Ward Lamon, when Lincoln had appointed him Marshal of the District of Columbia, accidentally found himself in a street fight, and, in restoring peace, he struck one of the belligerents with his fist, a weapon with which he was notoriously familiar. The blow was a harder one than Lamon intended, for the fellow was knocked senseless, taken up unconscious, and lay for some hours on the border of life and death. Lamon was alarmed, and the next morning reported the affair to the President. On another occasion a young soldier had fallen out of ranks when his regiment passed through Washington, and, getting drunk, failed to join his regiment when it left the city. To the friend who came to secure a pardon, Mr. Lincoln said: “Well, I think the boy can do us more good above ground than under ground,” and he wrote out the pardon. In all such cases as the above, where the ordinary human weakness was the motive, Mr. Lincoln’s heart was tender as a woman’s, but to prove that he could entertain no sympathy for a cool, deliberate, mercenary crime, he was approached by the Hon. John B. Alley, of Massachusetts, one day, with a petition for the pardon of a man who had been convicted of engaging in the slave trade, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and the payment of a fine of one thousand dollars. His term of imprisonment had expired, but in default of payment of the fine, he was still held. In answer to the appeal for pardon Mr. Lincoln said: “You know my weakness is to be, if possible, too easily moved by appeals for mercy, and if this man were guilty of the foulest murder that the arm of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him on such an appeal; but the man who would go to Africa and rob her of her children and sell them into an interminable bondage with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hands. No, he may rot in jail before he shall have liberty by any act of mine.” Upon another occasion the wife of a rebel officer, held as a prisoner of war, begged for the relief of her husband, and to strengthen her appeal said that he was a very religious man. In granting the release of her husband, Mr. Lincoln said: “Tell your husband when you meet him that I am not much of a judge of religion, but that in my opinion the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government because they think that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread in the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which men can get to heaven.”