To a large concourse of people who, two days after the proclamation was issued, assembled before the White House, with music, the President said:  “What I did, I did after a very full deliberation, and under a heavy and solemn sense of responsibility.  I can only trust in God I have made no mistake.”  That he realized to the full the gravity of the step before taking it is shown again in an incident related by Hon. John Covode, who, calling on the President a few days before the issue of the final proclamation, found him walking his room in considerable agitation.  Reference being made to the forthcoming proclamation, Lincoln said with great earnestness:  “I have studied that matter well; my mind is made up—­it must be done.  I am driven to it.  There is to me no other way out of our troubles.  But although my duty is plain, it is in some respects painful, and I trust the people will understand that I act not in anger but in expectation of a greater good.”

Mr. Ben.  Perley Poore makes the interesting statement that “Mr. Lincoln carefully put away the pen which he had used in signing the document, for Mr. Sumner, who had promised it to his friend, George Livermore, of Cambridge, the author of an interesting work on slavery.  It was a steel pen with a wooden handle, the end of which had been gnawed by Mr. Lincoln—­a habit that he had when composing anything that required thought.”

In response to a request of the ladies in charge of the Northwestern Fair for the Sanitary Commission, which was held in Chicago in the autumn of 1863, Lincoln conveyed to them the original draft of the proclamation; saying, in his note of presentation, “I had some desire to retain the paper; but if it shall contribute to the relief or comfort of the soldiers, that will be better.”  The document was purchased at the Fair by Mr. Thomas B. Bryan, and given by him to the Chicago Historical Society.  It perished in the great fire of October, 1871.

More than a year after the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln, in writing to a prominent Kentucky Unionist, gave a synopsis of his views and course regarding slavery, which is so clear in statement, and so forceful and convincing in logic, that a place must be given it in this chapter.

I am naturally anti-slavery.  If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.  I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel; and yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted, right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.  It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.  I could not take the office without taking the oath.  Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.  I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question