From his own good nature, and from a sincere desire to really deserve his popular name of Honest Old Abe, Lincoln determined to appoint the best men to office, irrespective of party. Hoping against hope to preserve the Union, he would have given place in his Cabinet to Southern Democrats as well as to Northern Republicans. But as soon as it was understood that he was elected, and that the country would have a President opposed to the extension of slavery, the South began to prepare to leave the Union, and for war. It was in vain that Lincoln and the great majority of his party made it clear as possible that, rather than see the country destroyed by war and by disunion, they would leave slavery as it was. This did not suit the views of the “rule-or-ruin” party of the South; and as secession from the Federal Union became a fixed fact, their entire press and all their politicians declared that their object was not merely to build up a Southern Confederacy, but to legislate so as to destroy the industry of the North, and break the old Union into a thousand conflicting independent governments. Therefore, Lincoln, in intending to offer seats in the Cabinet to Alexander H. Stephens, James Guthrie, of Kentucky, and John A. Gilmer, of North Carolina, made--if sincere--a great mistake, though one in every way creditable to his heart and his courtesy. The truth was, that the South had for four years unanimously determined to secede, and was actually seceding; while the North, which had gone beyond the extreme limits of endurance and of justice itself to conciliate the South, could not believe that fellow-countrymen and brothers seriously intended war. For it was predetermined and announced by the Southern press that, unless the Federal Government would make concessions beyond all reason, and put itself in the position of a disgraced and conquered state, there must be war. As the terrible darkness began to gather, and the storm-signals to appear, Lincoln sought for temporary relief in visiting his stepmother and other old friends and relatives in Coles County. The meeting with her whom he had always regarded as his mother was very touching; it was the more affecting because she, to whom he was the dearest on earth, was under an impression, which time rendered prophetic, that he would, as President, be assassinated. This anticipation spread among his friends, who vied with one another in gloomy suggestions of many forms of murder--while one very zealous prophet, who had fixed on poison as the means by which Lincoln would die, urged him to take as a cook from home “one among his own female friends.” CHAPTER VI.