At this time the fortunes of war were not favoring the North. There were days of doubt, days almost of despair. A shrill chorus of abuse of the President sounded from many Northern newspapers. Its keynote was struck by Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York _Tribune_ and the foremost man in a group of great editors such as the country has never seen since. They were Horace Greeley of the _Tribune_, Henry J. Raymond of the _New York Times_, and Samuel Bowles of the Springfield (Mass.) _Republican_. Bowles wrote: "Lincoln is a Simple Susan"; Raymond demanded that he be "superseded" as President; and Greeley, in a letter that was published in England and that greatly harmed the Union cause, said Lincoln ruled "a bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country." In Tom's boyhood, the names of the three were household words and names by which to conjure. The arrows the three shot at Lincoln pierced his heart, but his gentle patience never gave way. He bore with their well-meant but unjust criticism as he bore with so much else in those dark days, careless of hurt to himself, if he could but serve his country and do his duty as he saw it to do. A clear light shone upon one great duty and this he did. On September 22, 1862, he signed his famous Emancipation Proclamation, which with its sequence the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ended forever slavery wherever the Stars-and-Stripes waved. In the early days of that great September, even a boy could feel in the tense atmosphere of the White House that some great event was impending. Nobody knew upon just what the master mind was brooding, but the whole world was to know it soon. It was not until Lincoln had written with his own hand in the solitude of his own room the charter of freedom for the Southern slaves that he called together his Cabinet, not to advise him about it, but to hear from him what he had resolved to do. The messenger who summoned the Cabinet officials to that historic session was none other than Uncle Moses. Tom of course had long since told the story of his flight for freedom, including Unk' Mose's stout-hearted attack at the very nick of time upon the overseer. Lincoln was touched by the tale of the old negro's fine feat. He had Tom bring Moses to see him and Moses emerged from that interview the proudest darkey in the world, for he was made a messenger and general utility man at the White House. Part of his duty was to keep in order the room where the Cabinet met and to summon its members when a meeting of it was called. Uncle Moses, pacing slowly but majestically from the White House to the different Departments, bearing a message from the President to his Cabinet ministers, was a very different person from the Unk' Mose who had cared for Tom and Morris in the Alabama canebrake. The scarecrow had become a man. On these little journeys, Tad Lincoln often went with him, his small white hand clutching one of Mose's big gnarled, black fingers.