Abraham Lincoln

by Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson Charnwood

CHAPTER XII

THE END

On December 6, 1864, Lincoln sent the last of his Annual Messages to Congress. He treated as matter for oblivion the "impugning of motives and heated controversy as to the proper means of advancing the Union cause," which had played so large a part in the Presidential election and the other elections of the autumn. For, as he said, "on the distinct issue of Union or no Union the politicians have shown their instinctive knowledge that there is no diversity among the people." This was accurate as well as generous, for though many Democrats had opposed the war, none had avowed that for the sake of peace he would give up the Union. Passing then to the means by which the Union could be made to prevail he wrote: "On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to me that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and cannot give. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war and decided by victory. The abandonment of armed resistance to the national authority on the part of the insurgents is the only indispensable condition to ending the war on the part of the Government." To avoid a possible misunderstanding he added that not a single person who was free by the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation or of any Act of Congress would be returned to slavery while he held the executive authority. "If the people should by whatever mode or means make it an executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it." This last sentence was no meaningless flourish; the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery could not be passed for some time, and might conceivably be defeated; in the meantime the Courts might possibly have declared any negro in the Southern States a slave; Lincoln's words let it be seen that they would have found themselves without an arm to enforce their decision. But in fact there was no longer an issue with the South as to abolition. Jefferson Davis had himself declared that slavery was gone, for most slaves had now freed themselves, and that he for his part troubled very little over that. There remained, then, no issue between North and South except that between Independence and Union.

On the same day that he sent his annual message Lincoln gave himself a characteristic pleasure by another communication which he sent to the Senate. Old Roger Taney of the Dred Scott case had died in October; the Senate was now requested to confirm the President's nomination of a new Chief Justice to succeed him; and the President had nominated Chase. Chase's reputation as a lawyer had seemed to fit him for the position, but the well informed declared that, in spite of some appearances on the platform for Lincoln he still kept "going around peddling his griefs in private ears and sowing dissatisfaction against Lincoln." So in spite of Lincoln's pregnant remark on this subject that he "did not believe in keeping any man under," nobody supposed that Lincoln would appoint him. Sumner and Congressman Alley of Massachusetts had indeed gone to Lincoln to urge the appointment. "We found, to our dismay," Alley relates, "that the President had heard of the bitter criticisms of Mr. Chase upon himself and his Administration. Mr. Lincoln urged many of Chase's defects, to discover, as we afterwards learned, how his objection could be answered. We were both discouraged and made up our minds that the President did not mean to appoint Mr. Chase. It really seemed too much to expect of poor human nature." One morning Alley again saw the President. "I have something to tell you that will make you happy," said Lincoln. "I have just sent Mr. Chase word that he is to be appointed Chief Justice, and you are the first man I have told of it." Alley said something natural about Lincoln's magnanimity, but was told in reply what the only real difficulty had been. Lincoln from his "convictions of duty to the Republican party and the country" had always meant to appoint Chase, subject to one doubt which he had revolved in his mind till he had settled it. This doubt was simply whether Chase, beset as he was by a craving for the Presidency which he could never obtain, would ever really turn his attention with a will to becoming the great Chief Justice that Lincoln thought he could be. Lincoln's occasional failures of tact had sometimes a noble side to them; he even thought now of writing to Chase and telling him with simple seriousness where he felt his temptation lay, and he with difficulty came to see that this attempt at brotherly frankness would be misconstrued by a suspicious and jealous man. Charles Sumner, Chase's advocate on this occasion, was all this time the most weighty and the most pronounced of those Radicals who were beginning to press for unrestricted negro suffrage in the South and in general for a hard and inelastic scheme of "reconstruction," which they would have imposed on the conquered South without an attempt to conciliate the feeling of the vanquished or to invite their co-operation in building up the new order. He was thus the chief opponent of that more tentative, but as is now seen, more liberal and more practical policy which lay very close to Lincoln's heart; enough has been said of him to suggest too that this grave person, bereft of any glimmering of fun, was in one sense no congenial companion for Lincoln. But he was stainlessly unselfish and sincere, and he was the politician above all others in Washington with whom Lincoln most gladly and most successfully maintained easy social intercourse. And, to please him in little ways, Lincoln would disentangle his long frame from the "grotesque position of comfort" into which he had twisted it in talk with some other friend, and would assume in an instant a courtly demeanour when Sumner was about to enter his room.

On January 31, 1865, the resolution earlier passed by the Senate for a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit slavery was passed by the House of Representatives, as Lincoln had eagerly desired, so that the requisite voting of three quarters of the States in its favour could now begin. Before that time the Confederate Congress had, on March 13, 1865, closed its last, most anxious and distracted session by passing an Act for the enlistment of negro volunteers, who were to become free on enlistment. As a military measure it was belated and inoperative, but nothing could more eloquently have marked the practical extinction of slavery which the war had wrought than the consent of Southern legislators to convert the remaining slaves into soldiers.

The military operations of 1865 had proceeded but a very little way when the sense of what they portended was felt among the Southern leaders in Richmond. The fall of that capital itself might be hastened or be delayed; Lee's army if it escaped from Richmond might prolong resistance for a shorter or for a longer time, but Sherman's march to the sea, and the far harder achievements of the same kind which he was now beginning, made the South feel, as he knew it would feel, that not a port, not an arsenal, not a railway, not a corn district of the South lay any longer beyond the striking range of the North. Congressmen and public officials in Richmond knew that the people of the South now longed for peace and that the authority of the Confederacy was gone. They beset Jefferson Davis with demands that he should start negotiations. But none of them had determined what price they would pay for peace; and there was not among them any will that could really withstand their President. In one point indeed Jefferson Davis did wisely yield. On February 9, 1865, he consented to make Lee General-in-Chief of all the Southern armies. This belated delegation of larger authority to Lee had certain military results, but no political result whatever. Lee could have been the dictator of the Confederacy if he had chosen, and no one then or since would have blamed him; but it was not in his mind to do anything but his duty as a soldier. The best beloved and most memorable by far of all the men who served that lost cause, he had done nothing to bring about secession at the beginning, nor now did he do anything but conform to the wishes of his political chief. As for that chief, Lincoln had interpreted Davis' simple position quite rightly. Having once embraced the cause of Southern independence and taken the oath as chief magistrate of an independent Confederacy, he would not yield up that cause while there was a man to obey his orders. Whether this attitude should be set down, as it usually has been set down, to a diseased pride or to a very real heroism on his part, he never faced the truth that the situation was desperate and the spirit of his people daunted at last. But it is probable that just like Lincoln he was ready that those who were in haste to make peace should see what peace involved; and it is probable too that, in his terrible position, he deluded himself with some vague and vain hopes as to the attitude of the North. Lincoln on the other hand would not enter into any proceedings in which the secession of the South was treated otherwise than as a rebellion which must cease; but this did not absolutely compel him to refuse every sort of informal communication with influential men in the South, which might help them to see where they stood and from which he too might learn something.

Old Mr. Francis Blair, the father of Lincoln's late Postmaster-General, was the last of the honest peace-makers whom Lincoln had allowed to see things for themselves by meeting Jefferson Davis. His visit took place in January, 1865, and from his determination to be a go-between and the curious and difficult position in which Lincoln and Davis both stood in this respect an odd result arose. The Confederate Vice-President Stephens, who had preached peace in the autumn without a quarrel with Davis, and two other Southern leaders presented themselves at Grant's headquarters with the pathetic misrepresentation that they were sent by Davis on a mission which Lincoln had undertaken to receive. What they could show was authority from Davis to negotiate with Lincoln on the footing of the independence of the Confederacy, and a politely turned intimation from Lincoln that he would at any time receive persons informally sent to talk with a view to the surrender of the rebel armies. Grant, however, was deeply impressed with the sincerity of their desire for peace, and he entreated Lincoln to receive them. Lincoln therefore decided to overlook the false pretence under which they came. He gave Grant strict orders not to delay his operations on this account, but he came himself with Seward and met Davis' three commissioners on a ship at Hampton Roads on February 3. He and Stephens had in old days been Whig Congressmen together, and Lincoln had once been moved to tears by a speech of Stephens. They met now as friends. Lincoln lost no time in making his position clear. The unhappy commissioners made every effort to lead him away from the plain ground he had chosen. It is evident that they and possible that Jefferson Davis had hoped that when face to face with them he would change his mind, and possibly Blair's talk had served to encourage this hope. They failed, but the conversation continued in a frank and friendly manner. Lincoln told them very freely his personal opinions as to how the North ought to treat the South when it did surrender, but was careful to point out that he could make no promise or bargain, except indeed this promise that so far as penalties for rebellion were concerned the executive power, which lay in his sole hands, would be liberally used. Slavery was discussed, and Seward told them of the Constitutional Amendment which Congress had now submitted to the people. One of the commissioners returning again to Lincoln's refusal to negotiate with armed rebels, as he considered them, cited the precedent of Charles I.'s conduct in this respect. "I do not profess," said Lincoln, "to be posted in history. On all such matters I turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about Charles I. is that he lost his head in the end." Then he broke out into simple advice to Stephens as to the action he could now pursue. He had to report to Congress afterwards that the conference had had no result. He brought home, however, a personal compliment which he valued. "I understand, then," Stephens had said, "that you regard us as rebels, who are liable to be hanged for treason." "That is so," said Lincoln. "Well," said Stephens, "we supposed that would have to be your view. But, to tell you the truth, we have none of us been much afraid of being hanged with you as President." He brought home, besides the compliment, an idea of a kind which, if he could have had his way with his friends, might have been rich in good. He had discovered how hopeless the people of the South were, and he considered whether a friendly pronouncement might not lead them more readily to surrender. He deplored the suffering in which the South might now lie plunged, and it was a fixed part of his creed that slavery was the sin not of the South but of the nation. So he spent the day after his return in drafting a joint resolution which he hoped the two Houses of Congress might pass, and a Proclamation which he would in that case issue. In these he proposed to offer to the Southern States four hundred million dollars in United States bonds, being, as he calculated the cost to the North of two hundred days of war, to be allotted among those States in proportion to the property in slaves which each had lost. One half of this sum was to be paid at once if the war ended by April 1, and the other half upon the final adoption of the Constitutional Amendment. It would have been a happy thing if the work of restoring peace could have lain with a statesman whose rare aberrations from the path of practical politics were of this kind. Yet, considering the natural passions which even in this least revengeful of civil wars could not quite be repressed, we should be judging the Congress of that day by a higher standard than we should apply in other countries if we regarded this proposal as one that could have been hopefully submitted to them. Lincoln's illusions were dispelled on the following day when he read what he had written to his Cabinet, and found that even among his own ministers not one man supported him. It would have been worse than useless to put forward his proposals and to fail. "You are all opposed to me," he said sadly; and he put his papers away. But the war had now so far progressed that it is necessary to turn back to the point at which we left it at the end of 1864.

Winter weather brought a brief pause to the operations of the armies. Sherman at Savannah was preparing to begin his northward march, a harder matter, owing to the rivers and marshes that lay in his way, than his triumphal progress from Atlanta. Efforts were made to concentrate all available forces against him at Augusta to his north-west. Making feints against Augusta on the one side, and against the city and port of Charleston on the other, he displayed the marvellous engineering capacity of his army by an advance of unlooked-for speed across the marshes to Columbia, due north of him, which is the State capital of South Carolina. He reached it on February 17, 1865. The intended concentration of the South at Augusta was broken up. The retreating Confederates set fire to great stores of cotton and the unfortunate city was burnt, a calamity for which the South, by a natural but most unjust mistake, blamed Sherman. The railway communications of Charleston were now certain to be severed; so the Confederates were forced to evacuate it, and on February 18, 1865, the North occupied the chief home of the misbegotten political ideals of the South and of its real culture and chivalry.

Admiral Porter (for age and ill-health had come upon Farragut) was ready at sea to co-operate with Sherman. Thomas' army in Tennessee had not been allowed by Grant to go into winter quarters. A part of it under Schofield was brought to Washington and there shipped for North Carolina, where, ever since Burnside's successful expedition in 1862, the Union Government had held the ports north of Wilmington. Wilmington itself was the only port left to the South, and Richmond had now come to depend largely on the precarious and costly supplies which could still, notwithstanding the blockade, be run into that harbour. At the end of December, Butler, acting in flagrant disobedience to Grant, had achieved his crowning failure in a joint expedition with Porter against Wilmington. But Porter was not discouraged, nor was Grant, who from beginning to end of his career had worked well together with the Navy. On February 8, Porter, this time supported by an energetic general, Terry, effected a brilliant capture of Fort Fisher at the mouth of Wilmington harbour. The port was closed to the South. On the 22nd, the city itself fell to Schofield, and Sherman had now this sea base at hand if he needed it.

Meanwhile Grant's entrenchments on the east of Richmond and Petersburg were still extending southward, and Lee's defences had been stretched till they covered nearly forty miles. Grant's lines now cut the principal railway southward from the huge fortress, and he was able effectually to interrupt communication by road to the southwest. There could be little doubt that Richmond would fall soon, and the real question was coming to be whether Lee and his army could escape from Richmond and still carry on the war.

The appointment of Lee as General-in-Chief was not too late to bear one consequence which may have prolonged the war a little. Joseph Johnston, whose ability in a campaign of constant retirement before overwhelming force had been respected and redoubted by Sherman, had been discarded by Davis in the previous July. He was now put in command of the forces which it was hoped to concentrate against Sherman, with a view to holding up his northward advance and preventing him from joining hands with Grant before Richmond. There were altogether about 89,000 Confederate troops scattered in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, and there would be about the same number under Sherman when Schofield in North Carolina could join him, but the number which Johnston could now collect together seems never to have exceeded 33,000. It was Sherman's task by the rapidity of his movements to prevent a very formidable concentration against him. Johnston on the other hand must hinder if he could Sherman's junction with Schofield. Just before that junction took place he narrowly missed dealing a considerable blow to Sherman's army at the battle of Bentonville in the heart of North Carolina, but had in the end to withdraw within an entrenched position where Sherman would not attack him, but which upon the arrival of Schofield he was forced to abandon. On March 23, 1865, Sherman took possession of the town and railway junction of Goldsborough between Raleigh and New Berne. From Savannah to Goldsborough he had led his army 425 miles in fifty days, amid disadvantages of ground and of weather which had called forth both extraordinary endurance and mechanical skill on the part of his men. He lay now 140 miles south of Petersburg by the railway. The port of New Berne to the east of him on the estuary of the Neuse gave him a sure base of supplies, and would enable him quickly to move his army by sea to Petersburg and Richmond if Grant should so decide. The direction in which Johnston would now fall back lay inland up the Neuse Valley, also along a railway, towards Greensborough, some 150 miles south-west of Petersburg; Greensborough was connected by another railway with Petersburg and Richmond, and along this line Lee might attempt to retire and join him.

All this time whatever designs Lee had of leaving Richmond were suspended because the roads in that weather were too bad for his transport; and, while of necessity he waited, his possible openings narrowed. Philip Sheridan had now received the coveted rank of Major-General, which McClellan had resigned on the day on which he was defeated for the Presidency. The North delighted to find in his achievements the dashing quality which appeals to civilian imagination, and Grant now had in him, as well as in Sherman, a lieutenant who would faithfully make his chief's purposes his own, and who would execute them with independent decision. The cold, in which his horses suffered, had driven Sheridan into winter quarters, but on February 27 he was able to start up the Shenandoah Valley again with 10,000 cavalry. Most of the Confederate cavalry under Early had now been dispersed, mainly for want of forage in the desolated valley; the rest were now dispersed by Sheridan, and the greater part of Early's small force of infantry with all his artillery were captured. There was a garrison in Lynchburg, 80 or 90 miles west of Richmond, which though strong enough to prevent Sheridan's cavalry from capturing that place was not otherwise of account; but there was no Confederate force in the field except Johnston's men near enough to co-operate with Lee; only some small and distant armies, hundreds of miles away with the railway communication between them and the East destroyed. Sheridan now broke up the railway and canal communication on the north-west side of Richmond. He was to have gone on south and eventually joined Sherman if he could; but, finding himself stopped for the time by floods in the upper valley of the James, he rode past the north of Richmond, and on March 19 joined Grant, to put his cavalry and brains at his service when Grant judged that the moment for his final effort had come.

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took office for the second time as President of the United. States. There was one new and striking feature in the simple ceremonial, the presence of a battalion of negro troops in his escort. This time, though he would say no sanguine word, it cannot have been a long continuance of war that filled his thoughts, but the scarcely less difficult though far happier task of restoring the fabric of peaceful society in the conquered South. His difficulties were now likely to come from the North no less than the South. Tentative proposals which he had once or twice made suggest the spirit in which he would have felt his way along this new path. In the Inaugural address which he now delivered that spirit is none the less perceptible because he spoke of the past. The little speech at Gettysburg, with its singular perfection of form, and the "Second Inaugural" are the chief outstanding examples of his peculiar oratorical power. The comparative rank of his oratory need not be discussed, for at any rate it was individual and unlike that of most other great speakers in history, though perhaps more like that of some great speeches in drama.

But there is a point of some moment in which the Second Inaugural does invite a comment, and a comment which should be quite explicit. Probably no other speech of a modern statesman uses so unreservedly the language of intense religious feeling. The occasion made it natural; neither the thought nor the words are in any way conventional; no sensible reader now could entertain a suspicion that the orator spoke to the heart of the people but did not speak from his own heart. But an old Illinois attorney, who thought he knew the real Lincoln behind the President, might have wondered whether the real Lincoln spoke here. For Lincoln's religion, like everything else in his character, became, when he was famous, a stock subject of discussion among his old associates. Many said "he was a Christian but did not know it." Some hinted, with an air of great sagacity, that "so far from his being a Christian or a religious man, the less said about it the better." In early manhood he broke away for ever from the scheme of Christian theology which was probably more or less common to the very various Churches which surrounded him. He had avowed this sweeping denial with a freedom which pained some friends, perhaps rather by its rashness than by its impiety, and he was apt to regard the procedure of theologians as a blasphemous twisting of the words of Christ. He rejected that belief in miracles and in the literally inspired accuracy of the Bible narrative which was no doubt held as fundamental by all these Churches. He rejected no less any attempt to substitute for this foundation the belief in any priestly authority or in the authority of any formal and earthly society called the Church. With this total independence of the expressed creeds of his neighbours he still went and took his boys to Presbyterian public worship—their mother was an Episcopalian and his own parents had been Baptists. He loved the Bible and knew it intimately—he is said also by the way to have stored in his memory a large number of hymns. In the year before his death he wrote to Speed: "I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this book upon reason that you can and the balance upon faith and you will live and die a better man." It was not so much the Old Testament as the New Testament and what he called "the true spirit of Christ" that he loved especially, and took with all possible seriousness as the rule of life. His theology, in the narrower sense, may be said to have been limited to an intense belief in a vast and over-ruling Providence—the lighter forms of superstitious feelings which he is known to have had in common with most frontiersmen were apparently of no importance in his life. And this Providence, darkly spoken of, was certainly conceived by him as intimately and kindly related to his own life. In his Presidential candidature, when he owned to some one that the opposition of clergymen hurt him deeply, he is said to have confessed to being no Christian and to have continued, "I know that there is a God and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me, and I think He has, I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything; I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God. I have told them that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and Christ and reason say the same, and they will find it so." When old acquaintances said that he had no religion they based their opinion on such remarks as that the God, of whom he had just been speaking solemnly, was "not a person." It would be unprofitable to enquire what he, and many others, meant by this expression, but, later at any rate, this "impersonal" power was one with which he could hold commune. His robust intellect, impatient of unproved assertion, was unlikely to rest in the common assumption that things dimly seen may be treated as not being there. So humorous a man was also unlikely to be too conceited to say his prayers. At any rate he said them; said them intently; valued the fact that others prayed for him and for the nation; and, as in official Proclamations (concerning days of national religious observance) he could wield, like no other modern writer, the language of the Prayer Book, so he would speak of prayer without the smallest embarrassment in talk with a general or a statesman. It is possible that this was a development of later years. Lincoln did not, like most of us, arrest his growth. To Mrs. Lincoln it seemed that with the death of their child, Willie, a change came over his whole religious outlook. It well might; and since that grief, which came while his troubles were beginning, much else had come to Lincoln; and now through four years of unsurpassed trial his capacity had steadily grown, and his delicate fairness, his pitifulness, his patience, his modesty had grown therewith. Here is one of the few speeches ever delivered by a great man at the crisis of his fate on the sort of occasion which a tragedian telling his story would have devised for him. This man had stood alone in the dark. He had done justice; he had loved mercy; he had walked humbly with his God. The reader to whom religious utterance makes little appeal will not suppose that his imaginative words stand for no real experience. The reader whose piety knows no questions will not be pained to think that this man had professed no faith.

He said, "Fellow Countrymen: At this second appearance to take the oath of the Presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the energies and engrosses the attention of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

"One-eighth of the whole population were coloured slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localised in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither expected that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses, which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"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—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

Lincoln's own commentary may follow upon his speech:

"March 15, 1865. Dear Mr. Weed,—Every one likes a little compliment. Thank you for yours on my little notification speech and on the recent inaugural address. I expect the latter to wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it however in this case is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.

"Truly yours,

"A. LINCOLN."

On March 20, 1865, a period of bright sunshine seems to have begun in Lincoln's life. Robert Lincoln had some time before finished his course at Harvard, and his father had written to Grant modestly asking him if he could suggest the way, accordant with discipline and good example, in which the young man could best see something of military life. Grant immediately had him on to his staff, with a commission as captain, and now Grant invited Lincoln to come to his headquarters for a holiday visit. There was much in it besides holiday, for Grant was rapidly maturing his plans for the great event and wanted Lincoln near. Moreover Sheridan had just arrived, and while Lincoln was there Sherman came from Goldsborough with Admiral Porter for consultation as to Sherman's next move. Peremptory as he was in any necessary political instructions, Lincoln was now happy to say nothing of military matters, beyond expressing his earnest desire that the final overmastering of the Confederate armies should be accomplished with the least further bloodshed possible, and indulging the curiosity that any other guest might have shown. A letter home to Mrs. Lincoln betrays the interest with which he heard heavy firing quite near, which seemed to him a great battle, but did not excite those who knew. Then there were rides in the country with Grant's staff. Lincoln in his tall hat and frock coat was a marked and curious figure on a horse. He had once, by the way, insisted on riding with Butler, catechising him with remorseless chaff on engineering matters and forbidding his chief engineer to prompt him, along six miles of cheering Northern troops within easy sight and shot of the Confederate soldiers to whom his hat and coat identified him. But, however odd a figure, he impressed Grant's officers as a good and bold horseman. Then, after Sherman's arrival, there evidently was no end of talk. Sherman was at first amused by the President's anxiety as to whether his army was quite safe without him at Goldsborough; but that keen-witted soldier soon received, as he has said, an impression both of goodness and of greatness such as no other man ever gave him.

What especially remained on Sherman's and on Porter's mind was the recollection of Lincoln's over-powering desire for mercy and for conciliation with the conquered. Indeed Sherman blundered later in the terms he first accepted from Johnston; for he did not see that Lincoln's clemency for Southern leaders and desire for the welfare of the South included no mercy at all for the political principle of the Confederacy. Grant was not exposed to any such mistake, for a week or two before Lee had made overtures to him for some sort of conference and Lincoln had instantly forbidden him to confer with Lee for any purpose but that of his unconditional surrender. What, apart from the reconstruction of Southern life and institutions, was in part weighing with Lincoln was the question of punishments for rebellion. By Act of Congress the holders of high political and military office in the South were liable as traitors, and there was now talk of hanging in the North. Later events showed that a very different sentiment would make itself heard when the victory came; but Lincoln was much concerned. To some one who spoke to him of this matter he exclaimed, "What have I to do with you, ye sons of Zeruiah, that ye should this day be adversaries unto me? Shall there any man be put to death this day in Israel?" There can be no doubt that the prerogative of mercy would have been vigorously used in his hands, but he did not wish for a conflict on this matter at all; and Grant was taught, in a parable about a teetotal Irishman who forgave being served with liquor unbeknownst to himself, that zeal in capturing Jefferson Davis and his colleagues was not expected of him.

While Lincoln was at Grant's headquarters at City Point, Lee, hoping to recover the use of the roads to the south-west, endeavoured to cause a diversion of the besiegers' strength by a sortie on his east front. It failed and gave the besiegers a further point of vantage. On April 1 Sheridan was sent far round the south of Lee's lines, and in a battle at a point called Five Forks established himself in possession of the railway running due west from Petersburg. The defences were weakest on this side, and to prevent the entrance of the enemy there Lee was bound to withdraw troops from other quarters. On the two following days Grant's army delivered assaults at several points on the east side of the Petersburg defences, penetrating the outer lines and pushing on against the inner fortifications of the town. On Sunday, April 2, Jefferson Davis received in church word from Lee to make instant preparation for departure, as Petersburg could not be held beyond that night and Richmond must fall immediately. That night the Confederate Government left the capital, and Lee's evacuation of the fortress began the next day. Lincoln was sent for. He came by sea, and to the astonishment and alarm of the naval officers made his way at once to Richmond with entirely insufficient escort. There he strolled about, hand in hand with his little son Tad, greeted by exultant negroes, and stared at by angry or curious Confederates, while he visited the former prison of the Northern prisoners and other places of more pleasant attraction without receiving any annoyance from the inhabitants. He had an interesting talk with Campbell, formerly a Supreme Court judge, and a few weeks back one of Davis' commissioners at Hampton Roads. Campbell obtained permission to convene a meeting of the members of the Virginia Legislature with a view to speedier surrender by Lee's army. But the permission was revoked, for he somewhat clumsily mistook its terms, and, moreover, the object in view had meantime been accomplished.

Jefferson Davis was then making his way with his ministers to Johnston's army. When they arrived he and they held council with Johnston and Beauregard. He would issue a Proclamation which would raise him many soldiers and he would "whip them yet." No one answered him. At last he asked the opinion of Johnston, who bluntly undeceived him as to facts, and told him that further resistance would be a crime, and got his permission to treat with Sherman, while the fallen Confederate President escaped further south.

Lee's object was to make his way along the north side of the Appomattox River, which flows east through Petersburg to the James estuary, and at a certain point strike southwards towards Johnston's army. He fought for his escape with all his old daring and skill, while hardly less vigorous and skilful efforts were made not only to pursue, but to surround him. Grant in his pursuit sent letters of courteous entreaty that he would surrender and spare further slaughter. Northern cavalry got ahead of Lee, tearing up the railway lines he had hoped to use and blocking possible mountain passes; and his supply trains were being cut off. After a long running fight and one last fierce battle on April 6, at a place called Sailor's Creek, Lee found himself on April 9 at Appomattox Court House, some seventy miles west of Petersburg, surrounded beyond hope of escape. On that day he and Grant with their staffs met in a neighbouring farmhouse. Those present recalled afterwards the contrast of the stately Lee and the plain, ill-dressed Grant arriving mud-splashed in his haste. Lee greeted Meade as an old acquaintance and remarked how grey he had grown with years. Meade gracefully replied that Lee and not age was responsible for that. Grant had started "quite jubilant" on the news that Lee was ready to surrender, but in presence of "the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly" he fell into sadness. Pleasant "talk of old army times" followed, and he had almost forgotten, as he declares, the business in hand, when Lee asked him on what terms he would accept surrender. Grant sat down and wrote, not knowing when he began what he should go on to write. As he wrote he thought of the handsome sword Lee carried. Instantly he added to his terms permission for every Southern officer to keep his sword and his horse. Lee read the paper and when he came to that point was visibly moved. He gauged his man, and he ventured to ask something more. He thought, he said, Grant might not know that the Confederate cavalry troopers owned their own horses. Grant said they would be badly wanted on the farms and added a further concession accordingly. "This will have the best possible effect on the men," said Lee. "It will do much towards conciliating our people." Grant included also in his written terms words of general pardon to Confederate officers for their treason. This was an inadvertent breach, perhaps, of Lincoln's orders, but it was one which met with no objection. Lee retired into civil life and devoted himself thereafter to his neighbours' service as head of a college in Virginia—much respected, very free with alms to old soldiers and not much caring whether they had fought for the South or for the North. Grant did not wait to set foot in the capital which he had conquered, but, the main business being over, posted off with all haste to see his son settled in at school.

Lincoln remained at City Point till April 8, when he started back by steamer. Those who were with him on the two days' voyage told afterwards of the happy talk, as of a quiet family party rejoicing in the return of peace. Somebody said that Jefferson Davis really ought to be hanged. The reply came in the quotation that he might almost have expected, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." On the second day, Sunday, the President read to them parts of "Macbeth." Sumner, who was one of them, recalled that he read twice over the lines,

"Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further."

On the Tuesday, April 11, a triumphant crowd came to the White House to greet Lincoln. He made them a speech, carefully prepared in substance rather than in form, dealing with the question of reconstruction in the South, with special reference to what was already in progress in Louisiana. The precise points of controversy that arose in this regard hardly matter now. Lincoln disclaimed any wish to insist pedantically upon any detailed plan of his; but he declared his wish equally to keep clear of any merely pedantic points of controversy with any in the South who were loyally striving to revive State Government with acceptance of the Union and without slavery; and he urged that genuine though small beginnings should be encouraged. He regretted that in Louisiana his wish for the enfranchisement of educated negroes and of negro soldiers had not been followed; but as the freedom of the negroes was unreservedly accepted, as provision was made for them in the public schools, and the new State constitution allowed the Legislature to enfranchise them, there was clear gain. "Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it. What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. So new and unprecedented," he ended, "is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals. Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may and must be inflexible. In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper." A full generation has had cause to lament that that announcement was never to be made.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, with solemn religious service the Union flag was hoisted again on Fort Sumter by General Anderson, its old defender. On that morning there was a Cabinet Council in Washington. Seward was absent, in bed with an injury from a carriage accident. Grant was there a little anxious to get news from Sherman. Lincoln was in a happy mood. He had earlier that morning enjoyed greatly a talk with Robert Lincoln about the young man's new experience of soldiering. He now told Grant and the Cabinet that good news was coming from Sherman. He knew it, he said, for last night he had dreamed a dream, which had come to him several times before. In this dream, whenever it came, he was sailing in a ship of a peculiar build, indescribable but always the same, and being borne on it with great speed towards a dark and undefined shore. He had always dreamed this before victory. He dreamed it before Antietam, before Murfreesborough, before Gettysburg, before Vicksburg. Grant observed bluntly that Murfreesborough had not been a victory, or of any consequence anyway. Lincoln persisted on this topic undeterred. After some lesser business they discussed the reconstruction of the South. Lincoln rejoiced that Congress had adjourned and the "disturbing element" in it could not hinder the work. Before it met again, "if we are wise and discreet we shall re-animate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union re-established." Lastly, there was talk of the treatment of rebels and of the demand that had been heard for "persecution" and "bloody work." "No one need expect me," said Lincoln, "to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off." "Shoo," he added, throwing up his large hands like a man scaring sheep. "We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union. There is too much of the desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there is too little respect for their rights. I do not sympathise in these feelings." Such was the tenor of his last recorded utterance on public affairs.

In the afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln drove together and he talked to her with keen pleasure of the life they would live when the Presidency was over. That night Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln went to the theatre, for the day was not observed as in England. The Grants were to have been with them, but changed their minds and left Washington that day, so a young officer, Major Rathbone, and the lady engaged to him, both of them thereafter ill-fated, came instead. The theatre was crowded; many officers returned from the war were there and eager to see Lincoln. The play was "Our American Cousin," a play in which the part of Lord Dundreary was afterwards developed and made famous. Some time after 10 o'clock, at a point in the play which it is said no person present could afterwards remember, a shot was heard in the theatre and Abraham Lincoln fell forward upon the front of the box unconscious and dying. A wild-looking man, who had entered the box unobserved and had done his work, was seen to strike with a knife at Major Rathbone, who tried to seize him. Then he jumped from the box to the stage; he caught a spur in the drapery and fell, breaking the small bone of his leg. He rose, shouted "Sic semper tyrannis," the motto of Virginia, disappeared behind the scenes, mounted a horse that was in waiting at the stage door, and rode away.

This was John Wilkes Booth, brother of a famous actor then playing "Hamlet" in Boston. He was an actor too, and an athletic and daring youth. In him that peculiarly ferocious political passion which occasionally showed itself among Southerners was further inflamed by brandy and by that ranting mode of thought which the stage develops in some few. He was the leader of a conspiracy which aimed at compassing the deaths of others besides Lincoln. Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President, was to die. So was Seward. That same night one of the conspirators, a gigantic boy of feeble mind, gained entrance to Seward's house and wounded three people, including Seward himself, who was lying already injured in bed and received four or five wounds. Neither he nor the others died. The weak-minded or mad boy, another man, whose offense consisted in having been asked to kill Johnson and refused to do so, and another alleged conspirator, a woman, were hanged after a court-martial whose proceedings did credit neither to the new President nor to others concerned. Booth himself, after many adventures, was shot in a barn in which he stood at bay and which had been set on fire by the soldiers pursuing him. During his flight he is said to have felt much aggrieved that men did not praise him as they had praised Brutus and Cassius.

There were then in the South many broken and many permanently embittered men, indeed the temper which would be glad at Lincoln's death could be found here and there and notably among the partisans of the South in Washington. But, if it be wondered what measure of sympathy there was for Booth's dark deed, an answer lies in the fact that the murder of Lincoln would at no time have been difficult for a brave man. Fair blows were now as powerless as foul to arrest the end. On the very morning when Lincoln and Grant at the Cabinet had been telling of their hopes and fears for Sherman, Sherman himself at Raleigh in North Carolina had received and answered a letter from Johnston opening negotiations for a peaceful surrender. Three days later he was starting by rail for Greensborough when word came to him from the telegraph operator that an important message was upon the wire. He went to the telegraph box and heard it. Then he swore the telegraph operator to secrecy, for he feared that some provocation might lead to terrible disorders in Raleigh, if his army, flushed with triumph, were to learn, before his return in peace, the news that for many days after hushed their accustomed songs and shouts and cheering into a silence which was long remembered. He went off to meet Johnston and requested to be with him alone in a farmhouse near. There he told him of the murder of Lincoln. "The perspiration came out in large drops on Johnston's forehead," says Sherman, who watched him closely. He exclaimed that it was a disgrace to the age. Then he asked to know whether Sherman attributed the crime to the Confederate authorities. Sherman could assure him that no one dreamed of such a suspicion against men like him and General Lee; but he added that he was not so sure of "Jefferson Davis and men of that stripe." Then followed some delay, through a mistake of Sherman's which the authorities in Washington reversed, but in a few days all was settled and the whole of the forces under Johnston's command laid down their arms. Twenty years later, as an old man and infirm, their leader left his Southern home to be present at Sherman's funeral, where he caught a chill from which he died soon after. Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, near the borders of Florida. He was, not without plausible grounds but quite unjustly, suspected in regard to the murder, and he suffered imprisonment for some time till President Andrew Johnson released him when the evidence against him had been seen to be worthless. He lived many years in Mississippi and wrote memoirs, in which may be found the fullest legal argument for the great Secession, his own view of his quarrels with Joseph Johnston, and much besides. Amongst other things he tells how when they heard the news of Lincoln's murder some troops cheered, but he was truly sorry for the reason that Andrew Johnson was more hostile to the cause than Lincoln. It is disappointing to think, of one who played a memorable part in history with much determination, that in this reminiscence he sized his stature as a man fairly accurately. After several other surrenders of Southern towns and small scattered forces, the Confederate General Kirby Smith, in Texas, surrendered to General Canby, Banks' successor, on May 26, and after four years and forty-four days armed resistance to the Union was at an end.

On the night of Good Friday, Abraham Lincoln had been carried still unconscious to a house near the theatre. His sons and other friends were summoned. He never regained consciousness. "A look of unspeakable peace," say his secretaries who were there, "came over his worn features." At 7.22 on the morning of April 15, Stanton, watching him more closely than the rest, told them what had passed in the words, "Now he belongs to the ages."

The mourning of a nation, voiced to later times by some of the best lines of more than one of its poets, and deeper and more prevailing for the lack of comprehension which some had shown him before, followed his body in its slow progress—stopping at Baltimore, where once his life had been threatened, for the homage of vast crowds; stopping at New York, where among the huge assembly old General Scott came to bid him affectionate farewell; stopping at other cities for the tribute of reverent multitudes—to Springfield, his home of so many years, where, on May 4, 1865, it was laid to rest. After the burial service the "Second Inaugural" was read over his grave, nor could better words than his own have been chosen to honour one who "with malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gave him to see the right, had striven on to finish the work that he was in." In England, apart from more formal tokens of a late-learnt regard and an unfeigned regret, Punch embodied in verse of rare felicity the manly contrition of its editor for ignorant derision in past years; and Queen Victoria symbolised best of all, and most acceptably to Americans, the feeling of her people when she wrote to Mrs. Lincoln "as a widow to a widow." Nor, though the transactions in which he bore his part were but little understood in this country till they were half forgotten, has tradition ever failed to give him, by just instinct, his rank with the greatest of our race.

Many great deeds had been done in the war. The greatest was the keeping of the North together in an enterprise so arduous, and an enterprise for objects so confusedly related as the Union and freedom. Abraham Lincoln did this; nobody else could have done it; to do it he bore on his sole shoulders such a weight of care and pain as few other men have borne. When it was over it seemed to the people that he had all along been thinking their real thoughts for them; but they knew that this was because he had fearlessly thought for himself. He had been able to save the nation, partly because he saw that unity was not to be sought by the way of base concession. He had been able to free the slaves, partly because he would not hasten to this object at the sacrifice of what he thought a larger purpose. This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South. That fact came to be seen in the South too, and generations in America are likely to remember it when all other features of his statecraft have grown indistinct. A thousand reminiscences ludicrous or pathetic, passing into myth but enshrining hard fact, will prove to them that this great feature of his policy was a matter of more than policy. They will remember it as adding a peculiar lustre to the renovation of their national existence; as no small part of the glory, surpassing that of former wars, which has become the common heritage of North and South. For perhaps not many conquerors, and certainly few successful statesmen, have escaped the tendency of power to harden or at least to narrow their human sympathies; but in this man a natural wealth of tender compassion became richer and more tender while in the stress of deadly conflict he developed an astounding strength.

Beyond his own country some of us recall his name as the greatest among those associated with the cause of popular government. He would have liked this tribute, and the element of truth in it is plain enough, yet it demands one final consideration. He accepted the institutions to which he was born, and he enjoyed them. His own intense experience of the weakness of democracy did not sour him, nor would any similar experience of later times have been likely to do so. Yet if he reflected much on forms of government it was with a dominant interest in something beyond them. For he was a citizen of that far country where there is neither aristocrat nor democrat. No political theory stands out from his words or actions; but they show a most unusual sense of the possible dignity of common men and common things. His humour rioted in comparisons between potent personages and Jim Jett's brother or old Judge Brown's drunken coachman, for the reason for which the rarely jesting Wordsworth found a hero in the "Leech-Gatherer" or in Nelson and a villain in Napoleon or in Peter Bell. He could use and respect and pardon and overrule his far more accomplished ministers because he stood up to them with no more fear or cringing, with no more dislike or envy or disrespect than he had felt when he stood up long before to Jack Armstrong. He faced the difficulties and terrors of his high office with that same mind with which he had paid his way as a poor man or navigated a boat in rapids or in floods. If he had a theory of democracy it was contained in this condensed note which he wrote, perhaps as an autograph, a year or two before his Presidency: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.—A. LINCOLN."

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A complete bibliography of books dealing specially with Lincoln, and of books throwing important light upon his life or upon the history of the American Civil War, cannot be attempted here. The author aims only at mentioning the books which have been of greatest use to him and a few others to which reference ought obviously to be made.

The chief authorities for the life of Lincoln are:—

"Abraham Lincoln: A History," by John G. Nicolay and John Hay (his private secretaries), in ten volumes: The Century Company, New York, and T. Fisher Unwin, London; "The Works of Abraham Lincoln" (i. e., speeches, letters, and State papers), in eight volumes: G. Putnam's Sons, London and New York; and, for his early life, "The Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Herndon and Weik: Appleton, London and New York.

There are numerous short biographies of Lincoln, but among these it is not invidious to mention as the best (expressing as it does the mature judgment of the highest authority) "A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln," by John G. Nicolay: The Century Company, New York.

The author may be allowed to refer, moreover, to the interest aroused in him as a boy by "Abraham Lincoln," by C. G. Leland, in the "New Plutarch Series": Marcus Ward & Co., London; and to the light he has much later derived from "Abraham Lincoln," by John T. Morse, Junior: Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, U.S.A.

Among studies of Lincoln, containing a wealth of illustrative stories, a very high place is due to "The True Abraham Lincoln," by William Eleroy Curtis: The J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and London.

For the history of America at the period concerned the reader may be most confidently referred to a work, which by plentiful extracts and citations enables its writer's judgment to be checked, without detracting from the interest and power of his narrative, namely, "History of the United States, 1850-1877," by James Ford Rhodes, in seven volumes: The Macmillan Company, London and New York.

Among the shorter complete histories of the United States are: "The
United States: an Outline of Political History," by Goldwin Smith: The
Macmillan Company, London and New York; the article "United States of
America" (section "History") in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (see
also the many excellent articles on American biography in the
"Encyclopaedia Britannica"); "The Cambridge Modern History: Vol. VII.,
United States of America": Cambridge University Press, and The
Macmillan Company, New York.

Two volumes of special interest in regard to the early days of the
United States, in some ways complementary to each other in their
different points of view, are: "Alexander Hamilton," by F. G. Oliver:
Constable & Co., and "Historical Essays," by John Fitch.

Almost every point in regard to American institutions and political practice is fully treated in "The American Commonwealth," by Viscount Bryce, O.M., two volumes: The Macmillan Company, London and New York.

For the attitude of the British Government during the war the conclusive authority is the correspondence to be found in "The Life of Lord John Russell," by Sir Spencer Walpole, K.C.B., two volumes: Longmans, Green & Co., London and New York; and light on the attitude of the English people is thrown by "The Life of John Bright," by G. M. Trevelyan: Constable, London, and Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, U.S.A.

With respect to the military history of the Civil War the author is specially indebted to "The Civil War in the United States," by W. Birkbeck Wood and Major J. E. Edmonds, R.E., with an introduction by Spenser Wilkinson: Methuen & Co., London, and Putnam, New York, which is the only concise and complete history of the war written with full knowledge of all recent works bearing on the subject. Mr. Nicolay's chapters in the "Cambridge Modern History" give a very lucid narrative of the war.

Among works of special interest bearing on the war, though not much concerning the subject of this book, it is only necessary to mention "'Stonewall' Jackson," by Colonel Henderson, C.B., two volumes: Longmans, London and New York; "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" (a book of monographs by several authors, many of them actors in the war), four volumes: T. Fisher Unwin, London, and Century Company, New York, and "Story of the Civil War," by J. C. Ropes: Putnam, London and New York.

It may be added that a life of General Robert E. Lee had been projected, as a companion volume to this in the same series, by Brigadier-General Frederick Maurice, C.B., and it is to be hoped that, though suspended by the present war, this book may still be written. Existing biographies of Lee are disappointing. It has been (especially in view of this intended book on Lee) outside the scope of this volume to present the history of the Civil War with special reference to the Southern actors in it, but "Memoirs of Jefferson Davis" must be here referred to as in some sense an authoritative, though not a very attractive or interesting, exposition of the views of Southern statesmen at the time.

An interesting sidelight on the war may be found in "Life with the Confederate Army," by Watson, being the experiences of a Scotchman who for a time served under the Confederacy.

In regard to slavery and to Southern society before the war the author has made much use of "Our Slave States," by Frederick Law Olmsted; Dix and Edwards, New York, 1856, and other works of the same author. Mr. Olmsted was a Northerner, but his very full observations can be checked by the numerous quotations on the same subject collected by Mr. Rhodes in his history.

For the history of the South since the war and the present position of
the negroes, see the chapters on this subject in Bryce's "American
Commonwealth," second or any later edition, two volumes: Macmillan,
London and New York.

Mr. Owen Wister's novel, "Lady Baltimore": Macmillan, London and New
York, embraces a most interesting study of the survivals of the old
Southern society at the present time and of the present relations
between it and the North.

The treatment of the negroes freed during the war is the main subject of "Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen," by John Eaton and E. O. Mason: Longmans, Green & Co., London and New York, a book to which the author is also indebted for other interesting matter.

The personal memoirs, and especially the autobiographies dealing with the Civil War, are very numerous, and the author therefore would only wish to mention those which seem to him of altogether unusual interest. "Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant": Century Company, New York, is a book of very high order (Sherman's memoirs: Appleton, New York, and his correspondence with his brother: Scribner, New York, have also been quoted in these pages).

Great interest both in regard to Lincoln personally and to the history of the United States after his death attaches to "Reminiscences," by Carl Schurz, three volumes (Vol. I. being concerned with Germany in 1848): John Murray, London, and Doubleday Page, New York, and to "The Life of John Hay," by W. R. Thayer, two volumes: Constable & Co., London, and Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, U.S.A.

The author has derived much light from "Specimen Days, and Collect," by
Walt Whitman: Wilson and McCormick, Glasgow, and McKay, U.S.A.

He may be allowed, in conclusion, to mention the encouragement given to him in beginning his work by the late Mr. Henry James, O.M., whose vivid and enthusiastic judgment of Lincoln he had the privilege of receiving.