Lin Lincoln's spectacles (upper). coln's wallet, with compartment marked Lincoln's shawl "Herndon" (lower) Originals in Barrett Collection Original in Chicago Historical Society Collection PEACE SOCIETIES AND RIFLES 465 work without the consent of the overseer, except in cases of sickness, and then they are to send word as to the cause of their absence. They are to board in one of the houses of the company and give information at the counting-room where they board, when they begin, or, whenever they change their boarding-place; and are to observe the regulations of their boarding-house. Those intending to leave the employ of the company are to give at least two weeks' notice thereof to their overseer. All persons entering into the employment of the company are considered as engaged for twelve months, and those who leave sooner, or do not comply with all the regulations, will not be entitled to a regular discharge. The company will not employ anyone who is habitually absent from public worship on the Sabbath, or known to be guilty of immorality." Peace societies organize; they aim to stop war; they circulate Charles Sumner's oration on "The True Grandeur of Nations"; he says, "There is no war which is honorable, no peace which is dishonorable." However, the National Convention of Reformers, headed by Parke Godwin, raises a point and asks a question: "The Peace Societies are built upon a noble foundation of justice and philanthropy, but must not expect success in establishing permanent peace, or its parent, justice, in the intercourse of nations, established upon the right of conquest. Why shall not the laws, which create motives in all men to obtain from all their fellow citizens, by cunning, or any force not expressly forbidden in the law, all their lands, houses, goods, wares and merchandise, also stimulate nations to foreign conquest and warlike aggression?" The first undersea telegraph messages are sent; Washington and London exchange words. And the breech-loading rifle arrives; man shoots bullets quicker and oftener. Wendell Phillips, the aristocratic young lawyer who dropped law practice to become an Abolitionist agitator, says the churches are slow in their duty, hurling the taunt: "The theatres in many of our large cities bring out, night after night, all the radical doctrines and all the startling scenes of 'Uncle Tom.' They preach immediate emancipation, and slaves shoot their hunters with applause. The theatre, bowing to its audience, has preached immediate emancipation, and given us the whole of 'Uncle Tom'; while the pulpit is either silent or hostile." Yet in hundreds of communities, it is the church people who carry on the antislavery organizations, hide runaway negroes in barns, cellars, wagons, and man the stations of the Underground Railroad; in a little church built of walnut wood in Galesburg, Illinois, they hide negroes in the steeple. Frederick Douglass, the escaped mulatto slave, edits a paper, the North Star; always the runaway slaves, sleeping by day, heading north by night, try to follow the north star. Says Frederick Douglass, "Prejudice against free colored people has shown itself nowhere so invincible as among mechanics of the north." In Virginia, white mechanics go on a strike because negroes have been put to work alongside of them to learn skilled mechanical labor. The Charleston Mercury editorially hopes the white strikers will be crushed; interference and rebellion from white workmen has the same spirit as that of a black slave insurrection. Civil war in Kansas comes near to spreading out over the whole country in 1856. Fifteen hundred miles from Kansas people make sacrifices in order that Kansas shall not be a slave territory. Emerson, in far-off Massachusetts, says, "We must learn to do with less, live in a smaller tenement, sell our apple-trees, our acres, our pleasant houses." The faith of Emerson in the Government is gone. "I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the Sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to return to. Come home and stay at home, while there is a country to save." As his eyes sweep the years ahead of the nation, he cries, "The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough." CLARK E. CARR AND BILL GREEN 467 On a late afternoon of an autumn day in the year 1850 Abraham Lincoln, sitting in his rattletrap buggy, might have been lost still deeper in his thoughts if he could have snatched the film of tissue off the Future and read events to operate in the ten years to come. The babblings, confusions, and mixed paths of those events, as well as the human majesty of some of their outstanding performances, might have had for him the same mystery as the coming of evening in autumn haze, when all the revealed shapes of daylight take on the rags or the silks of mist and dark, and form themselves into fine or comic apparitions not seen in broad daylight. Hours come when men of dreams or mathematics, or both, have to be keener and more elusive with the outlines of their reveries or the statements of their theorems. Chapter 94 YOUNG Bill Green, who had clerked in the Berry & Lincoln store, slept in the same bed with Lincoln and held Kirkham's Grammar while Lincoln recited, was in northern Illinois in 1852, and met some families of movers at Princeton. One was the Carr family, who had come from the Mohawk Valley to Chicago by boat, and were going by wagon to the little log city of Galesburg in Knox County, where the Rev. George Gale and a company from Whitesboro, New York, had plans for churches, schools, colleges, religion, culture, and freedom, in the new prairie region. Clark E. Carr, the boy of the family, listened with sharp ears to the talk of Bill Green. He was the same Bill Green who was on a witness stand one time when John T. Stuart asked him who were the principal citizens of New Salem, Green answering: "There are no principal citizens; every man in New Salem neighborhood is a principal citizen." He had a Tennessee skill in telling stories, and the Carrs told him he was the best at spinning yarns that they had ever heard. He replied: "I ain't a primin' to a curi's young feller who used |