Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House

[31] such a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety as would have melted the hearts of the worst of his adversaries, who so mistakenly applied to him the epithets of tyrant and usurper. With a sorrow almost divine, he, too, could have said of the rebellious States, “How often would I have gathered you together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” Like another Jeremiah, he wept over the desolations of the nation; “he mourned the slain of the daughter of his people.”

Surely, ruler never manifested so much sympathy, and tenderness, and charity. How like the last words of the Divine one himself, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” will the closing sentences of his last inaugural address resound in solemn cadence through the coming centuries. Truly and well says the London “Spectator” of that address: “We cannot read it without a renewed conviction that it is the noblest political document known to history, and should have for the nation and the statesmen he left behind him something of a sacred and almost prophetic character. Surely, none was ever written under a stronger sense of the reality of God's government. And certainly none written in a period of passionate conflict ever so completely excluded the partiality of victorious faction, and breathed so pure a strain of mingled justice and mercy.”