If Fendler gets tired of bush-clearing, and will come to me this fall, I will give him $500 a year as curator, lodgings, two rooms in gardener’s house, which I have reserved; and let him have say three days in the week for himself, if he wants them.
The people are determined to support and reëlect their excellent President Lincoln (what a noble letter that last of his), whether Frémont and the like make a coalition with copperheads or not. It is all the same to us. Lincoln will walk the course. God bless him!
Wright is coming home for a few months this summer.
TO CHARLES WRIGHT.
Cambridge, September 18, 1863.
What Don José affirms about coast and mountain vegetation being much the same is curious, unlikely, yet you seem to find it so. That bit of coast with all microphyllous and spiny vegetation is also curious.
I am glad you like him for being an abolitionist. Though not very much of an abolitionist myself, at the start, I hope I can fall in with, and welcome, the ways of Providence, when Providence takes the matter in hand, and say Amen....
Well, you are doing well in botanizing, and should finish up Cuban botany while you are at it. And on your return, you and Grisebach should join teams, and do up Cuban botany in a full memoir. You are right to stay till next spring. You are happy in Cuba; you would not be so here. Things in the United States do not go to suit you at all. “Things is working,” and in the right way,—but the end must be the total suppression of the rebellion,—the exile or punishment of rebel leaders, the return of the masses to their duty, and they will put things straight. Just what is now going on in Tennessee will go on elsewhere, I suppose. I know only one man in Cambridge that you could talk secesh to. We can correspond very well, and keep cool. But if we were together, during the war, we should get into a row at once. It could not be otherwise....
When the Union is restored (which it is to be, of course, when the rebellion is put down) those who do not love us well enough to resume their duties and privileges have only to take themselves off to some country they like better. The United States of America belongs to loyal Americans. After the war the country will prosper wonderfully. And the South will get to be something.
December 1.