Hardly thinking what he did, Morris shot his hand up in the air, then wished with all his heart that he had not raised it, when the rabbi said: "Well, Morris, what's your question?"
"It's not exactly about the lesson," confessed the boy, awkwardly. "But when you talked about waiting for something for a long time, I wondered—I—how long is a person president of the United States?" he ended desperately, realizing how foolish his question must sound not only to the teacher but to his fellow students as well.
If Rabbi Adler failed to see any connection between the building of the Sanctuary and American politics, he was too kind to say so. "The president is elected for four years," he answered, "although sometimes he is reelected for a second term, which makes eight years in all."
"Then Mr. Lincoln'll be in Washington eight years, 'cause everybody will want him for two terms," decided Morris, loyally, though a little disappointed that the plan which had just occurred to him must take so long to mature.
"So you're a Lincoln man, too?" smiled his teacher. He hesitated a moment, then, feeling that high civic ideals were as necessary to his class as Hebrew, he went on: "We who have worked hard to elect Mr. Lincoln feel that our country is in good hands. He is not one of our people, yet I believe he is more like our Hebrew prophets than any man, Jew or non-Jew, living today. None of you boys may ever be president, but if you strive as earnestly as Mr. Lincoln has always done to serve the right, I shall be well satisfied.... We will take the next chapter for tomorrow," and the lesson was over.
Next came the German class and Morris, after reading and translating his portion of a German fairy tale quite creditably, sank back in his place, again busy with his plans. Rabbi Adler was right, he decided. If one just worked and waited, everything would turn out all right. So Mr. Lincoln would be gone for four years, perhaps eight. Well, since a Jewish gentleman had sent him a going-away present, wouldn't it be a fine thing for a Jewish boy to send him some gift when he returned to his home in Springfield? Morris wasn't sure just what the gift would be, but he was no longer worried. Even four years were not long to wait, especially if one had to save a good deal of money in the interval. For Morris was sure that he would have to send a really expensive present; perhaps a gold watch, which at that particular moment was the one thing, next to a Shetland pony, he most desired for himself.
The four years passed for Morris, now slowly when lessons were long and hard, now all too swiftly during the holiday seasons. They were years of struggle for the nation now torn asunder by a dreadful civil war. Even from the first, Morris was not too young to understand the history that was being made about him; the firing upon Fort Sumter; the secession of the southern states; Mr. Lincoln's call for volunteers. How he despised himself for being such a small boy when he saw his brother Harry in his blue uniform with the brass buttons! He couldn't understand why his mother had cried when Harry went away to be a soldier, since he himself felt cruelly cheated in being deprived of marching off to the battle field. Nor could he understand why Rabbi Adler's voice always faltered now when he read the Kaddish prayer for the mourners every Sabbath in the synagogue, although he had heard that his teacher's young son, Dankmar, serving in the artillery, was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga. For war to the little boy meant nothing but lines of straight soldiers marching to music with flying banners above them, and even when bits of crape appeared, so it seemed, upon the doors of every other home in the city, he thought only of the glory, not the horror of it all. Nor did he ever imagine how President Lincoln's great heart almost broke in those days over the suffering not only of his own Northern soldiers, but the Southern boys too, whom he would never call "rebels" nor cease to regard but as brother Americans. When the boy thought of the president at all, it was always as the captain of a mighty host, pressing fearlessly on to victory. "Like Joshua," he thought, remembering the verses on the flag, resolving that when victory did come at last he would celebrate in his own way, by sending Mr. Lincoln his present.
"We can't do too much for Mr. Lincoln," his brother Harry had said when he came home on a furlough, so tanned and sturdy that even Mrs. Rosenfelt had to confess that his soldiering had not broken down his health. And Morris's heart had reechoed the sentiment again and again, especially when Harry was taken to one of the Washington hospitals and wrote glowingly of the president's visits to the sick and wounded soldiers. "He's not like a president—he's just like a father," he wrote, and more than one bereaved household in those dark days learned to agree with him.
For the sadly-tried man from Illinois was never too busy with affairs of state to write a word of comfort to a mother who had lost her son on the battlefield, never too harassed with his many duties to listen to a plea for a furlough or a pardon. But, perhaps, of all the stories that reached Morris at that time the account of Mr. Abraham Jonas of Peoria meant the most.
Mr. Jonas was a Jewish citizen of Peoria, Illinois, and had been a staunch friend and political associate of Lincoln before the latter left Springfield for the White House. Strangely enough, Mr. Jonas's four sons all enlisted in the Southern army. Towards the close of the war, Abraham Jonas fell ill, and, learning from his doctors that his disease would prove fatal, felt that he could never die in peace until he had seen his son Charles, then a Confederate prisoner of war on Johnson's Island, Lake Erie. The dying father appealed to his old friend, and President Lincoln at once gave the order to parole Charles Jonas for three weeks that he might visit his father's bedside.