The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln Part 78

CHAPTER XXIX

THE PANIC

The morning after Betty returned to Carver Hospital from the front, a mother was pouring out her heart in a burst of patriotic joy over a wounded boy.

She thought of the lonely figure in the White House treading the wine press of a Nation's sorrow alone and asked the mother to go with her to the President, meet him and repeat what she had said. She consented at once.

For the first time Betty failed to gain admission promptly. Mr.

Stoddard, his third Secretary, was at the door.

"We must let him eat something, Miss Winter," he whispered. "All night the m.u.f.fled sound of his footfall came from his room. I heard it at nine, at ten, at eleven. At midnight Stanton left his door ajar and his steady tramp, tramp, tramp, came with heavier sound. The last thing I heard as I left at three was the m.u.f.fled beat upstairs. The guard told me it never stopped for a moment all night."

Betty was surprised to see his face illumined by a cheerful smile as she entered. She gazed with awe into the deep eyes of the man whose single word could stop the war and divide the Union. She wondered if he had fought the Nation's battle alone with G.o.d through the night until his prophetic vision had seen through cloud and darkness the dawn of a new and more wonderful life.

She spoke softly:

"I've brought you a good mother who lost a son at Fredericksburg. She has a message for you."

The tall form bent reverently and pressed her hand. A wonderful smile transfigured his rugged face as he listened:

"G.o.d help you in your trials, Mr. President, as he has helped me in mine----"

"And you lost your son at Fredericksburg?"

"Yes. It was long before I could feel reconciled. But I've been praying for you day and night since----"

"For me?"

"You must be strong and courageous, and G.o.d will bring the Nation through!"

"You say that to me, standing beside the grave of your son?"

"Yes, and beside the cot of my other boy who is here wounded from Chancellorsville. I'm proud that G.o.d gave me such sons to lay on the altar of my country. Remember, I am praying for you day and night!"

Both big hands closed over hers and he was silent a moment.

"It's all right then. I'll get new strength when I remember that such mothers are praying for me."

He pressed Betty's hand at the door:

"Thank you, child. You bring medicine that reaches soul and body!"

The hour of despair had pa.s.sed and the President returned to his task patient, watchful, strong.

Daily the shadows deepened over the Nation's life. Blacker and denser rose the clouds. Four Northern Generals had now gone down before Lee's apparently invincible genius--McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker, and with each fall the corpses of young men were piled higher.

Again the clamor rose for the return of McClellan to command. This cry was not only heard in the crushed Army of the Potomac, it was backed by the voice of two million Democrats who had chosen the man on horseback as their leader.

It was for precisely this reason that McClellan could not be considered again for command. His party had fallen under the complete control of its Copperhead leaders who demanded the ending of the war at once and at any sacrifice of principle or of the Union.

The only way the President could stop desertions and prevent the actual secession of the great Northern States of the Middle West, now under the control of these men, was to use his arbitrary power to suspend the civil law and put them in prison. Through the State and War Departments he did this sorrowfully, but promptly.

His answer to his critics was the soundest reasoning and it justified him in the judgment of thinking men.

"I make such arrests," he declared, "because these men are laboring to prevent the raising of troops and encouraging desertion. Armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the penalty of death.

"I will not shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, and refuse to touch a wily agitator who induces him to commit the crime. To silence the agitator and save the boy is not only Const.i.tutional, but withal a great mercy."

Volunteers were no longer to be had and a draft of five hundred thousand men had been ordered for the summer. The Democratic leaders in solid array were threatening to resist this draft by every means in their power, even to riot and revolution.

The ma.s.ses of the North were profoundly discouraged at the unhappy results of the war. In thousands of patriotic loyal homes, men and women had begun to ask themselves whether it were not cruel folly to send their brave boys to be slaughtered.

The prestige of the Southern army was at its highest point and its terrible power was nowhere more gravely realized than in the North, whose thousands of mourning homes attested its valor.

Europe at last seemed ready to spring on the throat of America. Distinct reports were in circulation in the Old World that the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, intended to interfere in our affairs. On the 9th of January, the French Government denied this. The Emperor himself, however, sent to the President an offer of mediation so blunt and surprising it could not be doubted that it was a veiled hint of his purpose to intervene. Beyond a doubt he expected the Union to be dismembered and he proposed to form an alliance between the Latin Empire which he was founding in Mexico and the triumphant Confederate States.

Great Britain was behind this Napoleonic adventure. Outwitted by the President in the affair of the _Trent_, the British Government was eager for the chance to strike the Republic.

To cap the climax of disasters Lee was preparing to invade the North with his victorious army. The announcement struck terror to the Northern cities and produced a condition among them little short of panic.

The move would be the height of audacity and yet Lee had good reasons for believing its success possible and probable. His grey veterans were still ragged and poorly shod. With Southern ports blockaded and no manufacturing this was inevitable, but they had proven in two years'

test of fire Lee's proud boast:

"There never were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led."

This opinion was confirmed to the President by Charles Francis Adams, a veteran of his own Army of the Potomac, whom he summoned to the White House for a conference.

"I do not believe," said Adams gravely, "that any more formidable or better organized and animated force was ever set in motion than that which Lee is now leading toward the North. It is essentially an army of fighters--men who individually, or in the ma.s.s, can be depended on for any feat of arms in the power of mere mortals to accomplish. They will blanch at no danger. Lee knows this from experience and they have full confidence in him."

He could not hope to enter Pennsylvania with more than sixty-five thousand men, but his plan was reasonable. With such an army he had hurled McClellan's hundred and ten thousand soldiers back from the gates of Richmond and scattered them to the winds. With a less number he had all but annihilated Pope's men and flung them back into Was.h.i.+ngton a disorganized rabble. With thirty-seven thousand grey soldiers he had repelled in a welter of blood McClellan's eighty-six thousand at Antietam and retired at his leisure. With seventy thousand men he had crushed Burnside's host of one hundred and thirteen thousand at Fredericksburg. With sixty thousand he had just struck Hooker's grand army of a hundred and thirty thousand men and four hundred and thirty-eight guns, rolled it up as a scroll and thrown it across the Rappahannock in blinding, bewildering defeat.

From every prisoner taken at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville he knew the Northern army was discouraged and heartsick. That he could march his ragged men, the flower of Southern manhood, into Pennsylvania and clothe and feed them on her boundless resources he couldn't doubt. Virginia was swept bare, and the demoralization of Hooker's army with the profound depression of the North left his way open.

To say that Lee's invasion, as it rapidly developed under such conditions, struck terror to the Capital of the Republic is to mildly express it. The movement of his army from Culpepper in June indicated clearly that his objective point was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. If the Capital of the State fell, nothing could withstand the onward triumphant rush of his army into Philadelphia, Baltimore and Was.h.i.+ngton.

To meet the extraordinary danger the President called for one hundred thousand militia for six months' emergency service from the five States cl.u.s.tering around Pennsylvania. And yet as the two armies drew near to each other, General George Meade, the new Union Commander who had succeeded Hooker, had but one hundred and five thousand against Lee's sixty-two thousand. So terrible had been the depression following Chancellorsville, so rapid the desertions, so numerous the leaves of absence, that the combined forces of the Army of the Potomac with the State troops under the new call reached only this pitiful total.

Lee's swift column penetrated almost to the gates of Harrisburg before Meade's advance division of twenty-five thousand men had caught up with his rear at Gettysburg on July 1st.

Seeing that a battle was inevitable, Lee drew in his advance lines and made ready for the clash. The Northern army was going into this fight with the smallest number of men relatively which he had ever met--though outnumbering him nearly two to one. The difference was that here the North was defending her own soil.

It was not surprising that on the eve of such a battle in the light of the frightful experiences of the past two years that Was.h.i.+ngton should be in a condition of panic. A single defeat now with Lee's victorious army north of the Capital meant its fall, the inevitable dismemberment of the Union, and the bankruptcy and ruin of the remaining Northern States.

Brave men in Congress who had fought heroically with their mouths inveighing with bitter invective against the weak and vacillating policy of the President in temporizing with the South were busy packing their goods and chattels to fly at a moment's notice.

The President realized, as no other man could, the deep tragedy of the crisis. He sat by his window for hours, his face a grey mask, his sorrowful eyes turned within, the deep-cut lines furrowed into his cheeks as though burned with red hot irons.

He was struggling desperately now to forestall the possible panic which would follow defeat.