FIRST NEGRO

Let our great leader show us the way----

LINCOLN

The Colony of Liberia is an old one, and it is open to you. I am now
arranging to open another in Central America. You are intelligent and
know that success does not so much depend on external help as on
self-reliance. If you will engage in the enterprise I will spend the
money Congress has entrusted to me for this purpose. I ask you to
consider it seriously, not for yourselves merely, nor for your race and
ours for the present time, BUT FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.

FIRST NEGRO

We will, sir----!

LINCOLN

The practical thing I want to ascertain is whether I can get a number
of able-bodied men with their wives and children to go at once--men who
"can cut their own fodder" so to speak----? Take this plan, show it to
your people----

[_Hands the document to the First Negro._]

--and find this out for me----

FIRST NEGRO

We'll do our best----

THIRD NEGRO

[_Bowing out with religious ecstasy._]

Praise God forever for our Savior-Leader----!

[NICOLAY _ushers out the three Negroes and shows in a stately
black-robed figure in mourning for her dead. She walks quietly to
the President and extends her hand with a gracious smile._]

THE WOMAN

Perhaps I've done wrong to take up your time----

LINCOLN

My time belongs to the people, Madam----

THE WOMAN

I've come to you, Mr. President, under an impulse I could not resist.
Mr. Stoddard, your third Secretary, is my friend. He told me this
morning that all night the sound of your footfall came from this room.
He heard it at nine, at ten, at eleven. At midnight the Secretary of
War left the door ajar and the steady tramp came with heavier sound.
The last thing he heard at three was the muffled beat upstairs. The
guard said it had not stopped at daylight. I saw you staggering alone
under a Nation's sorrow and I wondered if you had been given the vision
to see the dawn of a new life for our people. I know I'm looking into
the eyes of the man whose word can stop this war and divide the
Union--I have come to tell you that I lost my first born son at
Fredericksburg--a lad of twenty----

[_She pauses and_ LINCOLN _bends and presses he