The story of Abraham Lincoln

by Mary Agnes Hamilton

Willie did not know what to say: perhaps he could get his friends to help him, he said at last.

“No,” said Lincoln, “friends cannot pay it; only one man in the world can pay it, and that is William Scott. If from this day on William Scott does his duty, my bill is paid.”

William Scott never forgot these words. Just before his death in one of the later battles of the war, he asked his comrades to tell President Lincoln that he had never forgotten what he had said.

All the time, people who did not know the President threw on his shoulders all the blame for the long continuance of the war. Until the last year of the war, the newspapers abused him continually. The horrible loss of life in Grant’s last campaign was laid to his charge. Only those who came to the President to ask his help in their own suffering, understood what his suffering was; he suffered with each of them—he suffered with the South as well as the North. After Antietam, he had said, “I shall not live to see the end; this war is killing me.” The crushing burden he had borne so long and patiently had bent even his strong shoulders.

But it had not been borne in vain. The time seemed at last to have come when all America would understand how much they owed to the patient endurance of the President. And there was work still to be done which needed all his wisdom. The South was conquered. It had to be made one with the North. The pride of the conquerors had to be curbed, the bitterness of the conquered softened.

Lincoln returned from Richmond to Washington, in his heart the profound resolve “to bind up the nation’s wounds” as he, and only he, could do it.

April 14 was Good Friday, and a day of deep thankfulness in the North. In the morning Lincoln held a Cabinet meeting, at which General Grant was present. The question of reconstruction, of making one whole out of the divided halves, was discussed. Some of the Cabinet were anxious to wreak vengeance on the South, to execute the leaders of the rebellion. Such was not Lincoln’s view.

“Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.”

His noble patriotism could still say to the South, “We are not enemies, but friends.” His life was now even more precious to the South than to the North.

After the Cabinet meeting, Lincoln spent some time in talking with his son Robert, who had returned from the field with General Grant, under whom he had served as a captain. In the afternoon he went for a drive with Mrs. Lincoln. His mood was calm and happy: for the first time for four years he could look forward peacefully to the future, and to the great tasks still before him.