When the formal announcement of the final surrender of General Lee to General Grant, at Appomattox, on the 9th of April, 1865, was confirmed in the camp, all knew that at last the “cruel war” was over. There was great rejoicing in the hospital, and all began to prepare to go North, or home again, after so many weary years of struggle. Some wept for joy as they wrote to the weary waiting watchers at home; some were to carry to their friends and neighbors the last words and deeds of the many who slept beneath the soil of Virginia, or further south, while their comrades “went marching on.” The workers of the Agencies and the Commissions had so long labored in the same spirit that we were much like a large united family; and until we departed one by one for our homes, we did not realize how close was the bond of sympathy and affection, that could never be forgotten.
CHAPTER XXV
RECOLLECTIONS OF LINCOLN
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.”—Abraham Lincoln.
During the last year of the war I was still working for the “Boys” at City Point Depot Field Hospital, Virginia, half a mile from the headquarters of the United States Armies in the field, at the junction of the Appomattox and James Rivers, when the day of the second inaugural drew near. This caused a welcome ripple of excitement to spread over the daily monotony of discipline in hospital camp life. The fearless President was to stand once more before the people to take the oath to uphold the institutions and principles of his country, despite the state policy as well as humanity that had compelled the passing of the Emancipation Act, that had cut the last thread of hope for the return of “the good old days” of the South.
THE PERRY PICTURES. 125. COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY M. P. RICE.
BOSTON EDITION.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
When Abraham Lincoln, with superhuman courage, made that moral stroke of the pen that gave freedom to millions of slaves, then was born at last a free country, not only in name, but in the glorious fact that had blotted out from our country’s escutcheon the shame of human slavery that had so long branded our vaunted freedom as a disgrace. The people, the great middle class, the saviours of freedom who in great crises rise to a national emergency like a towering Gibraltar, had risen to uphold the weary hands of him who loved his country more than life, though so often it had seemed as if the waves of care and sorrow would engulf his tired soul.