Following this majestic and awe-inspiring pageant came the queerest collection of flotsam and jetsam ever gathered together—the “Bummers.” These were the stragglers that had attached themselves to the various corps, odd assortments of humans, animals, loot and salvage, hangers-on of Sherman’s March to the Sea, drift-wood clinging to the only anchorage that promised food and safety. They furnished the oddest parade ever seen in Washington before or since. Mules, goats, asses, horses, dogs, sheep, pigs, colts, raccoons, chickens, cats, and Negroes all ambling along contentedly as though their only object in life was to follow the army—as, indeed, it was. Each beast of burden was loaded to its carrying capacity with the odds and ends of camp luggage, equipment, and the queer lot of junk the soldiers had gathered “to carry home some day”—tents, knapsacks, hampers, sacks, bundles of clothing, boxes, valises, blankets, pots, kettles, fiddles, bird cages, camp stools, a few stray cradles, plenty of pickaninnies, and here and there, presiding over the lot, a black woman. Realism thus painted a living picture of the vicissitudes of the long weary march of destruction through the forests, swamps, plantations, and towns that came within the path of the blue-clad torrent which had swept all before it.
In this epochal review were numbers of distinguished officers: Merritt, Macy, Benham, Griffin, Humphreys, Davies, Devin, Patrick, Woods, Carey, Hunter, Hancock, Ross, Blair, Ward, Smith, Nagle, Geary, and others, too many to enumerate with any degree of accuracy—names a grateful nation has since placed high upon the honour roll in her Memorial Hall of Fame.
Most deservedly interesting of them all was the quiet, diffident man, with the three stars in his shoulder straps, the idolized commander of all of the armies of the North during the last year of the war—Ulysses S. Grant, whom Lincoln had chosen to bring peace to a sorely stricken land. A silent and unassuming observer, he seemed entirely unconscious that through his persistent and efficient service the Stars and Stripes were floating over a reunited nation.
A tanner’s clerk with a series of mercantile failures behind him when the guns of Sumter opened the war, he was the honoured and loved commander of half a million veterans, with the faith and trust of a nation when it closed—the leader of the greatest army from every standpoint that any man had ever had subject to his call.
Inarticulate in public, modest and silent by nature, General Grant’s pride and elation in the day’s event were manifest in the concentrated attention he gave to the passing marchers. His popularity demanded his almost constant response to the ovations to himself.
During the four years of the war for the preservation of the Union, there had been more than twenty-four hundred engagements of greater or lesser importance. In all, 2,600,000 men had been enlisted in the Federal armies, and while some of the records of the Confederate forces were destroyed, it has been estimated that they put more than a million men under arms.
The conclusion of the review sent back to civil life a vast host. All but a standing army of 15,000 men were disbanded.
The time had now come when President Johnson’s task assumed herculean proportions. Secession was abolished, slavery was an institution of the past, the Negroes were free, and the indestructibility of the Union and the supremacy of the national government were definitely and completely established. With the conspirators captured and on trial, public attention turned with redoubled interest to the political situation and with concentrated scrutiny to the attitude of the new Executive toward the problems that developed and multiplied daily about his head in stabilizing the government and reviving long-neglected and stagnant industries.
Before him lay the greatest responsibility and the greatest opportunity that had ever confronted any executive of the United States. From a huge disorganized fluid mass of opposed human elements, each committed to and allied to some of the varied forces that made up the national chaos, he must either bring reorganization, a harmonious welding of the mighty forces into a structure of government to endure, or must suffer retrogression, the tragedy of dissolution and national eclipse. Medusa-headed were the disrupting units, and legion the demands, needs, and appeals for attention and action.
It was a crucial period, when legal astuteness, super-statesmanship, extraordinary political acumen, expert diplomacy, unbiased vision, indomitable courage, and, above all, unswerving patriotism and Gibraltar-like strength to hold to convictions were the qualifications needed to control the rocking ship of state.