Lincoln Story Book, The

<h3>THE UNPARDONABLE CRIME.</h3> <p>The mass of examples of Lincoln's leniency, mercifulness, and lack of rigor, lead one to believe he could not be inexorable. But there was one crime to which he was unforgiving--the truckling to slavery. The smuggling of slaves into the South was carried on much later than a guileless public imagine. Only fifty years ago, a slave-trader languished in a Massachusetts prison, in Newburyport, serving out a five years' sentence, and still confined from inability to procure the thousand dollars to pay a superimposed fine. Mr. Alley, congressman of Lynn, felt compassion, and busied himself to try to procure the wretch's release. For that he laid the unfortunate's petition before President Lincoln. It acknowledged the guilt and the justice of his condemnation; he was penitent and deplored his state--all had fallen away from him after his conviction. The chief arbiter was touched by the piteous and emphatic appeal. Nevertheless, he felt constrained to say to the intermediary:</p> <p>"My friend, this is a very touching appeal to my feelings. You know that my weakness is to be, if possible, too easily moved by appeals to mercy, and if this man were guilty of the foulest murder that the arm of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him on such an appeal. But the man who could go to Africa, and rob her of her children, and sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer, that he can never receive pardon at my hands. No! he may rot in jail before he shall have liberty by any act of mine!" <br/> <br/> <br/></p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />