“I marvel that the minions of slavery elected Jeff Davis their chief with so much better material at hand!”
“His election was a tragic and superfluous blunder. I am the President of the United States, North and South,” was the firm reply.
“Particularly the South!” hissed Stoneman. “During all this hideous war they have been your pets—these rebel savages who have been murdering our sons. You have been the ever-ready champion of traitors. And you now dare to bend this high office to their defence——”
“My God, Stoneman, are you a man or a savage!” cried the President. “Is not the North equally responsible for slavery? Has not the South lost all? Have not the Southern people paid the full penalty of all the crimes of war? Are our skirts free? Was Sherman’s march a picnic? This war has been a giant conflict of principles to decide whether we are a bundle of petty sovereignties held by a rope of sand or a mighty nation of freemen. But for the loyalty of four border Southern States—but for Farragut and Thomas and their two hundred thousand heroic Southern brethren who fought for the Union against their own flesh and blood, we should have lost. You cannot indict a people——”
“I do indict them!” muttered the old man.
“Surely,” went on the even, throbbing voice, “surely, the vastness of this war, its titanic battles, its heroism, its sublime earnestness, should sink into oblivion all low schemes of vengeance! Before the sheer grandeur of its history our children will walk with silent lips and uncovered heads.”
“And forget the prison pen at Andersonville!”
“Yes. We refused, as a policy of war, to exchange those prisoners, blockaded their ports, made medicine contraband, and brought the Southern Army itself to starvation. The prison records, when made at last for history, will show as many deaths on our side as on theirs.”
“The murderer on the gallows always wins more sympathy than his forgotten victim,” interrupted the cynic.
“The sin of vengeance is an easy one under the subtle plea of justice,” said the sorrowful voice. “Have we not had enough bloodshed? Is not God’s vengeance enough? When Sherman’s army swept to the sea, before him lay the Garden of Eden, behind him stretched a desert! A hundred years cannot give back to the wasted South her wealth, or two hundred years restore to her the lost seed treasures of her young manhood——”