Part 100 (2/2)
When Senator Winter demanded proscription and vengeance against the leaders of the Confederacy, the President shook his head:
”No--let down the bars--let them all go--scare them off!”
He threw up his big hands in a vivid gesture as if he were shooing a flock of troublesome sheep out of his garden.
”Triumphant now, you will receive our enemies with open arms?” the Senator sneered.
”Enemies? There are no such things. The Southern States have never really been out of the Union. Their Acts of Secession were null and void. They know now that the issue is forever settled. The restored Union will be a real one. The Southern people at heart are law-abiding.
It was their reverence for the letter of the old law which led them to ignore progress and claim the right to secede under the Const.i.tution.
They will be true to Lee's pledge of surrender. I'm going to trust them as my brethren. Let us fold up our banners now and smelt the guns--Love rules--let her mightier purpose run!”
So big and generous, so broad and statesmanlike was his spirit that in this hour of victory his personality became in a day the soul of the New Republic. The South had already unconsciously grown to respect the man who had loved yet fought her for what he believed to be her highest good.
He was entering now a new phase of power. His influence over the people was supreme. No man or set of men in Congress, or outside of it, could defeat his policies. Even through the years of stunning defeats and measureless despair his enemies had never successfully opposed a measure on which he had set his heart.
His first great work accomplished in destroying slavery and restoring the Union, there remained but two tasks on which his soul was set--to heal the bitterness of the war and remove the negro race from physical contact with the white.
He at once addressed himself to this work with enthusiasm. That he could do it he never doubted for a moment.
His first care was to remove the negro soldiers from the country as quickly as possible. He summoned General Butler and set him to work on his scheme to use these one hundred and eighty thousand black troops to dig the Panama Ca.n.a.l. He summoned Bradley, the Vermont contractor, and put him to work on estimates for moving the negroes by s.h.i.+p to Africa or by train to an undeveloped Western Territory.
His prophetic soul had pierced the future and seen with remorseless logic that two such races as the Negro and Caucasian could not live side by side in a free democracy. The Radical theorists of Congress were demanding that these black men, emerging from four thousand years of slavery and savagery should receive the ballot and the right to claim the white man's daughter in marriage. They could only pa.s.s these measures over the dead body of Abraham Lincoln.
The a.s.sa.s.sin came at last--a vain, foolish dreamer who had long breathed the poisoned air of hatred. It needed but the flash of this madman's pistol on the night of the 14th of April to reveal the grandeur of Lincoln's character, the marvel of his patience and his wisdom.
The curtains of the box in Ford's theatre were softly drawn apart by an unseen hand. The Angel of Death entered, paused at the sight of the smile on his rugged, kindly face, touched the drooping shoulders, called him to take the place he had won among earth's immortals and left to us ”the gentlest memory of our world.”
THE END
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