The Government was now making rapid strides for the complete abolition of slavery. In June, 1864, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was repealed; in July the Coastwise Slave Trade was forever prohibited, and on January 31, 1865, the Joint Resolution proposing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, passed the House. On March 4, 1865, President Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time. The beautiful words closing his inaugural will live forever: "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 orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all Nations." Gen. Lee surrendered to Gen. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. On April 14th, the Stars and Stripes were again raised over Ft. Sumter, and the glad news swept over the North that the war was over. On the same evening the President was shot in Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth, and died the next morning. "Now he belongs to the ages," said Stanton, at the death-bed. The death of the President meant that Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, would be made President, and from the overwhelming shock of Mr. Lincoln's death the Republicans turned with misgiving and fear to the new Executive. CHAPTER XII. RECONSTRUCTION AND THE NATIONAL DEBT. "By these recent successes, the reinauguration of the national authority, the reconstruction of which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner and measure of reconstruction." _A. Lincoln_, _April_ 11, 1865. _From his last speech before death._