Part 100 (1/2)

With a far-away look the President slowly answered:

”And all that I am in this world, Miss Betty, I owe to a woman--my angel mother--blessings on her memory!”

”I trust her spirit heard that beautiful speech,” the girl responded tenderly.

She paused, looked up at John, blushed and added:

”We are to be married next week, Mr. President----”

”Is it so?” he said joyfully. ”I wish I could be there, my children--but I'm afraid 'Old Grizzly' might bite me. So I'll say it now--G.o.d bless you!”

He took their hands in his and pressed them heartily. His eyes suddenly rested on a s.h.i.+ning black face grinning behind John Vaughan.

”My, my, can this be Julius Caesar Thornton?” he laughed.

”Ya.s.sah,” the black man grinned. ”Hit's me--ole reliable, sah, right here--I'se gwine ter cook fur 'em!”

From the moment of Abraham Lincoln's election the end of the war with a restored Union was a foregone conclusion.

In the fall of Atlanta the heart of the Confederacy was pierced, and it ceased to beat. Lee's army, cut off from their supplies, slowly but surely began to starve behind their impregnable breastworks. Sherman's march to the sea and through the Carolinas was merely a torchlight parade. The fighting was done.

When Lee's emaciated men, living on a handful of parched corn a day, staggered out of their trenches in the spring and tried to join Johnston's army they marched a few miles to Appomattox, dropping from exhaustion, and surrendered.

When the news of this tremendous event reached Was.h.i.+ngton, the Cabinet was in session. Led by the President, in silence and tears, they fell on their knees in a prayer of solemn thanks to Almighty G.o.d.

General Grant won the grat.i.tude of the South by his generous treatment of Lee and his ragged men. He had received instructions from the loving heart in the White House.

Long before the surrender in April, 1865, the end was sure. The President knowing this, proposed to his Cabinet to give the South four hundred millions of dollars, the cost of the war for a hundred days, in payment for their slaves, if they would lay down their arms at once. His ministers unanimously voted against his offer and he sadly withdrew it.

Among all his councillors there was not one whose soul was big enough to understand the far-seeing wisdom of his generous plan. He would heal at once one of the Nation's ugliest wounds by soothing the bitterness of defeat. He knew that despair would send the older men of the South to their graves.

Edmund Ruffin, who had fired the first shot against Sumter and returned to his Virginia farm when his State seceded, was a type of these ruined, desperate men. On the day that Lee surrendered he placed the muzzle of his gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger with his foot, and blew his own head into fragments.