The physicians who surrounded the President's bed pronounced the wound fatal. The assassin's bullet entered the back of his head on the left side, passed through the brain, and lodged behind the left ear. But for his powerful physique and his abundant vitality, it would have brought instant death. He never recovered consciousness, but lingered through the night and died at twenty-two minutes past seven in the morning. Dr. Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, which the President attended, was kneeling in prayer by his bedside; Surgeon-General Barnes, of the army, had his finger upon the President's pulse; Robert Lincoln, Senator Sumner, and one of the assistant secretaries leaned upon the foot of the bed. Colonel Hay describes the scene as follows: "As the dawn came and the lamplight grew pale in the fresher beams, his pulse began to fail; but his face even then was scarcely more haggard than those of the sorrowing group of statesmen and generals around him. His automatic moaning, which had continued through the night, ceased; a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features. At twenty-two minutes after seven he died. Stanton broke the silence by saying, 'Now he belongs to the ages.' Dr. Gurley kneeled by the bedside and prayed fervently. The widow came in from the adjoining room, supported by her son, and cast herself with loud outcry on the dead body." VIII THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SLAVES Abraham Lincoln's hatred of slavery was inborn, but its development began when he saw human beings sold at auction on the levee at New Orleans and chained and beaten upon the decks of Mississippi River steamboats on their way to market. These horrors were first witnessed by him when he made his voyage on the flat-boat from Gentryville, and the impression was deepened upon his second journey four years later from New Salem. Even to the day of his death the recollection was vivid. He alluded to it frequently while the slave problem was perplexing him and his advisers during the war, and the picture was before his eyes when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. As one of his companions said, "Slavery ran the iron into him then and there." However, the mind of the boy had been prepared for this impression by the teachings of his mother. In 1804 a crusade against slavery in Kentucky was started by the itinerant preachers of the Baptist Church, and the Rev. Jesse Head, the minister who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, was a bold abolitionist and boldly proclaimed the doctrine of human liberty wherever he went. Lincoln's father and mother were among his most devoted disciples, and when he was a mere child Abraham Lincoln inherited their hatred of human servitude. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he once said in a speech. "I cannot remember when I did not think so and feel so."