February 17, 1861 (Sunday)

A Seventh Day Rest

Ted Widmer's narrative, "He Rested on the Seventh Day" relates Lincoln's activites for this Sunday.  He attended church, played with his boys, had discussions about the American-native Indians and received some wise counsel in a letter from Browning.  A good narrative to read at the link above. 

"Lincoln returned to his hotel around 2 p.m. to find his sons Tad and Willie playing leapfrog with the son of the hotel owner.  Decades later that lucky playmate, Edward Michael, recorded an unusual memory of the 16th President:  'The two boys and I were playing leapfrong in a room of the hotel, when President Lincoln came in and joined in the game.  He was a very friendly man.  He didn't act like a president.'  Has a president ever received higher praise?"

Hat tip Civil War Daily Gazette:  "Jefferson Davis arrived in Mobile, Alabama after a long and tiring journey.  It was evening.  He delivered a fiery speech in the street to a crowd of his new fellow countrymen:  'Time for compromise has now passed, and the South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel if coercion is persisted in.  We ask nothing, we want nothing; we will have no complications....  Our separation from the old Union is now complete.  No compromise, no reconstruction is now to be entertained.' 

Later he spoke:  'If war should come, if we must again baptize in blood the principles for which our fathers bled in the Revolution, we shall show that we are not degenerate sons.' "  He will be inaugurated tomorrow as the Southern Confederacy's President.

From the Library of Congress site, this clipping from the Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin to add to what has been said above.

Hat tip Civil War Daily Gazette:  William Sherman gives farewell address to cadets in Louisiana before he heads north.

An anecdote of Robert E. Lee as he prepares to leave Texas for Washington D.C.   Hat tip The American Civil War.