Abraham Lincoln's Methodist Friend

Friday is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.  I just came across a remembrance of Lincoln by a Methodist minister of Washington, D.C. who, like many of the city’s clergy, knew him as if a friend and sometimes sought favors from him in the form of pardons for parishioners and others.  Rev. Bernard Nadal, the son of a French immigrant who taught at what became DePauw University and later at Drew Seminary, was from Virginia but an ardent anti-slavery unionist who pastored Wesley Chapel on F Street in downtown D.C.  His biography calls him an “evangelical preacher,” in the “strictest sense orthodox,” and “firmly attached also to the great fundamentals of Methodism,” which he maintained “unflinchingly.”