good soldiership. They accepted discipline, and developed under it. They were brave in battle, and in victory they were guiltless of excess. It was a wonderful epoch in the race's history,-the transition from servitude to freedom,— and in that ordeal, first as slaves and then as soldiers, they showed themselves worthy of the deliverance that had come at last. As soldiers, they found leaders in the flower of the North. Such was Robert Gould Shaw, of the best blood and training of Massachusetts; a son of Harvard; serving from the first as private and then as captain; called by Governor Andrew in 1863 to the command of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the first black regiment mustered into service; taking a place which risked not battle peril only but social obloquy; training his recruits into soldiers; leading them in a hopeless onset against the batteries of Fort Wagner; falling at their head; buried in a ditch with his men; honored in an immortal sculpture which portrays the young, highbred hero in the midst of the humble, faithful men for whom he gave his life. All the energies of the North were at the highest stretch. In those whose hearts were in the strife, at home or in the field, there was a great glow and elation. The intensity of the time communicated itself to industry and trade. There was an almost feverish activity; with heavy taxation and a fluctuating currency-gold was long at a premium of 250mills and markets and stores were in full tide of operation. The North matched the South in personal courage and generalship; and greatly outweighed it in numbers, material, and in the productivity engendered in a free, urban, industrial society. The passion of the war touched everything. The churches were strongholds of the national cause. The Sanitary and Christian Commissions kept camp and home in close touch. But under all this stir was the tragedy of wide-spread desolation and bereavement. The multitudinous slaughter of campaigns like the Wilderness had an awful background of woful families. Arduous achievement, heroism and anguish, suffering and sacrifice for the cause of the nation and humanitythat was the North's story in those years. It is a sublime story as we look back: The glory dies not, and the grief is past. Once more the North was called on to solemnly decide, in the election of 1864. Against Lincoln was nominated by the Democrats, General McClellan, himself a stainless soldier and a patriot, but supported by every element of hostility to emancipation, of sympathy with the Southern cause, and of impatience with the long and burdensome struggle. The platform called for an immediate armistice, to be followed by a convention of the States, or other peaceable measures for the restoration of the Union. McClellan's letter of acceptance ignored the platform, and declared strongly for the persistent maintenance of the Union. The result of the election was a majority of 400,000 votes in 4,000,000 for Lincoln, every State supporting him save New Jersey, Kentucky, and Delaware. It was the greatness of the prize at stake that justified the cost. Lowell sang the true song of the war, when the end was almost reached, in the poem that records the sore loss to his own family, his three nephews, "likely lads as well could be,"―slain on the battle-field. In that lofty, mournful verse, there is no drum and trumpet clangor, but the high purpose whose roots are watered by tears: Come, Peace, not like a mourner bowed For honor lost an' dear ones wasted, But proud, to meet a people proud, With eyes thet tell o' triumph tasted! Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt, An' step that proves ye Victory's daughter! Like shipwrecked men's on raf's for water. Come, while our country feels the lift Of a gret instinct shoutin' "Forwards!" Thet tarries long in han's o' cowards! Come, sech ez mothers prayed for, when They kissed their cross with lips thet quivered, With Grant and Lee locked in the last desperate struggle at Petersburg, with final victory almost in sight, Lincoln spoke his second inaugural,-too grave for exultation, with the note of humility and faith. He is awed before the course of events since he stood there four years ago. He feels the strangeness of both combatants appealing to the same Bible and the same God. For himself and his people he utters the fond hope, the fervent prayer, that "this awful scourge of war may pass away." He accepts the suffering as the penalty of the nation-the whole nation-for the sin of slavery. Humbly, resolutely, he faces with his people the final effort, the sacred duty: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, and to all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." CHAPTER XXVIII RECONSTRUCTION: EXPERIMENTS AND IDEALS "GOD uses a good many ugly tools to dig up the stumps and burn off the forests and drain the swamps of a howling wilderness. He has used this old Egyptian plow of slavery to turn over the sod of these fifteen Southern States. Its sin consisted in not dying decently when its work was done. It strove to live and make all the new world like it. Its leaders avowed that their object was to put this belt of the continent under the control of an aristocracy which believes that one-fifth of the race is born booted and spurred and the other four-fifths ready for that fifth to ride. The war was one of freedom and democracy against the institutions that rest on slaves. It will take ten years for the country to shed the scar of such a struggle. The state of society at the South that produced the war will remain and trouble the land until freedom and democracy and the spirit of the nineteenth century takes its place. Only then can we grapple the Union together with hooks of steel, and make it as lasting as the granite that underlies the continent." These were the brave words of a Southern newspaper, the Galveston Bulletin, in January, 1867, in the mid-throes of reconstruction. So it was that the best minds of the reunited nation foresaw and accepted the path on which we still are slowly mounting; often slipping, stumbling, falling, but still getting upward. When, on January 31, 1865, the vote of the House com pleted the ratification by Congress of the Thirteenth Amend、 ment, abolishing slavery, a burst of jubilant cheering swept the whole assembly, and a wave of joy went through the North. Universal freedom seemed close at hand. Two months more, and the Confederate capital fell, on April 3, and still higher rose the trimph. Another week, and the North woke at midnight, to forget sleep and rejoice as over the final consummation,-Lee had surrendered! In those days it seemed to ardent souls that all the sacrifices of the past four years were repaid, and freedom and Union were completely won. But real freedom of men, true union of a nation, are not achieved by votes of Congress alone, or victories of the sword. The first and worst was over, yet the work was only begun. And these first steps had been by a rough and bitter road, of which the next stage could not be smooth or sweet. The plow of slavery had been followed by the harrow of war,-blossoms and fruitage could not instantly follow. Lincoln practically made his own the motto ascribed to the Jesuits, "The goal of to-day, the starting-point of tomorrow." Even before to-day's goal was reached, his eye was measuring the next stage. While his patient shoulders were still bowed under the weight of war, his hands were reaching out to the work of reconstruction. In December, 1863, a year after the Emancipation Proclamation, he issued another proclamation. In this he offered full amnesty to all who had taken arms against the government, on condition simply of an oath to support the Constitution, and all laws and proclamations concerning slavery until such were legally overruled. From this amnesty were excepted those who had held diplomatic or high military offices in the Confederacy; those who had left Congress or the army or navy to aid the Confederate cause; and those who had |