Not  two  months  before  his  death,  fifty-one  days  before
the  surrender  of  Lee,  President  Lincoln  sent  to  Missouri  what
was  to  be  his  farewell  message.  The  letter  was  dated  the
latter  part  of  February,  1865.  The  Missouri  Constitutional
convention  had  abolished  slavery.  The  delegates  were  pre-
paring that  ill-advised,  proscriptive,  short-lived  organic  act,
with  its  test  oaths  which  were  to  create  turmoil  for  a  genera-
tion in  the  State,  which  passed  into  history  as  the  Drake  con-
stitution. Mr.  Lincoln  wrote,  entreating  Governor  Fletcher
to  get  together  the  contending  factions  and  to  harmonize  the
people  irrespective  of  what  they  had  "thought,  said,  or  done


LINCOLN  AND  MISSOURI.
119


about  the  war  or  about  anything  else."  He  even  suggested
a  plan  of  detail  by  which  he  believed  this  might  be  accom-
plished. The  Hon.  Benjamin  B.  Cahoon,  Sr.,  of  Frederick-
town,  lifelong  student  of  Lincoln  who  stopped  and  sympa-
thized with  him  as  he  lay  wounded  after  Gettysburg,  has  said
of  this  farewell  message  to  Missouri:

"In  no  document  of  Lincoln's  is  his  kindness  and  hu-
manity better  exhibited.  It  can  be  classed  with  his  first  and
second  Inaugural  addresses  and  his  Gettysburg  oration."

A  fitting  conclusion  to  this  narrative  of  Lincoln  and  Mis-
souri is  this  letter  of  the  President  to  Governor  Fletcher:


Executive  Mansion,
Washington,  February  20,  1865.
His  Excellency,  Governor  Fletcher:

It  seems  that  there  is  now  no  organized  military  force  of  the
enemy  in  Missouri,  and  yet  that  destruction  of  property  and  life  is
rampant  everywhere.  Is  not  the  cure  for  this  within  easy  reach  of
the  people  themselves?  It  cannot  be  but  that  every  man,  not  naturally
a  robber  or  cutthroat,  would  gladly  put  an  end  to  this  state  of  things.
