Voices from the Past Part 136

589lines 1-2: ibid.

591lines 5-16: quotation from Ohn Quincy, President of

Harvard, Harvard Record

591lines 19-23 592 592lines 1-2

598line 26: song, "Tenting Tonight"

603lines 15-23

605lines 23-26

606lines 9-15

607lines 24-28

610lines 15-19: s.h.i.+loh quotation, Doneway & Evans

1

Executive Mansion

May 4, 1863

N

ot long after my inauguration I made a resolution to write something about my life. Writing, late at night, I hoped to escape the pressures of the war and go back into time.

April 12, 1861 - at 4:30 a.m., the war began.

Thirty-nine days after my inauguration!

When I called for 75,000 volunteers, I thought hostilities would end soon. I thought of many things in those trying days. There was the terrible summer of '82, when wheat fields were swept by gunfire, 20,000 Confederates died, the Union lost 16,000. Boys, mostly boys. Which General woke me during the night? Dark days, dark nights. The Army of the Potomac had 100,000 soldiers. Their losses and gains are part of me.

Deserters, absentees, spies-each is part of me. The wounded, the sick, the dying, the dead-they are part of me.

Oh, Traveler, why did you bring this war?

And Wall Street remembers this war! Fears it!

There seemed to be panic in rooms of this building.

The two years I have been here have taught me a great deal about men and self.

Yet, now, now I will record my life though life surges around Was.h.i.+ngton, though each one of us is sorely tried; we have read anew life's "great tragic volume," as John Adams called it. The pages lie open as drums thud along the Potomac.