put personal questions to the negroes, calling them "boys," and the mulattress, "girl."

The pot-hunter was still among them; or, rather, he had drawn apart from the rest and stood at the platform's far end, leaning on his gun, an innocent, wild-animal look in his restless eyes, and a slumberous agility revealed in his strong, supple loins. The station-agent went to him and with abrupt questions and

assertions, to which the man replied in low,
grave monosyllables, bought his game,— as
he might have done two hours before, but -
an Acadian can wait. There was some trou-
ble to make exact change, and the agent,
saying "Hold on, I'll fix it," went into the
station just as the group from the Sicilian's
boat reached the platform. The agent came
bustling out again with his eyes on his palm,
counting small silver.

"Here! But he spoke to the empty air.
He glanced about with an offended frown.
"Achille!" There was no reply. He turned
"Where's that 'Ca-
to one of the negroes:
jun?" Nobody knew. Down where his canoe
had lain tiny rillets of muddy water were still
running into its imprint left in the mire; but
canoe, dog, and man had vanished into the
rank undergrowth of the swamp.

II. CLAUDE.

Or the party that had come in the Sicilian's boat four were men and one a young woman. She was pretty; so pretty, and of such restful sweetness of countenance, that the homespun garb, the brand-new creaking gaiters, and a hat that I dare not describe were nothing against her. Her large, soft, dark eyes, more sweetly but not less plainly than the attire, confessed her a denizen of the woods.

Not so the man who seemed to be her husband. His dress was rustic enough; and yet you would have seen at once that it was not the outward circumstance, but an inward singularity, that had made him and must always keep him a stranger to the ordinary ways of men. There was an emotional exaltation in his face as he hastily led his companions with military directness to the ticket window. Two others of the men were evidently father and son, the son barely twenty years of age, the parent certainly not twice as old; and the last of the group was a strong, sluggish man of years somewhat near, but under, fifty.

They bought but one ticket; but, as one may say, they all bought it, the youngest extricating its price with difficulty from the knotted corner of his red handkerchief, and the long, thin hand of the leader making the purchase, while the eyes of the others followed every movement with unconscious absorption.

The same unemotional attentiveness was in their forms as their slow feet drifted here and there always after the one leader, their eyes on his demonstrative hands, and their ears drinking in his discourse. He showed them the rails of the track, how smooth they were, how they rested on their cross-ties, and how they were spiked in place always the same

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