Imagine him facing the gray-haired father of another doomed soldier and saying, “If your son lives until I order him shot, he will live longer than ever Methuselah did”!
Imagine him sitting at the table day after day, his face cold, abstracted, his gray eyes “seeing something in the air” and hardly touching his food!
Life mask of Lincoln while President. Observe the wasted features, the kindly, humorous mouth, and the reverential indications of the high top head
Imagine him on the night after the bloody loss of Chancellorsville—seventeen thousand killed, wounded and missing! Mr. Stoddard, sitting in the deserted White House, underneath Lincoln’s room, has helped our imagination:
“But that sound, the slow, heavy, regular tread of the President’s feet, pacing up and down in his room and thinking of Chancellorsville! A man’s tread may well be heavy when there is such a load upon his shoulders as Lincoln is carrying.... He can hear, in his heart, the thunder of the Union and Confederate guns, and the shrieks and groans that rise on the lost battlefield.... Ten o’clock—and now and then there have been momentary breaks, as if he paused in turning at the wall; but no pause has lasted longer than for a few heart-beats.... Eleven o’clock—and it is as if a more silent kind of silence had been obtained, for the tread can be heard more distinctly, and a sort of thrill comes with it now and then.... There has been no sound from the President’s room for a number of minutes, and he may be resting in his chair or writing. No; there it comes again, that mournfully monotonous tread, with its turnings at the wall.... Two o’clock comes, without another break in the steady tramp of Lincoln’s lonely vigil. Three o’clock arrives, and your task is done, and you pass out almost stealthily ... and the last sound in your ears is the muffled beat of that footfall.
Before eight o’clock of the morning you are once more at the White House ... look in at the President’s room.... He is still there, and there is nothing to indicate that he has been out of it.... There upon the table, beside his cup of coffee, lies the draft of his fresh instructions to General Hooker, bidding him to push forward without any reference to Chancellorsville.”
These are but fragmentary glimpses of the savior of the Union in his many-sided life during the war. But they help us to understand him in that tragic stretch of time when he plodded wearily between the White House and the telegraph room in the War Department to learn, day by day, what his generals at the front had to say.
It would be but vain repetition to picture him in silent, white-faced anguish, or in equally silent transports of joy and thanksgiving, all through the fighting days of Shiloh, Stone River, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Petersburg, when Americans reddened American soil with the blood of Americans, and the ordinary dress of women and children throughout the country turned to black.
They said of him that he sometimes cracked jokes, Nero-like, while the continent shuddered at the slaughter of its bravest and best, and while the fate of the Union hung trembling in the balance.