us official bodies pass in rapid
succession before the head of the nation, wishing him success and
prosperity in the New Year. The occasion is made gay with music and
flowers and bright uniforms, and has a social as well as an official
character. Even in war times such customs were kept up, and in spite of
his load of care, the President was expected to find time and heart for
the greetings and questions and hand-shakings of this and other state
ceremonies. Ordinarily it was not hard for him. He liked to meet people,
and such occasions were a positive relief from the mental strain of his
official work. It is to be questioned, however, whether, on this day,
his mind did not leave the passing stream of people before him, to dwell
on the proclamation he was so soon to sign.

At about three o'clock in the afternoon, after full three hours of such
greetings and handshakings, when his own hand was so weary it could
scarcely hold a pen, the President and perhaps a dozen friends, went up
to the Executive Office, and there, without any pre-arranged ceremony,
he signed his name to the greatest state paper of the century, which
banished the curse of slavery from our land, and set almost four million
people free.

X. THE MAN WHO WAS PRESIDENT

The way Mr. Lincoln signed this most important state paper was
thoroughly in keeping with his nature. He hated all shams and show and
pretense, and being absolutely without affectation of any kind, it
would never have occurred to him to pose for effect while signing
the Emancipation Proclamation or any other paper. He never thought of
himself as a President to be set up before a multitude and admired,
but always as a President charged with duties which he owed to every
citizen. In fulfilling these he did not stand upon ceremony, but took
the most direct way to the end he had in view.

It is not often that a President pleads a cause before Congress. Mr.
Lincoln did not find it beneath his dignity at one time to go in
person to the Capitol, and calling a number of the leading senators and
representatives around him, explain to them, with the aid of a map, his
reasons for believing that the final stand of the Confederates would be
made in that part of the South where the seven States of Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia
come together; and strive in this way to interest them in the sad
plight of the loyal people of Tennessee who wer