Stephens as Vice-President. On the same day of the meeting of the Confederate Congress at Montgomery, a Peace Conference, so-called, assembled in Washington City. Delegates from twenty-one States were present, and the optimists who composed the body still dreamed of peace. They prepared certain amendments to the Constitution of the United States, and the same were laid before Congress, with the recommendation that they be adopted. That body, freshly gathered from the people, and inspired with rising antagonism to the action of the Southern leaders, gave little heed to the recommendations, and the Conference dispersed without practical results.

Buchanan was still President, and the Government was still under the direction of the Democratic party; but the country seemed on the verge of ruin. It appeared that the Ship of State was purposely steered directly for the rocks. In the Executive Department there was a complete paralysis. The army had been sent in detachments to remote frontiers. The fleet was scattered in distant seas. The financial credit had run down to the lowest ebb. The Government was unable to borrow funds for current emergencies at twelve per cent. The diverse counsels of his friends had distracted the President. He hesitated, and knew not which way to turn. With the exception of Forts Sumter and Moultrie, in Charleston harbor, Fort Pickens, near Pensacola, and Fortress Monroe, in the Chesapeake, all the important naval ports and posts in the seceded States had been seized by the Confederate authorities, even before the organization of their Government. Meanwhile, in far off Kansas the local warfare continued to breakout at fitful intervals; but the Free State party had at last gained a complete ascendancy, and the early admission of the new Commonwealth, with two additional Republican Senators, was a foregone conclusion.

With the beginning of the new year, the President roused himself for a moment, and made a feeble attempt to reinforce and provision the garrison of Fort Sumter. The steamer Star of the West was accordingly sent out with men and supplies; but the Confederates were informed of all that was done, and had no trouble in defeating the enterprise As the steamer approached the harbor of Charleston she was fired on by a Confederate battery, planted for that purpose, and compelled to return. Thus in gloom and grief and the upheavals of revolution, the Administration of James Buchanan drew to a close. Such was the dreadful condition of affairs that it was deemed prudent for the new President to approach the Capital without recognition. For the first time in the history of the nation, the Chief Magistrate of the Republic slipped into Washington City by night, as a means of personal safety.

The new Chief Magistrate was a man for the hour and for the epoch. He had been thrown to the front by those processes which, in the aggregate, look so much like Providence. Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, was a Kentuckian by birth; born in the county La Rue, on the 12th of February, 1809. His ancestors had immigrated thither from Rockingham County, Virginia; both father and mother were Virginians by birth. At the time of the emigration, however, Kentucky was simply a territorial extension westward of the Old Dominion. The childhood of Lincoln was passed in utter obscurity. It appear that the family were poor to the last degree-mere backwoods people of the lowest order. In 1816 the father, Thomas Lincoln, removed to Spencer County, Indiana-just then admitted into the Union-and built a cabin in the woods near the present village of Gentryville. This place was the scene of Lincoln's boyhood-a constant struggle with poverty, hardship, and toil. At the age of sixteen we find him managing a ferry across the Ohio, opposite the mouth of Anderson Creek-a service for which he was paid six dollars a month. In his youth he received, in the aggregate, about one year's schooling, which was all he ever had in the way of formal education. In the year of his majority he removed with his father's family to the North Fork of the Sangamon River, ten miles west of Decatur, in Illinois. Here he and his father built another log house, and opened and fenced a farm. Here Abraham Lincoln, pushing forth from the ancestral cabin, began for himself the hard battle of life.