which lay very close to Lincoln's
heart; enough has been said of him to suggest too that this grave
person, bereft of any glimmering of fun, was in one sense no congenial
companion for Lincoln. But he was stainlessly unselfish and sincere,
and he was the politician above all others in Washington with whom
Lincoln most gladly and most successfully maintained easy social
intercourse. And, to please him in little ways, Lincoln would
disentangle his long frame from the "grotesque position of comfort"
into which he had twisted it in talk with some other friend, and would
assume in an instant a courtly demeanour when Sumner was about to enter
his room.

On January 31, 1865, the resolution earlier passed by the Senate for a
Constitutional Amendment to prohibit slavery was passed by the House of
Representatives, as Lincoln had eagerly desired, so that the requisite
voting of three quarters of the States in its favour could now begin.
Before that time the Confederate Congress had, on March 13, 1865,
closed its last, most anxious and distracted session by passing an Act
for the enlistment of negro volunteers, who were to become free on
enlistment. As a military measure it was belated and inoperative, but
nothing could more eloquently have marked the practical extinction of
slavery which the war had wrought than the consent of Southern
legislators to convert the remaining slaves into soldiers.

The military operations of 1865 had proceeded but a very little way
when the sense of what they portended was felt among the Southern
leaders in Richmond. The fall of that capital itself might be hastened
or be delayed; Lee's army if it escaped from Richmond might prolong
resistance for a shorter or for a longer time, but Sherman's march to
the sea, and the far harder achievements of the same kind which he was
now beginning, made the South feel, as he knew it would feel, that not
a port, not an arsenal, not a railway, not a corn district of the South
lay any longer beyond the striking range of the North. Congressmen and
public officials in Richmond knew that the people of the South now
longed for peace and that the authority of the Confederacy was gone.
They beset Jefferson Davis with demands that he should start
negotiations. But none of them had determined what price they would
pay for peace; and there was not among them any will that could really
withstand their President. In one point indeed Jefferson Davis did
wisely yield.