Page:Samuel Scoville -Abraham Lincoln, His Story.djvu/36

 "Yes, shoot me!" the officer assured him earnestly.

Leaning over to him Lincoln said in a stage whisper, "Well, if I were you and Sherman had threatened to shoot me, I wouldn't trust him for a moment—for I believe he'd do it."

Early in life Lincoln resolved not to weigh himself down with bad habits. He led a straight, clean life morally. What he said about the women of America at the end of the Civil War can be quoted as his attitude toward women during his entire life:

"If all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, 'God bless the women of America.'"

He neither drank nor smoked. In the early forties he wrote to George E. Pickett, afterward a Confederate general:

"I have just told the folks here in Springfield, on the hundred-and-tenth anniversary of Washington's birthday, that the one victory we can ever call complete will be that one which proclaims that there is not one slave nor one drunkard on the face of God's green earth. Recruit for this victory!"

The picture of his inner life is a harder one