A woman in a faded shawl and hood came to see the President, begging that, as her husband and all her sons--three--had enlisted, and her husband had been killed, he would release the oldest, that he might care for his mother. Mr. Lincoln quickly consented. When the poor woman reached the hospital where her boy was to be found, he was dead. Returning sadly to Mr. Lincoln, he said, "I know what you wish me to do now, and I shall do it without your asking; I shall release your second son.... Now _you_ have one, and _I_ one of the other two left: that is no more than right." Tears filled the eyes of both as she reverently laid her hand on his head, saying, "The Lord bless you, Mr. President. May you live a thousand years, and always be at the head of this great nation!" Through all these months it had become evident that slavery must be destroyed, or we should live over again these dreadful war-scenes in years to come. Mr. Lincoln had been waiting for the right time to free the slaves. General McClellan had said, "A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies"; but Sept. 22, 1862, Mr. Lincoln told his Cabinet, "I have promised my God that I will do it"; and he issued the immortal Emancipation Proclamation, by which four million human beings stepped out from bondage into freedom. He knew what he was doing. Two years afterward he said, "It is the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century." The following year, 1863, brought even deeper sorrows. The "Draft Act," by which men were obliged to enter the army when their names were drawn, occasioned in July a riot in New York city, with the loss of many lives. Grant had taken Vicksburg on July 4, and General Meade had won at the dreadful three days' fight at Gettysburg, July 1-4, with a loss of more than twenty thousand on either side; but the nation was being held together at a fearful cost. When Mr. Lincoln announced to the people the victory at Gettysburg, he expressed the desire that, in the customary observance of the Fourth of July, "He whose will, not ours, should everywhere be done, be everywhere reverenced with profoundest gratitude." He reverenced God, himself, most devoutly. "I have been driven many times upon my knees," he said, "by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day."