Annabel and I, having just been married, went with him to Washington on our wedding-tour in 1847.  He was taking his seat in Congress that year.  We were with him there when he met Webster.  Lincoln was deeply impressed by the quiet dignity of the great man.  We went together to hear Emerson lecture.  It was a motley audience—­business men, fashionable ladies and gentlemen, statesmen, politicians, women with their knitting, and lion-hunters.  The tall, awkward orator ascended the platform, took off his top-coat and drew a manuscript from his pocket.  He had a narrow, sloping forehead, a prominent nose, gray eyes and a skin of singular transparency.  His voice was rich and mellow but not strong.  Lincoln listened with rapt attention to his talk about Democracy.  It was a memorable night.  He spoke of it often.  Such contact with the great spirits of that time, of which he studiously availed himself in Washington, was of great value to the statesman from Illinois.  His experiences on the floor were in no way important to him, but since 1914 I have thought often of what he said there, regarding Polk’s invasion of Mexico, unauthorized by Congress as it was: 

“The Provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons:  kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally that the good of the people was the object.  This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they proposed to so frame the constitution that no man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

The next year he stumped Massachusetts for “Zach” Taylor and heard Governor Seward deliver his remarkable speech on Slavery which contained this striking utterance: 

“Congress has no power to inhibit any duty commanded by God on Mount Sinai or by His Son on the Mount of Olives.”

On his return home Lincoln confessed that we had soon to deal with that question.

I was in his office when Herndon said: 

“I tell you that slavery must be rooted out.”

“What makes you think so?” Mr. Lincoln asked.

“I feel it in my bones,” was Herndon’s answer.

After that he used to speak with respect of “Bill Herndon’s bone philosophy.”

His term in Congress having ended, he came back to the law in partnership with William H. Herndon—­a man of character and sound judgment.  Those days Lincoln wore black trousers, coat and stock, a waistcoat of satin and a Wellington high hat.  He was wont to carry his papers in his hat.  Mary had wrought a great change in his external appearance.

They used to call him “a dead square lawyer.”  I remember that once Herndon had drawn up a fictitious plea founded on a shrewd assumption.  Lincoln carefully examined the papers.

“Is it founded on fact?” he asked.

“No,” Herndon answered.