somehow I can't. They said I'd better come and see you. When the war broke out I gave my boy to God, and then told him he might go and fight the rebels. Now, Mr. President, if you'll let me take him home, I'll nurse him up, and just as soon as he gets well enough he'll go right back and fight again. He's a good boy; he won't shirk."

Tears glistened in the eyes of Mr. Lincoln as he looked into the honest face and listened to the pleading words.

"You shall have your boy. There, take this scrap of paper, and you will get your boy if he is able to be moved."

"God bless you, Mr. President! we are so much obliged to you!" said the grateful woman, stifling her sobbing joy as she received the paper. (*)

The Attorney-general came to the President soliciting a favor. “A friend of mine," said Mr. Bates, "over in Virginia is a Union man, but his boy enlisted in the rebel army. He has been captured by our troops, and the father wants him paroled. He promises that the boy shall not serve again. As a personal favor I hope you will see your way to grant it."

"Bates," said Mr. Lincoln, "I have a case almost like it. The son of an old friend in Illinois ran away from home and enlisted in the rebel army. The poor fool has been captured, and his broken-hearted father wants me to send him home, and he promises to keep him there. Now, let us unite our influence with this Administration, and see if we can't make the two old men happy, and at the same time keep two fools from going back into the rebel army."

The fathers received their sons, and the "fools" never again took up arms against their country.

A fair was held in Washington on March 16th for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals. It was given under the auspices of women. Mr. Lincoln visited it, and, being called upon for a speech, said:

"I have but a few words to utter. This extraordinary war falls heavily upon all classes of people, but most heavily upon the soldier. It has been said, 'All that a man hath will he give for his life;' the soldier puts his life at stake, and often yields it, in his country's cause. The highest merit thus is due the soldier. . . . I am not accustomed to the language of eulogy; I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women. But I must say that 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."

An entertainment in aid of the fair, consisting of poetical recitations

and readings by elocutionists, was held in the Representatives' Hall. The President attended, and was invited to a seat on the platform. Among the selections was a poem entitled "The New Pastoral," written by Thomas Buchanan Read in 1850, after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise a prophetic poem containing a remarkable passage:

"Here the great statesman from the ranks of toil

May rise with judgment clear, as strong as wise,
And with a well-directed patriot blow

Reclinch the rivets in our Union bonds

Which tinkering knaves have striven to set ajar.”

Fourteen years had passed since the writing of the poem, and the prophecy was being fulfilled in the person of President Lincoln. It was recognized by the audience, and the Capitol rang with applause.

The Governor of Kentucky, Mr. Bramlette, together with Mr. Dixon and Mr. A. G. Hodges, visited Washington to see about the draft for soldiers which Congress had ordered. They talked with Mr. April 4. Lincoln about the Emancipation Proclamation. After their return to Kentucky, Mr. Hodges asked the President to write out what he had said to them. Very remarkable the closing sentences:

"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years' struggle, the nation's condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new causes to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."

General Grant returned from the West to take supreme command of military affairs.

"What sort of a man is General Grant?" asked one of the President's friends.

"Well, I hardly know what to think of him," said Mr. Lincoln. "He is the quietest fellow you ever saw. He don't make any fuss. I

believe two or three times he has been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here. The only evidence you have that he is in any place is that he makes things git. Grant is the first general I have had."

"How is that?"

"You know how it has been with the others. As soon as I put a man in command, he'd come to me with a plan of a campaign, as if to

say, 'Now, I don't believe I can do it, but if you say so I'll try,' and so put the responsibility of success or failure on me. It isn't so with Grant. He hasn't told me what his plans are. I don't know, and I don't want to know. I am glad to have found a man who can go ahead without me."

The President had been lying on a lounge, but now sat upright and talked more earnestly, as if it were a congenial topic.

"You see, when any of the others set out on a campaign, they'd look over matters and pick out some one thing they were short of and which they knew I couldn't give them, and tell me they couldn't win unless they had it, and it was most generally cavalry."

Mr. Lincoln laughed heartily a moment, and then went on:

Now, when Grant took hold I was waiting to see what his pet impossibility would be. I reckoned it would be cavalry, as a matter of course, for we hadn't horses enough to mount the men we had. There were 15,000, or thereabouts, up near Harper's Ferry, and no horses to put them on. Well, Grant sent word to me the other day about those very men, just as I expected, but he didn't ask for horses. He only wanted to know whether he should make infantry of them or disband them. He don't ask impossibilities of me, and he is the first general who hasn't."

General Grant intended that the army under Sherman, at Chattanooga, the Army of the Potomac, under Meade, and the Army of the James, under Butler, should move at the same time. General Burnside was at Annapolis, in Maryland, with the Ninth Corps, numbering nearly 30,000 men. He was directed to march to Washington, and from there to the Rapidan, to co-operate with the Army of the Potomac.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue comes Burnside's troops, turning up Fourteenth Street, where the President stands upon a balcony to review them. Some of the veterans have fought at Bull Run, Ball's April 25. Bluff, Roanoke, Newbern, in front of Richmond, Antietam, Gettysburg, Knoxville. The flags which they carry are in tatters, but they are the dearest things on earth to the men keeping step to the drumbeat. There is the steady tramping of the men, the deep, heavy jar of gun-carriages, clattering of horses' hoofs, clanking of sabres. General Burnside and the President, standing side by side, look down upon the serried ranks. The lines are deepening in the face of Abraham Lincoln. He is pale and care-worn. The soldiers behold him, swing their hats, and hurrah. A division of veterans pass, and then, with full ranks, the platoons extending the entire width of the street, come brigades

which have never been in battle-men who have come at the call of their country to lay down their lives on the battle-field. Their country! They never had a country till that pale man on the balcony gave them one. They never were men till he made them such. They were slaves; he made them freemen. They have been chattels-things; now they are owners of themselves-citizens-soldiers of the Republic. Never before have they beheld their benefactor. "Hurrah for Uncle Abe! Hurrah for Mars Linkum!" No cheers like theirs. It is the spontaneous outburst from grateful hearts. Yes; in return for what he has done for them and for their race will they fight to the death!

May 3.

"Can you," said the President to Mr. L. E. Chittenden, "leave your office and go over to Annapolis? A party of about 400 officers and men out of rebel prisons at Belle Isle, at Richmond, arrived there yesterday. Their condition will be investigated by Congress; but that will take time. An intelligent lady, whom you know, has given me such an account of their sad state that I should like to know the truth at once from one who will neither exaggerate nor suppress any of the facts. Will you go and see them, and bring me back your report?" (")

Mr. Chittenden visited Annapolis, beheld the men, returned to Washington, and reported to Mr. Lincoln.

"All the way from Annapolis," he said, "I have been studying the formula for an answer to your question. It is useless. You would like to know what I have seen; I cannot tell you. Imagine, if you can, strong men, robbed of their money, blankets, overcoats, boots, and clothing, covered with rags, driven like foxes into holes on an island, exposed to frost and cold until their frozen extremities drop from their bleeding stumps, fed upon food such as the swine would have rejected, until by exhaustion their manhood is crushed out, their minds destroyed, and their bodies, foul with filth and disease, are brought to the very borders of the grave, which soon will close upon half of them, and you may get some faint conception of what may be seen at Annapolis. But it will be very faint. The picture cannot be comprehended even when it is

seen."

"Can such things be possible!" the President exclaimed.

"You are

the fourth person who has given me the same account. I cannot believe it! There must be some explanation for it. The Richmond people are Americans-of the same race as ourselves. It is incredible!"

"No," Mr. President, "I saw the poor unfortunates last evening. I went again this morning to find something which would relieve the

horror of the first impression. I did not find it. I have conversed with men who know they are dying. They all tell the same story, and but one conclusion is possible: a frightful weight of responsibility and guilt rests upon the authorities at Richmond for these crimes against humanity."

"Nothing," replied Mr. Lincoln, "has occurred in the war which causes me to suffer like this. I know it seems impossible to account for the treatment of these poor fellows, except on the theory that somebody is guilty. But the world will be slow to believe that the Confederate authorities intend to destroy their prisoners by starvation. We should be slow to believe it. It must be that they have some claim of excuse. The Indians torture their prisoners, but I never heard that they froze them or starved them!" We may not know all the facts, the whole inside history. They may have excuses of which we know nothing."

"Make the case your own, Mr. President," said Chittenden. "Washington is larger than Richmond. Your duties are quite as absorbing as those of Mr. Jefferson Davis. Could Confederate prisoners of war be dying by hundreds of exposure and starvation on an island in the Potomac, between this city and Alexandria, and you not know it? Why, the newsboys in the streets would publish it, and the authorities could not remain ignorant of it, even if they were deaf and dumb."

“Well,” said Mr. Lincoln, “I admit you have the best of the argument. But do me a favor. Retain your opinions, if you must, but say nothing about them at present until we are forced to make the charge -until there is no alternative, and the world is forced to think as we do." "I will do as you request, Mr. President."

"Let us hope," he replied, "for the best. We shall have enough to answer for if we survive this war. Let us hope at least that the crime of murdering prisoners by exposure and starvation may not be fastened on any of our people."

With fifteen days' rations for the army, General Grant cut loose from all communication with Washington, crossed the Rapidan, and went on to the Wilderness. (See "Redeeming the Republic," chap. iv.) A courier arrived at the White House with an account of the two days' struggle-an undecided battle, in which 20,000 men had been killed or wounded. The President paced his chamber, and gave way to uncontrollable emotion, exclaiming:

May 8.

"My God! my God! twenty thousand! I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it! Why do we suffer so? Could we not have avoided the terrible, bloody war? Was it not forced upon us? Will it ever end?"