Their fighting was over, and there was to be no more charging of batteries; nor long watchings in the trenches, drenched by rains, parched by summer heat, or numbed by the frosts of winter; no more scenes of blood, of wasting away in hospitals, or murders and starvation in Rebel prisons. It was the hour of peace. In the radiant light of that Sabbath sun they could rejoice in the thought that they had once more a reunited country; that an abject people had been redeemed from slavery; that the honor of the nation had been vindicated; that the flag which traitors had trailed in the dust at the beginning of the conflict was more than ever the emblem of the world's best hopes.
Study for a statue of Lincoln.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CONCLUSION.
April, 1865.
Day was breaking on the 12th of April, when General Grant, accompanied by his staff, alighted from the cars at City Point, after a tedious night ride from Burkesville. He walked slowly up the steep bank to his head-quarters, not with the air of a conqueror, but as if sleep and rest would be far more acceptable than the congratulations of a noisy crowd. Four years had passed since he left his quiet home in Illinois, a humble citizen, unknown beyond his village borders; but now his name was inseparably connected with a great moral convulsion, world-wide in its influence, enduring as time in its results. The mighty conflict of ideas had swept round the globe like a tidal wave of the ocean. Industry had been quickened in every land, and new channels of trade opened among the nations. Wherever human language was spoken, men talked of the war between Slavery and Freedom, and aspirations for good were awakened in the hearts of toiling millions in Europe, on the burning sands of Africa, and in the jungles of Hindostan, to whom life was bare existence and the future ever hopeless.
Assassination of Lincoln.