Anyone who reads much of the always grave and sometimes most moving orations of Lincoln’s later years may do well to turn back to this agreeable piece of debating-society horse-play.  But he should then turn a few pages further back to Lincoln’s little Bill for the gradual and compensated extinction of slavery in the District of Columbia, where Washington stands.  He introduced this of his own motion, without encouragement from Abolitionist or Non-Abolitionist, accompanying it with a brief statement that he had carefully ascertained that the representative people of the district privately approved of it, but had no right to commit them to public support of it.  It perished, of course.  With the views which he had long formed and continued to hold about slavery, very few opportunities could in these years come to him of proper and useful action against it.  He seized upon these opportunities not less because in doing so he had to stand alone.

His career as a Congressman was soon over.  There was no movement to re-elect him, and the Whigs now lost his constituency.  His speeches and his votes against the Mexican war offended his friends.  Even his partner, the Abolitionist, Mr. Herndon, whose further acquaintance we have to make, was too much infected with the popularity of a successful war to understand Lincoln’s plain position or to approve of his giving votes which might seem unpatriotic.  Lincoln wrote back to him firmly but sadly.  Persuaded as he was that political action in advance of public sentiment was idle, resigned and hardened as we might easily think him to many of the necessities of party discipline, it evidently caused him naive surprise that, when he was called upon for a definite opinion, anybody should expect him, as he candidly puts it, to “tell a lie.”

As a retiring Congressman he was invited to speak in several places in the East on behalf of Taylor’s candidature; and after Taylor’s election claimed his right as the proper person to be consulted, with certain others, about Government appointments in Illinois.  Taylor carried out the “spoils system” with conscientious thoroughness; as he touchingly said, he had thought over the question from a soldier’s point of view, and could not bear the thought that, while he as their chief enjoyed the Presidency, the private soldiers in the Whig ranks should not get whatever was going.  Lincoln’s attitude in the matter may be of interest.  To take an example, he writes to the President, about the postmastership in some place, that he does not know whether the President desires to change the tenure of such offices on party grounds, and offers no advice; that A is a Whig whose appointment is much desired by the local Whigs, and a most respectable man; that B, also a Whig, would in Lincoln’s judgment be a somewhat better but not so popular subject for appointment; that C, the present postmaster, is a Democrat, but is on every ground, save his political party, a proper person