The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln Part 89

"We'll ask for his release. It's sure to be granted."

John's eyes suddenly flashed.

"You think so?"

"Absolutely sure of it."

"We'll try it then," he said, with a cold ring in his voice that chilled Betty's heart, and sent her home wondering at its meaning.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

THE DARKEST HOUR

In the summer of 1864 the President saw the darkest hours of his life.

The change in his appearance was startling and pitiful. His sombre eyes seemed to have sunk into their caverns beneath the bushy brows and all but disappeared. Their gaze was more and more detached from earth and set on some dim, invisible sh.o.r.e. Deeper and deeper sank the furrows in his ashen face. The shoulders drooped beneath a weight too great for any human soul to bear.

To Betty Winter's expression of loyalty and sympathy he answered sadly:

"It's success I need, child,--not sympathy. My own burdens of cares are as nothing to my soul. It's our cause--our cause--the Union must live or I shall die!"

He sat sometimes by his window for hours immovable as a marble statue, his deep, hungry eyes gazing, gazing forever over the s.h.i.+ning river toward the Southern hills. His Secretaries stepped softly about the room in silent sympathy with the Chief they loved with pa.s.sionate devotion.

Grant had crossed the Rapidan on that glorious spring morning in May with his magnificent army accompanied by the highest hopes of millions.

And there had followed those awful sickening battles, one after another, until he had fallen back in failure before the impa.s.sable trenches around Petersburg.

The star of Grant, the conquering hero of the West, had apparently set in a sea of blood.

Lee, with inferior numbers, alert, resourceful, vigilant, had checked and baffled him at every turn, and Richmond's fall was no nearer to human eye than in 1862.

The miles and miles of hospital barracks in Was.h.i.+ngton, crowded to their doors with wounded, dying men, were the living witnesses of the Nation's mortal agony. Every city, town, village, hamlet and county in the North was in mourning. Death had literally flung its pall over the world.

From these thousands of stricken homes there had slowly risen a storm of protest against the new leader of the Army. The word "Butcher" was on every lip. General Grant, they said, possessed merely the qualities of the bulldog fighter--tenacity and persistence. He held what he had won so long as men were poured into his ranks by tens of thousands to take the place of the dead. They declared that he possessed no genius, no strategic skill, no power to originate plans and devise means to overcome his skillful and brilliant antagonist. The demand was pressed on the President for his removal.

His refusal had brought on him the blame for all the blood and all the suffering and all the failures of the past bitter year.

His answer to his critics was remorseless in its common sense, but added nothing to his hold on the people.

"We must fight to win," he firmly declared. "Grant is the ablest general we have yet developed. His losses have been appalling--but the struggle is now to the bitter end. Our resources are exhaustless. The South can not replace her fallen soldiers--her losses are fatal, ours are not."

In the face of a political campaign he prepared a call by draft for five hundred thousand more men and issued a proclamation appointing a day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer.

The spirits of the people touched the lowest tide ebb of despair.

The war debt had reached the appalling total of two thousand millions of dollars and its daily cost was four millions. The paper of the Treasury was rapidly depreciating and the premium on gold rising until the value of a one dollar green-back note was less than fifty cents in real money.

The bankers, fearing the total bankruptcy of the Nation, had begun to refuse further loans on bonds at any rate of interest.

The bounty offered to men for reenlistment in the army when their terms expired amounted to the unheard of sum of one thousand five hundred dollars cash on signing for the new term. Bounty jumping had become the favorite sport of adventurous scoundrels. Millions of dollars were being stolen by these men without the addition of a musket to the fighting force. Grant was hanging them daily, but the traitor's work continued.

The enlisted man deserted in three weeks and reappeared at the next post and reenlisted again, collecting his bounty with each enrollment.

The enemies of the President in his own party, led by Senator Winter, to make sure of his defeat before the convention, which was about to meet in Baltimore, held a National convention of Radical Republicans in Cleveland and nominated John C. Fremont for the Presidency. Their purpose was by this party division to make Lincoln's nomination an impossibility. Fremont's withdrawal was the weapon with which they would fight the President before the regular Republican convention and after.

Senator Winter voiced the feeling of this convention in a speech of bitter and vindictive eloquence.

"I denounce the administration of Abraham Lincoln," he declared, "as imbecile and vacillating. We demand not only the crus.h.i.+ng of Lee's army, but a program of vengeance against the rebels, which will mean their annihilation when conquered. We demand the confiscation of their property, the overthrow of every trace of local government and the reduction of their States to conquered provinces under the control of Congress. The milk and water policy of Lincoln is both a civil and a military failure, and his renomination would be the greatest calamity which could befall our Nation!"

A week later the regular party convention met at Baltimore. On the night before this meeting the President's renomination was not certain.

On every hand his enemies were a.s.sailing him with unabated fury. Every check to the National arms was laid at his door--every mistake of civil or military management. The ravages of the Confederate cruisers which were built in England and had swept the seas of our commerce were blamed on him. He should have called Great Britain to account for these outrages and had two wars instead of one!

The cost of the great struggle mounting and mounting into billions was his fault. The draft might have been avoided with the Government in abler hands. The emanc.i.p.ation policy had not freed a single negro and driven the whole Democratic Party into opposition to the war. His Border State policy had held four Slave States in the Union, but crippled the moral power of his position as anti-Slavery man. Every lie, every slander of four years were now repeated and magnified.

A competent man must be put into the White House. The Rail-splitter must go!

The real test of strength would come in the secret meeting of the Grand Council of the Union League--the Secret Society which had been organized to defeat the schemes of the Knights of the Golden Circle. In this meeting men will say exactly what they think. In the big convention to-morrow all will be harmony and peace. The convention will do what these powerful leaders from every State in the North tell them to do.

The a.s.sembly is dignified and orderly. The men who compose it are the eyes and ears and brains of the party they represent. They are the real rulers of the Nation. The party will obey their orders. These are the men who do the executive thinking for millions. The millions can only reject or ratify their wills. We are a democracy in theory, but in reality here is a.s.sembled the aristocracy of brains which const.i.tutes our government.

The Grand President Edmunds raps for order and faces a crowd of keen, intelligent leaders of men his equal in culture and will.

The meeting is called for but one purpose. With swift, direct action the battle begins. A friend of the President offers a resolution endorsing his administration, preceded by a preamble which declares it to be unwise to swap horses while crossing a stream.

The big guns open on this battle line without a moment's hesitation.

Senator Winter has not thought it wise to make this opening speech. The prominent part he took in organizing and launching the Fremont convention has put him in the position of an avowed bolter. He has already put forward a colleague from the Senate who is supposed to be friendly to the administration.

The Senator is a man of blunt speech and dominating personality. He speaks with earnestness, conviction and eloquence. He does not mince words. All the petty grievances and mistakes and disappointments of his four years under the tall, quiet man's strong hand are firing his soul now with burning pa.s.sion.

He boldly accuses the President of tyranny, usurpation, illegal acts, of abused power, of misused advantages, of favoritism, stupidity, frauds in administration, timidity, sluggish inaction, oppression, the willful neglect of suffering and the willful refusal to hear the cry of the down-trodden slave.

He turns the battery of his scorn now on his personal peculiarities, his drawn and haggard and sorrow marked face, his heartlessness in reading and telling funny stories, and last of all his selfish ambition which asks a second term at the sacrifice of his party and his country.

A Congressman of unusual brilliance and power follows this a.s.sault with one of even greater eloquence and bitterness.

Two more in quick succession and all demand with one accord the same thing:

"Down with Lincoln!"

Not a voice has been lifted in his favor. If he has a friend he is apparently afraid to open his mouth.

And then the giant form of Jim Lane slowly rises. He looks quietly over the crowd as if pa.s.sing in review the tragic events of four years. Is he going to add his voice to this chorus of rage? A year ago in the same Grand Council he had a bitter grievance against the President and a.s.sailed him furiously. Yesterday he was at the White House and came away with a shadow on his strong face.

He stood for a long time in silence and seemed to be scanning each individual in the crowd of tense listeners.

And then his deep voice broke the stillness. His words rang like the boom of cannon and their penetrating power seemed to pierce the brick walls of the room.

"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Grand Council: