Part 8 (2/2)

Scarcely less heavy were the financial troubles of Grant's administration. An era of war is an era of extravagance. When hard times came, men were tempted by the dreams of cheap money, and the greenback craze was abroad. But Grant stood for honest money, and attacked lying measures with the zeal of a Hebrew prophet.

After two presidential terms came two years of foreign travel (1877-79), and wherever the great soldier went he exhibited his confidence in democracy, his interest in the working people and the poor. He returned home to receive such an ovation as no American citizen has ever had. Six years of private life were followed by a financial disaster that threatened to destroy his good name itself. Grant was one who made ill-advised haste to become rich. Scandalized by the deceit and impoverished by the failure of men he had trusted as partners, the great soldier was now a.s.saulted by worry and fear. Our best physicians believe that fear, whether related to property or the loss of name, or grievous disappointment, is in some way related to cancer. And within a few months after that awful wreckage, Grant knew that his life was coming to an end.

The soldier became an author. Stricken with death, in the hope of safeguarding his family against poverty Grant decided to write his memoirs. It was an astonis.h.i.+ng literary achievement. His style is simple as suns.h.i.+ne. Grant knew what he wanted to say, said it, and had done.

Yet all the time a shadow was falling upon the page,--the shadow made by the messenger of death, who stood by Grant's shoulder, ready to claim his own. Slowly the soldier wrote the story of his youth, his campaigns in the West, his battles in the Wilderness, while every day the hand grew feebler.

Reared in a religious atmosphere, Grant's nature was essentially moral and religious. He possessed all the big essential virtues--honesty, justice, truth, honour, good will. He loved the truth. He felt that he had done what he could. Southern soldiers and generals as well as Northern comrades and friends brought to his bedside messages of affection and good cheer. At length he fell asleep. His tomb on the height above the Hudson has become a Mecca for innumerable mult.i.tudes.

To the end of time, perhaps, Lincoln will be remembered as the Martyr President, the best loved of all our leaders, the great Emanc.i.p.ator, the gentlest memory of our world; but side by side with Lincoln will stand Grant, the man of oak and rock, the man of iron will, who fought the war to a successful issue, and will be known in history as the greatest soldier of the Republic.

XI

THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE AT HOME WHO SUPPORTED THE SOLDIERS AT THE FRONT

It is a proverb that nothing moves men like tales of eloquence and heroism. Historians and poets alike believe that stories of bravery and anecdotes of heroes exert a profound influence upon young hearts. Here is Socrates. His judges condemn him to the jail and poison. Socrates quails not, and says: ”At what price would one not estimate one night of n.o.ble conference with Homer and Hesiod? You, my judges, go home to your banquets--I to hemlock and death; but whether it is better for you than for me, G.o.d knoweth.” It is a moving story. Here is the early missionary martyr, fettered and brought before a cruel tyrant, to be condemned to death. The missionary lifts his chains, calls the roll of the king's crimes, flashes the sword of justice, coerces the monarch from his throne, makes him crawl, beg, plead, and beseech the missionary's pity and prayers, for speech has made a prisoner king, and turned a monarch into a captive. It is a moving tale. And here are the stories of war: Xenophon's ten thousand young Greeks, lost in the heart of the great nation, a thousand miles from home, without maps, without food, outnumbered daily ten to one, living off the country, fighting all day, surrounded by a fresh army each night, steadily pursuing their famous retreat. See, too, the handful at Thermopylae, defending the Pa.s.s, and every one of them giving his life. And here are the Dutch, driven by the b.l.o.o.d.y Alva into the North Sea, clinging to the d.y.k.es by their finger-tips, and fighting their way back to their homes and altars. And here are the American boys confined to the prison s.h.i.+p, the _Jersey_, starved victims of scurvy and fever, without food, without medicine, with the corpses of their brothers floating in the water just outside, boys whose monument stands yonder in Fort Greene. What a tale of martyrdom is theirs!

Yet the history of heroism holds no more thrilling story than that of the soldiers of our Civil War. Every other pa.s.sage, every other incident, that we have pa.s.sed in review can be more than duplicated by soldier boys who have lent new meaning to patriotism and martyrdom. As many men died in Southern prisons as fell on both sides at the battle of Gettysburg. This is their story--they counted life not dear unto themselves; they struggled unto blood, striving against oppression, and the world itself, with all its beauty, was not worthy of them.

Our prosperous generation, threatened with effeminacy and softness, needs to re-open the pages of history and to linger long upon the portraits of our heroic leaders. Theirs was the greatest war that ever shook the earth. A million Northern men, and over against them a million Southern men, and a battle line a thousand miles in length! Including the long-term men and the short-term service, 3,000,000 men engaged in the conflict! Two thousand two hundred and sixty-one battles fought--if we mention conflicts in which there were more than five hundred engaged on each side. When Lee surrendered, his land was desolate. Armies upon armies of cripples came home to suffer! There were a million widows and over three million orphan children! Men who at Lincoln's call for troops left the college and the university discovered, when it was all over, that it was too late to take up their studies, and lived on like unfulfilled prophecies. Others, who during those four years poured out all the vital nerve forces, brought so little strength out of the long, bitter struggle that they might better have died, and for years have been in the invalid's chair, looking with wistful eyes on the great procession of society moving on to industrial victories! The war all over? The war has been continued in its influences throughout the entire generation! It never will be over until the last cripple has dropped his maimed body, until the last child, robbed of a dead father's care, has recovered his losses, and the last woman who has lived alone through the years has found her beloved!

The courage and endurance of the Southern women, who took full charge of the cotton plantations and helped support Lee's army, stirs the sense of wonder. There were many Northern women who had no relatives at the front, but there was scarcely a Southern home where the father, husband or sons were not on the battle line. For that reason the Southern women were always in a state of suspense. Homes were entirely broken up during the four years. The men were at the front, and all the women were either at work at home or were in the hospitals as nurses. During 1862 and 1863 practically every church in Richmond was a hospital, and there were twenty-five other buildings used by surgeons. Physicians had no morphine and no quinine. For coffee they used parched corn. Tea rose to $500 a pound. For sugar they steeped watermelon rind. For soda these women burned corncobs and mixed the ashes with their corn-meal. They had neither ice nor salt. They tore up their ingrain carpets to make trousers for the soldiers. Women wore coa.r.s.e hemp and calico. Having no leather, one little factory turned out five hundred pairs of wooden shoes a month in Richmond.

When Lee needed bullets, a minister tore the lead pipe out of his house in Richmond to send the lead to Lee. Flour rose to $400 a barrel. In one little town iron became so scarce that tenpenny nails were used for money. No tale more pitiful than that of the women who took charge of the slaves on the plantation, comforted their little children, buried their dead, smiled, wept, prayed, worked, compelled their lips to silence, staggered on, groaned inly while they taught men peace, and died while others were smiling. Whether or not men are made in the image of G.o.d, these women certainly were. And it was because they believed with all their mind and soul that independence for the State was the sovereign gift of G.o.d; and they died for independence, just as the boys in blue lived and died for the Union.

It was this moral earnestness and intensity of conviction that made the war so terrible. When England hired Hessians to fight Was.h.i.+ngton's troops, and they fought for so much a week, the hired soldiers were slow to begin attack and quick to retreat. Mercenaries have to be scourged into battle. Stonewall Jackson's men believed in their cause and thirsted for the excitement of the attack and onslaught. And yet all the time the two opposing armies maintained mutual respect and even developed a new sense of brotherhood as the desperate struggle went on.

Never was there a war carried on with such intensity by day and such a sense of mutual respect at night. Once when the Rappahannock separated the two armies, and it was evident that there was no campaign beyond, a revival broke out in one of Stonewall Jackson's regiments and there were prayer-meetings in almost every tent every night. Becoming acquainted, a number of boys in blue by previous arrangement crossed the river, and knelt in the prayer service. One night the sound of the regiments singing, ”Nearer My G.o.d to Thee,” rolled through the air across the river, and finally the boys in the Northern army joined in, until at the last verse, the two regiments, opposed in arms, were one in voice and heart, as they poured out their souls to G.o.d in the old hymn they had learned at their mother's knee. For the soldier knew that any moment a shot might bring the end.

The sufferings of men in prisons touch the note of horror. The national government is planning a monument for those who died in Andersonville.

Gettysburg slew 26,000, Andersonville 32,000. The stockade included twenty-six acres, but three acres were marsh. Incredible as it may seem, there was no shelter, no beds, no cook-house, no hospital, no nothing.

Just the cold rain in winter chilling men to death, just the pitiless glare of the August sun scorching them to death. There was no sanitation, and when it rained the little stream backed up the sewage, and after each shower men died by scores. Wirtz wrote Jefferson Davis that one-fifth of the meal was bran, and that he had no meat, no medicine, no clothing. Men burrowed in the ground, dug caves like rats, and not infrequently fifty bodies were carried out in a single day.

Wirtz destroyed men faster than did General Lee. The men imprisoned in Andersonville urge that there were thousands of cords of wood just outside the stockade, miles upon miles of forests all about, that the prisoners could have built their own shanties and hospitals, and cookhouses. To which Wirtz's friends answer that he did not have weapons or Confederate soldiers enough to guard the prisoners on parole. While they also answer that the prisoners in Andersonville had as much food and the same kind as Lee's army was then enjoying. The plain fact is that the South was out of medicine, clothing and food, and was itself on the edge of starvation.

The wonderful thing is that these Union boys, 32,000 of them, who died at Andersonville, could at any moment have obtained release by taking the oath not to renew arms against the South. Some few did escape by digging under the stockade--but what perils they endured to escape from the enemy's country! They slept in leaves by day, and travelled by night. They were pursued by bloodhounds, lay in water and swamps, with only their lips above the filth until the peril had pa.s.sed by. They wore rags, ate roots, s.h.i.+vered in the rains, sweltered in the heat, grew more emaciated, until more dead than alive they reached the Northern lines.

Now that it is all over, Confederate soldiers like General John B.

Gordon have said on a hundred lecture platforms in Northern cities that, having done what he could for States' rights and to destroy the Union, he thanked G.o.d above all things else that he was not successful. In the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, that great Southern soldier wrote the last words of his life, in the hope that they would help cement the Union between the North and the South:--”The issues that divided the sections were born when the Republic was born, and were forever buried in an ocean of fraternal blood. We shall then see that, under G.o.d's providence, every sheet of flame from the blazing rifles of the contending armies, every whizzing sh.e.l.l that tore through the forests at s.h.i.+loh and Chancellorsville, every cannon shot that shook Chickamauga's hills or thundered around the heights of Gettysburg, and all the blood and the tears that were shed are yet to become contributions for the upbuilding of American manhood and for the future defense of American freedom. The Christian Church received its baptism of pentecostal power as it emerged from the shadows of Calvary, and went forth to its world-wide work with greater unity and a diviner purpose. So the Republic, rising from its baptism of blood with a national life more robust, a national union more complete, and a national influence ever widening, shall go forever forward in its benign mission to humanity.”

Nor must we forget the work of nurses, the members of the Sanitary Commission, and the Christian Commission Movement. The events of the Russian-j.a.panese war show what is a wonderful progress of science. j.a.pan sent along with her army experts on the water, the food, and the placing of tents, that made typhoid, cholera and the usual diseases impossible.

Her surgeons used antiseptic methods, and gangrene was practically unknown in the j.a.panese hospitals. But the situation was different in 1861. Modern sanitation, surgery, antiseptic methods, chloroform and ether are comparatively recent discoveries. Such anesthetics as the surgeons had were poor in quality and insufficient in quant.i.ty. In the camps fever was prevalent. Smallpox, measles and lesser diseases became malignant and wrought terrible ravages. Tents became more dangerous than battle-fields. What the bullet began, the hospitals completed. More men died through disease than through leaden hail. But the n.o.ble army of physicians and nurses wrought wonders. Think of it! Twenty-six thousand men dead or dying on the field of Gettysburg!

Here is a page torn from the journal of one of the nurses there: ”We begin the day with the wounded and sick by was.h.i.+ng and freshening them.

Then the surgeons and dressers make their rounds, open the wounds, apply the remedies and replace the bandages. This is the awful hour. I put my fingers in my ears this morning. When it is over we go back to the men and put the ward in order once more, remaking the beds and giving clean handkerchiefs with a little cologne or bay water upon them, so prized in the sickening atmosphere of wounds. Then we keep going round and round, wetting the bandages, going from cot to cot almost without stopping, giving medicine and brandy according to orders. I am astonished at the whole-souled and whole-bodied devotion of the surgeons. Men in every condition of horror, shattered and shrieking, are brought in on stretchers and dumped down anywhere.” Men shattered in the thigh, and even cases of amputation were shovelled into berths without blanket, without thought or mercy. It could not have been otherwise. Other hundreds and thousands were out on the field of Gettysburg bleeding to death, and every minute was precious.

No page can ever describe the service of nurses, sisters of mercy, chaplains, brave men and kind women, who took train and went to the front upon news of the battle and remained there for weeks.

But while the soldier boys were striving unto blood for their convictions, what about the people at home who loved them? How did they carry their burdens and fulfill their task that was not less important?

Fortunately, during the war, the North was blessed with four bountiful harvests that were rich enough, not only to support the people at home, and the soldiers at the front, but also to furnish an excess of food that could be sold abroad to obtain money with which to help support the war. It seemed as if the sun, the rain, and the soil had entered into a conspiracy to support the North and liberty. The largest crop of wheat and corn ever garnered before the war was in 1859. At that time, men thought the harvest would never be surpa.s.sed. But strangely enough, that b.u.mper crop of 1859 was surpa.s.sed four times in succession during the Civil War. Meanwhile the herds of cattle and the flocks of sheep more than doubled during the conflict, and all of the land that was not yellow with grain became a rich pasture and meadow, covered with cattle, sheep and horses.

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