Before eight o’clock of the morning you are once more at the White House ... look in at the President’s room.... He is still there, and there is nothing to indicate that he has been out of it.... There upon the table, beside his cup of coffee, lies the draft of his fresh instructions to General Hooker, bidding him to push forward without any reference to Chancellorsville.” These are but fragmentary glimpses of the savior of the Union in his many-sided life during the war. But they help us to understand him in that tragic stretch of time when he plodded wearily between the White House and the telegraph room in the War Department to learn, day by day, what his generals at the front had to say. It would be but vain repetition to picture him in silent, white-faced anguish, or in equally silent transports of joy and thanksgiving, all through the fighting days of Shiloh, Stone River, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Petersburg, when Americans reddened American soil with the blood of Americans, and the ordinary dress of women and children throughout the country turned to black. They said of him that he sometimes cracked jokes, Nero-like, while the continent shuddered at the slaughter of its bravest and best, and while the fate of the Union hung trembling in the balance. “I must laugh or I will surely die,” he explained to John Hay. XIV To Lincoln the preservation of the Union was of much greater importance than the freedom of the negro race. No one who has ever glanced through his speeches and writings can have any doubt about that. When he signed the Proclamation of Emancipation he did it solely to save the Union. It was his mind, rather than his heart, that inspired the deed; for his inclination was to recognize the constitutional property right in slaves and to secure their emancipation by paying for them. This reverence for the Constitution and defense of all its guarantees and sanctions, even when the argument advantaged those who raised their hands against the government, is not the least of Lincoln’s claim to the love and gratitude of his countrymen. Not even the monstrous emotions of a fratricidal war could shake his determination to recognize slavery as a property right confirmed by the nation, so long as the nation itself could survive. Nor could the alternate appeals and abuse of the New England abolitionist fanatics make him forget that the rebel South was defending what it believed to be its legal rights. There is not a single note of bitterness or hatred for the South in all that he said or wrote up to the day when a Southern hand struck down the South’s best friend. The time came, however, when there was no longer any hope that emancipation by compensation would be accepted as a means of restoring peace. Then, and then only, Lincoln considered unconditional emancipation as an act of war in defence of the Union and as a means of peace.