After reviewing his own argument on this subject in the second message, he concluded: 

“The views then expressed now remain unchanged, nor have I much to add.  None are so deeply interested to resist the present rebellion as the working people.  Let them beware of prejudices, working division and hostility among themselves.  The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer was the hanging of some working people by other working people.  It should never be so.  The strongest bond of human sympathy outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.  Nor should this lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property.  Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world.  That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.  Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuming that his own shall be safe from violence when built."(8)

Lincoln was never more anxious than in this fateful spring when so many issues were hanging in the balance.  Nevertheless, in all his relations with the world, his firm serenity was not broken.  Though subject to depression so deep that his associates could not penetrate it, he kept it sternly to himself.(9) He showed the world a lighter, more graceful aspect than ever before.  ’A precious record of his later mood is the account of him set down by Frank B. Carpenter, the portrait painter, a man of note in his day, who was an inmate of the White House during the first half of 1864.  Carpenter was painting a picture of the “Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.”  He saw Lincoln informally at all sorts of odd times, under all sorts of conditions.  “All familiar with him,” says Carpenter, “will remember the weary air which became habitual during his last years.  This was more of the mind than of the body, and no rest and recreation which he allowed himself could relieve it.  As he sometimes expressed it, ’no remedy seemed ever to reach the tired spot."(10)

A great shadow was darkening over him.  He was more than ever convinced that he had not long to live.  None the less, his poise became more conspicuous, his command over himself and others more distinguished, as the months raced past.  In truth he had worked through a slow but profound transformation.  The Lincoln of 1864 was so far removed from the Lincoln of Pigeon Creek-but logically, naturally removed, through the absorption of the outer man by the inner—­that inevitably one thinks of Shakespeare’s change “into something rich and strange.”

Along with the weakness, the contradictions of his earlier self, there had also fallen away from him the mere grossness that had belonged to him as a peasant.  Carpenter is unconditional that in six months of close intimacy, seeing him in company with all sorts of people, he never heard from Lincoln an offensive story.  He quotes Seward and Lincoln’s family physician to the same effect.(11)