The life and public services of Abraham Lincoln ... together with his state papers, including his speeches, addresses, messages, letters, and proclamations, and the closing scenes connected with his life and death. By Henry J. Raymond. To which are added anecdotes and personal reminiscences of President Lincoln, by Frank B. Carpenter.

STATE PAPERS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

CHAPTER XX.
THE CLOSE OF THE REBELLION.
THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS. ---PROCLAMATION TO DESEITERS.-SPREOHES BD
THE PRESIDENT.-DESTRUCTION OF LEE'S ARMY.-TTHE PRESIDENT'
VISIT TO RICHMOND. —RETUIVN TO WASIIINGTON.-CLOSE OF THE WAR.
IT seems hardly credible that four years should embrace within their narrow limit so immense a change
as the four years of Mr. Lincoln's first Administration had
brought to the country and to himself. When, on the 4th
of March, 1861, he took the oath of office, administered
to him by Chief-Justice Taney, the horizon was dark
with storms, whose duration and violence were as yet
happily unknown. He himself, as he stood on the steps
of the Capitol, was an untried man, sneered at by those.
who had held the reins of power in the country, an
object for the rising hate of the aspiring aristocracy of
the South, which had already sought his life, and would
have sought it with still greater vindictiveness, if a tithe
of the sagacity, firmness, honesty, and patriotism which
animated his breast had been understood; even then an
object of interest and growing affection, comparatively
unknown as he was even to his own friends, to those
who saw the danger which was overhanging the country,
and were nerving themselves to meet it.
But now the fierceness of the storm seemed to be passing away, and clearer skies to be seen through the rolling
clouds. The citizen, who, four years before, was utterly untried and unknown, was now the chosen leader of a nation of
thirty million people, who trusted in his honesty as they
trusted in the eternal principles of Nature, who believed
him to be wise, and knew him to be abundant in patience
and kindness of heart, with an army of half a million