As before stated, these two contemporary accounts by Welles and Chase, though made at the time, were not published until years afterward; but there was another publication that was virtually contemporary. Frank B. Carpenter, the artist, began almost immediately his noted painting of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the course of his six months in the White House had long and repeated interviews with all members of the Cabinet, and talked with them about every incident connected with that event. He published his account in his book in 1866, while all the members of the Cabinet were living, and, so far as known, was never objected to or proposed to be modified by any member of the Cabinet. According to his statement, Lincoln told the Cabinet that he had promised God that he would do this, uttering the last part of this sentence in a low voice. Secretary Chase, who was sitting near the President, asked Mr. Lincoln if he had correctly understood him, and the President repeated what he had affirmed before, saying: "I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom for the slaves."--_Six Months in the White House_, pp. 89, 90. In this threefold attestation we have irrefutable testimony that the determining motive of President Lincoln in his issue of the Emancipation Proclamation was the keeping of his solemn covenant with God. It is all but impossible to exaggerate the significance of this incident. The essential fact is as fully proved as human testimony can possibly prove a fact. When we remember the extreme reticence of Abraham Lincoln on all such matters, and the fact of which he must have been painfully conscious that his Cabinet was not very favorably disposed toward the thing that he proposed to do, his quiet, outspoken, and repeated declaration that he had promised this thing to God is sufficient in itself to settle forever the essentially religious character of Abraham Lincoln. If we had no other word from his lips touching on the subject of religion but this one, we should be assured of his unfaltering belief in God, in a profound sense of his own personal responsibility to God, in prayer, and a personal relation with God. This was no platitude uttered to meet the expectation of the religious people of the United States; it was no evasive generality intended to fit whatever religious desire might lie in the minds of those who heard him. It was no play to the gallery; it was no masquerade; every motive of pretense or hypocrisy or duplicity was absent. It was the sincere expression of the abiding faith of Abraham Lincoln in God, and prayer, and duty. * * * * *