of visitors, in September, 1862, “and glad to know that I have your sympathy and your prayers. .  I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purpose. . . .  I have sought His aid; but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light He affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me He wills it otherwise.  If I had my way, this war would never have commenced.  If I had been allowed my way, this war would have been ended before this; but it still continues and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of His own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we can not but believe that He who made the world still governs it."(9)

XXIV.  GAMBLING IN GENERALS

On July 22, 1862, there was a meeting of the Cabinet.  The sessions of Lincoln’s Council were the last word for informality.  The President and the Ministers interspersed their great affairs with mere talk, story-telling, gossip.  With one exception they were all lovers of their own voices, especially in the telling of tales.  Stanton was the exception.  Gloomy, often in ill-health, innocent of humor, he glowered when the others laughed.  When the President, instead of proceeding at once to business, would pull out of his pocket the latest volume of Artemus Ward, the irate War Minister felt that the overthrow of the nation was impending.  But in this respect, the President was incorrigible.  He had been known to stop the line of his guests at a public levee, while he talked for some five minutes in a whisper to an important personage; and though all the room thought that jupiter was imparting state secrets, in point of fact, he was making sure of a good story the great man had told him a few days previous.(1) His Cabinet meetings were equally careless of social form.  The Reverend Robert Collyer was witness to this fact in a curious way.  Strolling through the White House grounds, “his attention was suddenly arrested by the apparition of three pairs of feet resting on the ledge of an open window in one of the apartments of the second story and plainly visible from below.”  He asked a gardener for an explanation.  The brusk reply was:  “Why, you old fool, that’s the Cabinet that is a-settin’, and them thar big feet are ole Abe’s."(2)

When the Ministers assembled on July twenty-second they had no intimation that this was to be a record session.  Imagine the astonishment when, in his usual casual way, though with none of that hesitancy to which they had grown accustomed, Lincoln announced his new policy, adding that he “wished it understood that the question was settled in his own mind; that he had decreed emancipation in a certain contingency and the responsibility of the measure was his."(3) President and Cabinet talked it over in their customary