Lured by ‘Union’ as the bribe.
Destiny sat by and said,
‘Pang for pang your seed shall pay;
Hide in false peace your coward head,—
I bring round the harvest-day.’”
R. W. Emerson.
In one of the smaller parlors of the White House in Washington sat two men of rather marked appearance. One of them sat leaning back in his tipped chair, with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, and his right ancle resting on his left knee. His figure, though now flaccid and relaxed, would evidently be a tall one if pulled out like the sliding joints of a spy-glass; but gaunt, lean, and ungainly, with harsh angles and stooping shoulders. He was dressed in a suit of black, with a black satin vest, and round his neck a black silk kerchief tied carelessly in a knot, and passing under a shirt-collar turned down and revealing a neck brawny, sinewy, and tanned.
The face that belonged to this figure was in keeping with it, and yet attractive from a certain charm of expression. Nose prominent and assertive; cheek-bones rather obtrusive, and under them the flesh sallow and browned, though partially covered by thick bristling black whiskers; eyes dark and deeply set; mouth and lips large; and crowning all these features a shock of stiff profuse black hair carelessly put aside from his irregularly developed forehead, as if by no other comb than that which he could make of his long lank fingers.
This man was not only the foremost citizen of the Republic, officially considered, but he had a reputation, exaggerated beyond his deserts, for homeliness. By the Rebel press he was frequently spoken of as “the ape” or the “gorilla.” From the rowdy George Sanderson to the stiff, if not stately Jefferson Davis (himself far from being an Adonis), the pro-slavery champions took a harmless satisfaction, in their public addresses, in alluding, in some contemptuous epithet, to the man’s personal shortcomings. So far from being disturbed, the object of all these revilings would himself sometimes playfully refer to his personal attractions, unconscious how much there was in that face to redeem it from being truly characterized either as ugly or commonplace.
As he sat now, with eyes bent on vacancy, and his mind revolving the arguments or facts which had been presented by his visitor, his countenance assumed an expression which was pathetic in its indication of sincere and patient effort to grasp the truth and see clearly the way before him. The expression redeemed the whole countenance, for it was almost tender in its anxious yet resigned thoughtfulness; in its profound sense of the enormous and unparalleled responsibilities resting on that one brain, perplexing it in the extreme.