But I digress. Throughout the contention that preceded the war, amid the passions that attended the war itself, not one bitter, proscriptive word escaped the lips of Abraham Lincoln, whilst there was hardly a day that he was not projecting his great personality between some Southern man or woman and danger. Under the date of February 2, 1848, and from the hall of the House of Representatives at Washington, whilst he was serving as a member of Congress, I find this short note to his law partner at Springfield:-- "DEAR WILLIAM: I take up my pen to tell you that Mr. Stephens, of Georgia, a little, slim, pale-faced, consumptive man, with a voice like Logan's (that was Stephen T., not John A.), has just concluded the very best speech of an hour's length I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes (he was then not quite thirty-seven years of age) are full of tears yet." From that time forward he never ceased to love Stephens, of Georgia. After that famous Hampton Roads conference, when the Confederate commissioners, Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter, had traversed the field of official routine with Mr. Lincoln, the president, and Mr. Seward, the secretary of state, Lincoln, the friend, still the old Whig colleague, though one was now president of the United States and the other vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, took the "slim, pale-faced, consumptive man" aside, and, pointing to a sheet of paper he held in his hand, said: "Stephens, let me write 'Union' at the top of that page, and you may write below it whatever else you please." In the preceding conversation Mr. Lincoln had intimated that payment for the slaves was not outside a possible agreement for reunion and peace. He based that statement upon a plan he already had in hand, to appropriate four hundred millions of dollars to this purpose.