The Tenth Decade of the United States

MAY, 1905

BY WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN

I

THERE is neither permanence nor utter change in human affairs. There are no periods in history. There are only pauses, never complete; now and then, a lowering of the voices, never hushed; a slower pace; a calmer mood. There was no sharp, clear end of the multitudinous activities, no sudden diversion of the energies, that made up the great Civil War. No court could say when it ceased. Congress held one opinion on the point, the President another. There was, however, a moment of pausing, almost of silence. It was the day of Lincoln’s death.

That was also a moment when the people of the United States might be apprehended almost as a single mass and body. They were drawn together in a common experience,though they were still of many minds. All had their silent parts, or helped, at least, to make the background and ensemble of a single tableau, wonderfully vivid, which will still arrest the thought and move the sympathy of any but the most bowed down and unregardful of mankind. It was a pause after turmoil. It was not — like that in France which Burke has caught for us, and Carlyle also, when Mirabeau and the unhappy queen met on the round knoll in the Garden of St. Cloud, under the stars, and there consulted in low tones — the dreadful silence before the tempest. The moment was not charged with the nervous agony of suspense, but the shock and horror of the assassin’s deed, the stillness that followed, could awake once more, out of the weariness and satiety which four years of battles had brought them to, the people’s dull, spent sense of that great whole of which they all were parts.

Our history is hard and masculine; colored with few purple lights; too little related to our tenderer sentiments and deeper passions. When older peoples have paused as we did then, they have looked upon far different scenes. Fairer companies have stood about more stately figures of triumph or of tragedy than that America and the world now gazed upon. The common chamber, the gaunt, pale President, the strong, bearded counselors at his bedside, — this was unlike the scenes which European peoples have fixed in their memories. Charles the First and Mary Stuart on their scaffolds, the barons and the king at Runnymede, Maria Theresa appealing to the nobles of Hungary to take up their swords for her child, Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau, and many another pageant of human love and sacrifice, are treasured up by other peoples as we have treasured up this crude, unlackeyed martyrdom. Even the great personality of Lincoln, now potent in so many individual lives, intimate and familiar of so many of our hidden moods, was not yet fully revealed to his fellows. It was the emancipator only that had fallen; the leader and shepherd of men. Outwardly, at least, his experience was limited as theirs was. Dying in the midst of multitudes, master of armies and of navies, he was still of the frontier; as,indeed, all our American life was still, in a sense, only the frontier and western fringe of European life. True, Lincoln also leads our thoughts back to the princes whose peer he was; but we can pass from his deathbed with no irreverence, no sense of shock or change, to look out, in the plain light of day, upon the whole wide field of work and strife and progress which was always in his thought, and glimpse the attitude and state of the republic when his summons passed, like an angelus, across the continent.

The continent still set bounds to the growth and aspiration of the Republic. Nor were the continental limits in any sense filled out and occupied. There were neither dependencies nor colonies, but only the states, the territories, and the District of Columbia. From the Atlantic to the Mississippi, leaving out, for the moment, the region of undetermined status where the armies were still at work, all was permanently divided into states. One of these, the oldest, had been shorn in twain, its eastern lowlands, which held with the South, keeping the old and famous name, while its western, mountainous parts were irregularly erected into the new, amorphous state of West Virginia. Beyond the Mississippi, a column of five states, Louisiana, the eldest, at the bottom, Minnesota at the top, bordered the river and the plains. Kansas, midway up the column, and Texas, at its base, stretched out farther still into the waste. Thence to the Rocky Mountains were territories only.

Three of these, Utah, Nebraska, and Colorado, were already demanding statehood. Nebraska, whose population of 50,000 was for the most part agricultural, and might, therefore, be considered as fixed upon her soil, had perhaps the best claim of the three; but there also the restless, migratory impulse continued to appear. Colorado, suddenly invaded by a throng of seekers after gold and silver, the true extent of her mines not yet completely known, could make no guarantee of a sufficient permanent population. These two territories, moreover, had had too little forethought of the trend of public opinion concerning the negro to make, in the constitutions they were framing, such a place for the black man among their citizens as a growing sentiment in the older Northern states was even now beginning to demand for him. Utah’s population was, in fact, the greatest of all; and it was also the most compact and homogeneous. Her settlers were already accumulating wealth and building a city by the Great Salt Lake. They were proving that the desert could be made to blossom; the ditches they were digging with their hands were the beginning of the work of irrigation which has redeemed from absolute waste a region greater than New York. But they were also building a temple, now one of the most curious and impressive places of worship in the world; and because of the temple and what it stood for, this industrious and thriving community was under a ban. The Mormons had journeyed to Utah in 1846 from their temporary home in Nauvoo, in Illinois, and now controlled the territory politically and industrially. The Latter Day Saints had entered in where it was by war determined that the slave-holder should never come; but even Douglas, the champion of “squatter sovereignty,” had been unwilling to concede to the Mormons the privileges of self-government. He had proposed in 1857 to strike Utah out of the list of territories. But the only national law concerning Mormonism was the act of 1862, which merely forbade polygamy in the territories, fixed the punishment for the offense at a fine of five thousand dollars, and limited to fifty thousand dollars the amount of real estate which any religious or charitable association might hold. That act was never enforced with any thoroughness. Polygamy continued to be practiced, and Utah had no good prospect of statehood.

In the more southern of the territories, population was sparse; the Indians, the Mexicans, and the people of mixed blood, still far outnumbered the settlers from the states. New Mexico and Arizona had together less than 50,000 white inhabitants, no cities, no important industries, and no hope of immediate statehood. To the northward were the territories of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Dakota, roamed over by Indians and a few white men. Their mines, their forests, and the fields which are now so productive of wheat and corn, were scarcely touched.

The number of Indians in the whole country was estimated at a little over 300,000; and the great majority had their homes beyond the Mississippi. The principal eastern tribes were gathered together in the Indian Territory. Several of these, having among them a considerable number of negro slaves, had at the outbreak of the war openly espoused the Southern cause. The Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles had been represented by delegates in the Confederate congress at Richmond. But before the end of the struggle they were all brought back into that ill-defined allegiance to the Union which they had formerly acknowledged. Apart from this, the largest grouping of Indians anywhere in the country, the more important agencies were the Central,in Missouri,the two Chippewa agencies, on the Mississippi and on Lake Superior, and the Mackinac and the Northern, both in the far Northwest. There were 50,000 Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, half as many in Dakota, more than 50,000 in California. Besides the income from a trust fund of three million dollars, the government appropriated annually nearly a million to maintain the agencies. The personnel of the agencies, however, was as bad as could be found in any branch of our civil service, and our troubles over the Indians were sure to grow acute again before any better system should be tried. The policy of massing them in reservations was still the approved method of keeping them in order.

No railroad or other highway crossed the vast region between the valley of the Mississippi and the crest of the Rockies. It was the time of the “pony express.” The principal pony express route was very nearly identical with the present route of the Union and Central Pacific railroads—across Nebraska, upper Utah. Nevada, and California, to San Francisco. The Santa Fé route, starting from Independence, Missouri, crossed the Indian Territory into New Mexico, but stopped at Santa Fé. The Oregon route diverged northwestward from the central pony express route near Salt Lake. A mail route close to the Mexican line turned northward when it reached California, and ended at San Francisco.

But beyond this region, our true “West” and frontier, there was a still farther West of better realized opportunity. Two states, California and Oregon, looked out upon the Pacific. Political considerations had also induced Congress, in 1864, to grant the powers of statehood to the miners of Nevada, although, as the event proved, they had not so good a case as their fellows of Colorado. The three Pacific states had perhaps 600,000 people, and 223 miles of railroad. Both in California and in Oregon there were natural resources sufficient for large populations. This was true, also. of the region north of Oregon, whose limits were not yet quite completely defined, because it was not yet finally determined whether the boundary line agreed upon in the treaty of 1846 should run to the north or to the south of certain small islands off the coast of Washington Territory. That was the only serious boundary dispute between the United States and any of their neighbors.

Here, then, in that larger half of the Republic which stretched out beyond the Mississippi, was the ample field awaiting the next great display of national energy; and already men of wealth and enterprise were taking the first step toward a real occupation. Already, two companies were formed to cross with railroads the deserts which divided the Pacific states from the states of the Mississippi Valley. The two lines were soon stretching out blindly in opposite directions, feeling their way, as it were, to some point where they might meet and join. That, in fact, is not a very inaccurate description of the status of the two enterprises. In 1864, after various tentative and ineffective measures, Congress had held out such generous inducements that capitalists were found willing to take up the scheme of a transcontinental line, and the Union Pacific Company was chartered and organized. The Central Pacific, chartered under the laws of California, was an independent company. Neither road was bound to follow the other’s choice of a route, but they were bound to make a junction. As yet, however, the territories, ten in all, including the Indian Territory, were without railroads and telegraph lines. In all their immense area there were less than 300,000 people. Millions of square miles, still inaccessible to agriculture, trade, and manufactures, were waiting until the energy so long absorbed in strife between the North and the South should be set to bridging the vast chasm of desert and mountains between the Pacific and the Mississippi. The earlier westward movement had been twofold. Two streams of population, moving along parallel lines, one below the lakes, the other above the gulf, had carried toward the Pacific the two kindred but diverging civilizations which were now embattled. Until those two columns, at last united, should march one way, the West must wait.

But even before that release could come, the energy of the older group of Eastern states was not completely absorbed in the struggle with the South. The history of the United States during the four years of civil war is far from being a history of warfare only. Interrupted, diminished for a time, and forced into new channels, the industry of the North had never ceased to be effective. Even in the early, gloomy period of the struggle, it was actually, in some fields, pressing forward.

Foreign commerce was, of course, lessened, for there was no Northern staple to take the place of cotton. The total value of our exports fell from 243 million dollars in the fiscal year 1861 to 194 millions in 1865; our imports of all commodities, which in 1861 were 286 millions, were in 1865 but 234 millions. The decline of our merchant marine had been still more rapid, for within a few months of the outbreak of hostilities there were Confederate privateers waiting to waylay our merchantmen at those “crossroads of the seas” which the genius of Commodore Maury had charted out. The tonnage of American vessels employed in foreign commerce had fallen sixty per cent in five years: that is to say, from more than two and one-half million tons in 1860 to but little more than one million tons in 1865. Our domestic commerce, which far exceeded in volume all our trade with foreign countries, was also lessened, possibly in even greater proportion. Southern cotton no longer made its way to New England. The wharves of Boston, the mills of Lawrence and Lowell and Fall River, would not now have persuaded a Southern planter, as they had once persuaded Yancey, that cotton was the basis of the entire wealth of the East. Neither, on the other hand, could the Eastern manufacturer, the New York merchant, or the Northwestern farmer with his wheat and his bacon, command, during the years of warfare, that peculiarly safe Southern market where local competition was forbidden by the limitations of slavery as an industrial system.

But the growth of the commerce between the East and the West was fast making amends for the temporary stoppage of the old commerce between the North and the South. The railroads west of the Mississippi, including those of the Pacific states, had, indeed, but little more than three thousand miles of track in operation, but of the total of thirty-five thousand miles in the whole country all but nine thousand belonged to the states north of the Potomac and west of the Mississippi. From 1860 to 1865 the gain had been about five thousand miles. There had been a considerable increase in the number of locomotives. The Baldwin works alone had turned out ninety-five in 1862, ninety-six in 1863, one hundred and thirty in 1864. The old West was by this time joined to the East by several lines of railroad, and also by the Erie Canal. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, designed to carry out Washington’s plan of connecting the waters of the Potomac and the Ohio, had got no farther than the base of the Alleghenies, which it reached in 1850; and Calhoun’s scheme for a railroad to connect Charleston with the West and Northwest had also come to nothing. But by the middle of the century three important railroads, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central, had passed beyond the Appalachian ridges. Chicago had been reached in 1852. In 1859, the Hannibal and St. Joseph touched the Missouri River.

These early east - and - west railroads were, it is true, not to be compared with the great systems of to-day. The rate of speed was far lower than at present. The tracks, with their iron rails, could not sustain such heavy coaches as are now commonly employed. In 1856, Theodore L. Woodruff had patented a nightcar with the essential features of the sleeping-cars now in use, but his idea was not yet so thoroughly developed nor so widely adopted as to render night-travel common. The longest trains were of ten or twelve coaches. The charges for passengers were much higher than at present, the freight charges several times as high. It cost 26.2 cents in 1865 to bring a bushel of wheat from Chicago to New York. The average charge for carrying one ton of freight one mile was 3.31 cents, as against the fraction of a cent per tonmile which is now the usual rate. Nevertheless, inadequate as the means of transportation seem, judged by the standards of a later day, they had already, before the war began, diverted to Eastern markets many products of the West, which in the first half of the century had gone mainly down the rivers to the cotton states and the ports of the Gulf of Mexico. During the war, moreover, the soldiers may be said to have taken the place of the Southern planters as customers of the Western farmer. No doubt, the armies themselves absorbed an energy which would otherwise have gone to the production of wealth in both the sections; but in the North the productive energy left behind the armies was stimulated at once by new demands and by new opportunities. There was, too, a constant reënforcement from other countries. Immigration was more than making good the actual losses in the war. The number of immigrants had, indeed, fallen heavily during the first year, but by the third year the stream had regained its old volume. It continued to gain in 1864, and in 1865 it reached the grand total of 287,397. Of these newcomers, the larger proportion was still drawn from northern and central Europe. The United Kingdom alone contributed nearly 45 per cent, and Germany 34 per cent. The countries of Southern Europe furnished only 1.5 per cent; China and other Asiatic countries,less than3 percent. Counting the 7.5 per cent from British North America, more than nine-tenths of the whole was of the stocks to which the mass of our native population belonged. The productive labor of the North, thus constantly increased from foreign sources, was also reënforced by the entrance of women into various fields of industry, where they have held their places ever since.

The figures show that the industry of the North and West was not misapplied or ineffective. Live stock, for example, had decreased, from the extraordinary consumption of the armies in the field; but sheep had grown no fewer, and the wool crop steadily increased to meet the heavier demand caused by the scarcity of cotton. In 1865, it was actually one third greater than in 1860. This might, of course, be taken as a sign of delay in the westward progress of agriculture, since the shepherd is often merely the forerunner of the farmer; but even in agriculture the coming into general use of the mowing machine, the buggy plow, and other labor-saving devices had largely compensated for the withdrawal of men’s hands from the plowshare and the pruninghook to take up the sword. At the London Exhibition of 1862, American mowers surpassed all competition. The war had, it is true, seriously delayed the benefits of the generous homestead law of 1862. From January, 1863, when it went into effect, to the end of 1865, less than three and onehalf millions of acres had been occupied under its provisions, and it was not until the years of peace that the wise bounty of the government became fully effective. But the regions already won to agriculture increased their output of wheat from 170 million bushels (round numbers) in 1860 to 190 millions in 1863. The crops of the next two years showed a falling off, but this was attributable partly to bad weather and partly to the disturbed condition of industry in the border states. The corn crops, though they did not reach the extraordinary level of 1860, showed, after the first drop, a marked and steady rise, and in 1865, an exceptionally good year for corn, there was a gain of 170 million bushels over 1864.

Even in manufactures, there were gains on many lines to set against such heavy losses as befell the cotton mills and other establishments which were left either without their raw material or without a market. The output of pig iron, for example, which dropped nearly two hundred thousand tons in 1861, had risen by 1863 above the total of 1860, and the next year we were making many thousand tons more than when the war began. In the oil country below Lake Erie a new industry had been created. The output of crude petroleum had grown from half a million barrels in 1860 to nearly two and a half millions in 1865. The gain in woolen manufactures was extraordinary; thousands of garments formerly made of cotton must now, of necessity, be made of wool. There was an increase also in the manufacture of watches and jewelry, of malt liquors, of sewing machines, of hempen products, of paper.

There was a still more remarkable gain in the output of our mines. The story of the great Comstock Lode in Nevada, like the trade between the Union and the Confederate lines, illustrates the persistence of the struggle for wealth, even in the midst of warfare. The Comstock miners, who in 1859 had sent back to civilization only thirty thousand dollars in gold, sent three and a half millions in gold and silver during the first year of the war. In 1864, they contributed sixteen millions to the world’s stock of the precious metals. The mines of California were far from exhausted,and Colorado’s scarcely touched. The output of gold and silver from the principal mines of the whole country was in round numbers forty-three and one third millions in 1861, sixty-three millions in 1864, seventy millions in 1865. In all, nearly three hundred millions in gold and silver had been mined while the armies were in the field.

What was true of the great industries of agriculture, manufacturing, and mining, the main sources of the power of the North and of the whole Republic, was true also, if we may trust what evidence we possess, of other industrial activities. In all occupations money wages were high after 1862, but when allowance is made for the inflated state of the currency and the high prices of most commodities, it does not appear that the wage-earning classes had any good reason to think themselves better off than they would have been in peace. There were, however, certain trades and occupations that flourished by reason of the war. In the great cities, and even with the armies in the field, caterers to the immediate wants and to the pleasures of their fellows found their services in great demand. As always in such times, the venders of trifles, the purveyors of light amusements, were thriving. The theatres and music halls of New York were crowded nightly. Companies of barnstormers, some of them not without their struggling histrionic geniuses, followed in the wake of the grand divisions. There was an excellent market for novels and other forms of light literature. Panders to worse appetites than these were likewise stimulated to an extraordinary thrift; for wars and pestilences invariably lessen the sense of responsibility in the weaker sorts of men. Gaming, drunkenness, and licentiousness increased. The worse quarters of our cities, fed with the less desirable of the immigrants, were by this time well recognized factors in municipal politics. The draft riots in New York served, for one thing, to exhibit the foulness and danger which already underlay the city’s wealth. Beleaguered Richmond, even in the days when, hope abandoned, the men in the Petersburg trenches came to the very climax of their long devotion, was, according to Southern authorities, a resort for the vilest of mankind; humanity, whose noblest, sublimest aspect was exhibited in that last ditch which Lee’s gray “miserables ” were set to die in, was at its foulest in the city they defended. There, fortunes were snatched from the wreck and débris of the falling Confederacy, as in the North larger fortunes were filched by contractors and adventurers from the abundant stores which the industry and sacrifice of patriots on the farms and in the workshops provided for the patriots in the field.

Surprising as it seems, the statistics indicate that the total and the per capita wealth of the North had actually increased during the war. The real and personal property in the loyal states in 1863 was estimated by one authority at nearly 14 billions, as against less than ten and threefourths billions in 1860. The fluctuations of the currency and the meagerness of the data impair the value of the estimate; but the general inference is not improbably correct. The war had retarded, but it had not stopped, the material progress of the North. The pace of our advance was slower, but we did not halt; we did not, on the whole, lose ground.

Nor were the less material activities relinquished. The business of the post office, sometimes taken to gauge the intellectual life of a community, had not declined. The receipts, which were eight and one half millions (round numbers) in 1860, were more than eleven millions in 1863, fourteen and one half millions in 1865. The schools did not close their doors. On the contrary, war, though it loosed the reins to all the viler greeds and appetites, seemed to have stimulated the desire for education among the young. What figures we have concerning the public schools indicate that the number of teachers and scholars in the loyal states had increased, and increased steadily, from 1861 to 1865. As to the colleges their gain was remarkable. Harvard, from whose four hundred and twenty students in 1861 a good proportion had departed for the battle-fields, enrolled almost twice as many in 1864. The other Eastern colleges, for the most part, also grew. The young universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, scarcely started on their careers in 1861, had in 1864 passed Harvard and Princeton, respectively, in their enrollments. Coeducation, the higher training of women, and the training of men for the professions, particularly the law, had won in these years a consideration denied to them in less harassed times.

The newspaper press, then, perhaps, a better sign of intellectual life than now, although, judging by our present standard of reportorial enterprise, it made but little of the opportunities the battles gave, had continued to widen its range. The number of newspapers had multiplied rapidly, but the greater journals had more than held their own. The New York Tribune was still easily the most influential of all. In spite of Greeley’s unworldliness and his admirable refusal to imitate the methods of Bennett, whose Herald was the forerunner of the merely commercial newspaper enterprises of today, the Tribune had in 1863 a total circulation, daily, semi-weekly, and weekly, of two hundred and fifteen thousand copies; and of this nearly three fourths belonged to the weekly, always the most important means of moulding public opinion. These figures were bettered in 1865. Meanwhile, however, the Herald’s circulation had probably grown faster than the Tribune’s. The interchange of news and of opinion was easier and fuller than ever before. In that sort of intellectual life there had been a steady progress.

But so much could not be said of literature and the arts. The New England Renaissance, to use the phrase of a recent historian of American letters, was practically ended. Emerson, Hawthorne,Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and even Bryant, were still alive, still writing; Lowell, indeed, was still to make, in the Commemoration Ode, his best attempt in poetry. But the best work of all these men was, as a rule, finished; and no other writers of comparable gifts succeeded. Lowell’s and Whitman’s verses, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic, were, in truth, the only poetry inspired by the war at all worthy of the theme. In the conquered South there were no winged minds that could take refuge, as Goethe and Schiller did when France ruled the land and England the sea, in the kingdom of the air.²

There had been, however, a great intellectual gain in America from the bitter but successful struggle; a noble use in our adversity. We had gained a better estimate of ourselves, and a juster view of “abroad.” The gain was intangible and hard to define, but none the less real and important. It is perhaps best displayed in the proud and swelling music of Lowell’s Ode, best explained in his essay “ On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners.” We seemed to have made good somehow, by actual warfare among ourselves, Emerson’s earlier declaration of our intellectual independence. It was not merely that we had proved our case as a nation: that Freeman, the English historian, having begun to write a history of Federal government from the formation of the Achaian League “ to the disruption of the United States of America,” had now to set a different limit to his enterprise. A better sign of our true achievement was the famous retraction of Punch at Lincoln’s bier. We could no longer seem, to foreigners or to ourselves, a nation of shop-keepers. By courage and endurance, by a high quarrel, recklessly pursued, we had won a right to partake of whatever nobleness and dignity there was in the world. The test of war, by making us surer of ourselves, had enabled us to take a surer tone with older civilizations. It had given us a better mien and poise, and freed us from provincialism as nothing else could. We had never, it is true, ceased entirely to share in the culture of England. Guided by a few students like Cogswell and Everett and Bancroft, our Eastern colleges had also, several decades before the war, come into touch with German scholarship, — doubtless the most potent here of all the intellectual influences that have spread to us from the continent of Europe. But of all these things we were now made free as we had not been before, because we were ourselves no longer the untried experiment, the unknown quantity, we had been. Intellectually, as well as diplomatically, we stood upright at last, and faced the world.

And we faced it “with a light scorn.” If one should attempt to put into a single phrase the attitude of the Republic toward the Powers,Russia alone excepted,this of Lowell’s might be the best. To England and France, especially, we turned as a man that has been hard beset, but has come out victorious, turns to the sarcastic spectator who has aided and encouraged the adversary in every way he dared. France had gone far to wipe out the happier memories of former times; England had well nigh justified the unfortunate teaching of our school historians and our Fourth-of-July orators.

The Emperor of the French had seen in our perplexity, our struggle for national existence, nothing better than an opportunity for a trial of that fantastic scheme of a Central American Empire which he had matured in the years of his wanderings and written out while a prisoner at Ham. It was no fault of his that Maximilian, seated on his heaving throne in Mexico, was not already master of all that lay to the south of us, well-nigh to the equator. Napoleon had not even yet relinquished altogether his dream of a great Central American Metropolis, guarding the entrance of that canal which for three hundred years had fascinated such minds as his, and dominating the commerce of two oceans. Our Department of State had wisely forborne to treat Maximilian’s invasion of Mexico as the contemptuous infringement of our Monroe Doctrine which it was, but General Grant had recognized the actual situation when, immediately after the surrender of Lee, he ordered the forces in the Southwest to move down to the borders of Mexico. Thus the end of our civil strife disclosed in the Southwest the same old confrontment of Latin and Teuton which American history had exhibited so many times before.

It also set us free for the debate with our kinsmen of the little isle which had run through so much of our history as a nation. There was the dispute over the Northwestern boundary; there was the old dispute about the fisheries; there was, above all, the gathered resentment of the American people at the ill-will and the sneers of England’s ruling class throughout the war, the aid and refuge she had given to our domestic foes, the privateers, highwaymen of the seas, built in her shipyards to prey upon our commerce. The grudge was deep; it was as just as any grudge we ever had against the mother country; and it was aggravated now by a cause that had often set us against our kin. The discontent of Ireland was in one of its periods of intense bitterness. The Fenians, counting, not without their host, upon the sympathy of Americans, were planning violent measures from this country as a base. It was soon known that discharged soldiers from our armies were acting with them, and it was feared that they might at any time pass across the border into Canada and strike there at the power of England. We were no sooner through with our own long quarrel than we were compelled to take account of this persistent old-world feud.

Turning now to the state of our domestic politics at the end of the war, we find it a time of heavy burdens and extraordinary tasks. Great as our energy had been, well-nigh limitless though our material resources had proved to be, the strain of warfare had unquestionably altered, in many grave respects, the working of our government.

The great and rapid increase of expenses had, of course, made it impossible to pay as we went. Expenditures for military purposes had risen steadily from the beginning. At the end, the treasury was paying out not less than five million dollars a day, or, including the interest on the debt, nearly nineteen hundred millions a year. The total money cost of the war, over and above all ordinary charges on the government, is estimated at three and one fourth billions. That was more than any ten years of warfare had ever cost the people of Great Britain; it was five times as much as ten years of Napoleon’s wars had cost the French. To meet a part of these demands, but mainly to pay the interest on the debt incurred in meeting them, our people had been taxed, after 1862, more heavily than ever before. The internal revenue duties had been raised. A direct tax had been apportioned among the states, and collected from the loyal states. Customs duties also had been raised from time to time, until, in 1865, the average rate was forty-seven and one half per cent, as against nineteen and one half per cent in 1860. It must, however, be admitted that revenue had not been the sole object of these changes in the tariff laws. The Republicans had made it plain, before they came into power, that they were in favor of protection. That had doubtless helped them to carry Pennsylvania, which in the election of 1860 was thought to be a pivotal state. The policy had been adhered to, and the changes in the rates after the war began, though intended to increase the revenues, were also made with an eye to the protection of American industries from foreign competition. It should be remembered, too, that eleven states of the Union, formerly supposed by their public men to contribute more than their share of the revenues, particularly through import duties, were for the most part inaccessible to the tax gatherers during these years.

But taxation alone could not nearly supply the needed revenues. Great sums had been borrowed. The bonded debt in July, 1865, was more than one billion dollars. None of the bonds bore less than five per cent interest. The first to mature would be payable in 1871,the last in 1904. But our entire indebtedness was three times our bonded debt. There were more than half a billion of liabilities not entered in the treasurer’s books at all; and the bulk of the remainder was in outstanding notes. More than a billion of these were ordinary treasury notes, bearing interest at 7.3 per cent, and due in the years 18661868. During the last few months of the war, most of the government’s expenses had been met with half a billion of these “ seven-thirties,” as they were called. But another half billion of our notes were of another sort — a sort entirely unknown to us before the war. In 1862,the government had assumed the questioned right to make its paper promises to pay a legal tender in payment of debts. The legal tenders bore no interest, and they were, like the other notes, for the time being irredeemable, for the government, as well as the banks, had long since suspended specie payments. Their value in specie was but little more than fifty per cent of their face value.

Coin was for the most part in hiding, or driven out of the country. To take the place of it, and of the old state-bank currency, but more particularly to insure a demand for the bonds, still another form of currency had been devised. Besides the legal tenders and the other forms of treasury paper, there were the notes of the national banks. By July, 1865, fifteen hundred banks had been established under the law of 1862. They had taken, in all, bonds to the face value of 276 million dollars, and on that basis had issued notes to the face value of 171 millions. The total of paper of all descriptions guaranteed by the government was therefore, in round numbers, one and one-half billions, as against a total circulation of 457 millions in 1860, including specie and the notes of the state banks. It is not correct to count all the interestbearing notes as currency, but many of them were used as a medium of exchange.

The setting up of the banks and the resort to legal tenders were doubtless the most important effects of the war in public finance. It would not be extravagant to say that the debt itself was, if one keeps in mind the country’s great resources and the spirit of the people, more important as leading to these two experiments in paper money than it was in its own proper character as a burden on the taxpayers. To handle the debt, and eventually to pay it, was, no doubt, a great task of peace awaiting the government. But to regulate wisely the two new forms of currency was an infinitely more difficult task; and it was precisely the sort of task in which the government of a democracy is least likely to excel.

The task of military and naval disestablishment, demanding though it did good management and economy, was almost entirely executive; it could be safely entrusted to the same hands that had organized the two arms for service in the war. That done, however, and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors returned to industry and the walks of peace, there would remain a task not contemplated in our Constitution, and for which no precedent could be found in our history: the task of bringing the region lately in insurrection back into proper and permanent relations with the loyal states and with the national government. The novelty of the problem was heightened by certain other changes that had come about by reason of the war: changes in the character of the Union, in the relations between the states and the government, in the practice and usage of the government itself.

Of these, the simplest and the most far-reaching were the overthrow of slavery as an institution and the downfall of the theory of the sovereignty of states. The first was of a nature to demand also a change in the written Constitution, and a thirteenth amendment, prohibiting slavery or involuntary servitude, except for crime, and granting Congress the power to enforce the prohibition by appropriate laws, had passed the two houses and been submitted to the states before the death of Lincoln.

Of the second, however, it would be too much to say positively that it was an actual change in our constitution of government. It was rather the decision by force of arms of a controversy about the Constitution, whose merits remained as they were. It was still a debatable question whether we had all along been a nation, and had maintained our nationality by force of arms, or whether the war had changed us from a league or confederacy of essentially independent and sovereign states into a true nation. But on either theory the practical outcome was the same. In effect, Marshall’s and Webster’s and Story’s and Lincoln’s view of the Constitution had prevailed over the view of Davis and Calhoun and Jefferson. We were now for all time a nation and not a league. There was, however, no need to change a single word of the Constitution in order to record the outcome or to make it plain. It was enough that an attempt to assert the sovereignty of states had been made, and that it had been put down. There seems to be no probability, no real danger, that the extreme state-rights theory will ever again control the course of any great number of Americans, or that any dissatisfied state or section will ever again allege the right of secession. The right of revolution is the only ground on which an effort to break up the Union would now be justified; and that right Americans share with the citizens or subjects of other nations.

As to the states which had not attempted secession, it was not at first held,and probably jurists would not now maintain, that they had lost through the war any of those rights and privileges which, even under the national theory, they had possessed before. In practice, however, they had lost something. They had lost prestige. The national government had got in the habit, so to speak, of disregarding certain doubts about its powers which until these years it had never once ignored. In order to set up the national banks, for instance, and to make room for their notes, it had taxed out of existence the notes of the state banks. It had, avowedly, taxed to destroy. It had also gone farther than ever before when it organized a national volunteer force of its own, and when it asserted a practically complete control over the militia of the states. The assumption of a right to make its notes a legal tender, though not an invasion of any right of the states, to which, indeed, that particular right was expressly denied, was, nevertheless, the taking on of a national and centralized character clearly antagonistic to former contentions of the states.

These changes of usage, though the specific acts were justified on various specific grounds, had all in a general way been based on the plea of necessity in time of war. They were, therefore, now that peace was come, open to question, as the right of a state to secede, or the right of the national government to resist secession, was not. But the student of American politics since the great war must begin with the understanding, not merely that the states were no longer sovereign in the sense in which the Southerners had used that word, but that they had also, in practice, lost to the general government certain important powers and functions which, before the war, it would not lightly have assumed, and they would not have yielded up without a struggle.

Apart from the relation of the Union to the states, other important changes had also come about: changes in the usage of the national government itself, without reference to the states. The relations of the different departments among themselves had been altered. Of this class of changes, much the most important was the increase in the power of the executive. War, of course, demands a strong and single head; and that demand, inconsistent as it might seem with our whole theory of government, had been compelling and effective. The legislature and the courts had been forced into the background. The executive department had profited by the character of the tasks presented by the times. It had profited also by a clear advantage of personnel; for the President, himself the foremost man of his time, had shown a tact and a willingness, not always found in strong men, to bring and keep strong men about him.

Lincoln was, unquestionably, of an opportunist mind; that disposition consorted with his swift and shrewd apprehensions, and with his profound sense of occasions. Seeing, at the outset, the necessity of quick and vigorous measures, he had not waited for authority from Congress or the sanction of the courts. He had begun by calling out the militia on his own sole initiative. Before Congress could formally declare a war, he had proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports, — a measure whose practical wisdom has been questioned; Congress, if it had been called together and consulted, might very well have preferred a different course. It was the President also who had called out and organized the volunteer army. It was the President who had first suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and proclaimed martial law. Congress, when it met, indemnified him fully; but the power he had thus assumed was open to question. At any other time, the legislature would, most likely, have disputed it. In practice, it exalted the executive at the expense of the judiciary also; the functions of the military were thus extended to embrace duties which in ordinary times are undertaken only by the courts of law. Even in regions where the civil courts were in full operation, there were arbitrary arrests, followed by military trials. The prisons were crowded, and to the machinery of military government Lincoln added a commission to look into the cases of prisoners awaiting trial, with authority to release whomsoever they thought fit. In the border states, and even in certain quarters of the North, lives and property were thus dependent on the hated processes of military justice. It was the President, too, acting in his sole capacity of military commander, who had done what he himself had held could not be done by any other department of the government, nor by all the departments together, including the executive: he had confiscated the immense property in slaves of those who were in insurrection against the government. Destroying, with a stroke of his pen, values to the extent of two and one half billions of dollars, and overthrowing the industrial system of eleven states, he had thereby given to the war a new character and a new object.

True, Lincoln had in all these things been mindful of public opinion, which he, better than any other of our public men, knew how both to lead and to obey. True, also, Congress had almost uniformly countenanced his assumptions of power, either by silent acquiescence or by positive enactments. The Supreme Court as he found it when he went into office was not so pliant. The aged Taney had taken issue with him when a writ of habeas corpus came up to him from a region where the privilege had been suspended. But it was an aged court, as well as an aged chief justice; when Campbell, the Alabamian, the youngest of the justices, resigned in 1861, the average age of the remaining justices was over seventy. In all, there were five vacancies while Lincoln was in office. He had thus an opportunity to carry out that very plan of getting the Dred Scott decision reversed which he had announced so soon as it was handed down. He filled every place with a man of his own way of thinking. The last change he made was to put Secretary Chase, next to himself the ablest assailant of the court’s old positions, author of the Legal Tender Act, and founder of the national banks, in Taney’s seat. Thus transformed, the court was perhaps more strongly inclined than ever before in its history to a thoroughly national interpretation of the Constitution. It was more disposed than ever before to give, both to the President and to Congress, the benefit of any doubts concerning their rights and powers.

Such, in fact, was the disposition in all three departments of the government; for in all three Republicans controlled. Since the election of 1860, the party had only once felt itself in any real danger of defeat. That was in the early summer of 1864. But the opposition had promptly thrown away whatever chance it had. The Democratic national convention had declared the war to be a failure, and Sherman at Atlanta, Farragut at Mobile, Sheridan in the valley of the Shenandoah, had answered the charge with victories. The Democrats, going before the people as a party of mere protest, were met and crushed with the plain fact of military success. The Republicans, notwithstanding a moderate reaction in certain quarters, had swept the country. With more than two thirds of both houses of Congress, they had not merely the control of all ordinary legislation; they could also pass and submit to the people amendments to the Constitution. They held, too, all appointive offices of any consequence, for the spoils system prevailed everywhere. In the first few weeks of his first administration, Lincoln had removed from office more men than Andrew Jackson had removed in the entire eight years of his reign. “ I am,” Lincoln had said, “like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house that he cannot stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.” In nearly all the Northern states, also, the Republican party was in power. Only New Jersey had a Democratic governor; only New Jersey and Delaware, Democratic legislatures.

And the Republican party had been in power long enough to acquire a habit of dominance. Its record, almost from the beginning, was a record of practical achievement, not of exile and devotion. Its original opportunist bent was now confirmed by a long practice of expedients, its strong-government creed was strengthened by the logic of events. A time of war is no time for doctrinaires. Hamilton himself, who professed no faith in the people, had never been more masterful in his actual course than Lincoln, the patient student of public opinion. To give more power to the central government was the policy of the Republicans when, under the name of anti-Nebraska men, they first appeared as a party. This they had done; and their work had reacted upon them to the strengthening of their first impulse. They were farther advanced toward paternalism than either the Federalists or the Whigs had ever been.

On the other hand, the plight of the Democrats was pitiable. The immigration from Europe of classes naturally in sympathy with their tenets had, it is true, enabled them to keep control of certain cities of the North, but in most other quarters they were not even an effective opposition. In leaders also they were sadly lacking. Since the death of Douglas, no man had arisen among them with any gift of leadership to be compared to his. Vallandigham, of Ohio, who was at least courageous and conspicuous, could never be commended to a majority in the North. Showing plainly his sympathy with the Southerners, he had been sent into exile within the lines of the Confederacy. The two Bayards in Delaware, Pendleton in Ohio, McDonald in Indiana, and Seymour in New York, were all men of character, ability, and training. All were fit for leadership, but none of them seemed to have the instinct and the will to lead. The party was everywhere in an attitude painfully defensive. Not merely defeated, but proved to have been wrong in its contention about the war, the party was left without a policy or an issue. Thousands of Democrats were serving bravely in the armies and on the men-of-war, but the party itself rested under a damning suspicion of lukewarmness, if not of something worse. In many parts of the North, to be a Democrat was to be a Copperhead, and to be a Copperhead was little better than it was to be a Unionist in the South. Unless the Southern states should be reorganized, nothing short of a political revolution in the North could give the party the presidency or a majority in either house of Congress. Not even that, without the aid of time and death, could give it the control of the Supreme Court; and this was sure to be of great importance, for there were many new and difficult Constitutional questions awaiting decision.

But for eight months from the death of Lincoln Congress was not to meet, and no case involving clearly any of the new questions was yet before the court. From the long obsequies of the murdered President, the people, anxious and expectant, turned to his successor. It was he and those about him who had the initiative with the fresh problems of peace. There were many things which the executive must do, and there were many more a strong executive might do.

Assuming now, in a way the least auspicious, the duties of the hardest office in the world, Johnson had the wisdom to keep about him the councilors of Lincoln. The cabinet was not changed. Seward, indeed, was for some weeks absent from its meetings. He was himself helpless from accidental hurts and the wounds which he had taken from his would-be assassin; and a series of domestic tragedies which followed turned the “Red House” into a house of mourning. Nevertheless, Seward is by many supposed to have wielded over Johnson an extraordinary influence; to have found in this administration the opportunity to lead which he had dreamed was his when Lincoln first called him into office. The best politician of all the surviving antislavery men, because he was the most of a man of the world, and had the least of the rigidity of the reformer, Seward was, no doubt, of greater service to his chief than any of his fellows; but it does not appear that he was in fact responsible for any policy of Johnson’s, apart from foreign affairs. The testimony of the persons closest to Johnson, and a careful study of his own record and utterances, fail to bear out the notion that he began with one Southern policy and that Seward persuaded him into another. What inconsistencies there were in his course were by no means inconsistent with his own character, and they were not unnatural responses to events.

Hugh McCulloch, of Indiana, but recently promoted from his post of comptroller of the currency, where he had organized the system of national banks, to Chase’s place in the Cabinet, which for some months had been held by Fessenden, of Maine, has probably a better claim than Seward to be considered the originator of a domestic policy. The best type of the business man in politics, sagacious, honest, and blessed with a peculiarly amiable temper, he addressed himself to the work of his department with an admirable singleness of purpose. His reports were not political documents, but candid, sound discussions of actual problems in finance. In that character they are not unworthy of comparison with the famous contemporary budget speeches of Gladstone. On one occasion, in fact, the English Chancellor, speaking in the House of Commons, praised the American secretary as an “able and enlightened minister of finance.” With unusual simplicity and force McCulloch presented to his countrymen those considerations of duty and expediency which make against the arguments for shifting on, from one generation to another, the burden of a debt. And the people showed at first a good readiness to accept a fair part of the burden. To the secretary’s announcement of the purpose to pay the debt in coin or its equivalent there arose at first no strong opposition. Within two years, he could report that the principal was reduced by 250 millions.

On the necessity of an early return to specie payments and a prompt contraction of the currency, the secretary was no less clear. The legal tenders he strongly disliked. Both to them and to those treasury notes which had not the quality of a legal tender he preferred the issue of the national banks. His policy, therefore, was to retire the legal tenders as rapidly as it could be done without disturbing business, to fund the other treasury notes, and to bring about an increase of the bank-notes; for he held, with most economists, that a forced loan is pretty sure to prove in the long run the costliest of all. But the appetite of the masses for cheap money was already aroused. The secretary soon discovered, perhaps to his surprise, that the legal tenders or “greenbacks ” were better liked than any other form of currency. Congress at first heartily endorsed his policy. But when it came to the point of actual legislation a dangerous and unsound public opinion began to take hold of the lawmakers. At the end of 1865, the House of Representatives voted almost unanimously in favor of retiring the legal tenders; but the act of April, 1866, instead of giving the secretary full power to carry out this plan, merely authorized him to retire ten millions of the greenbacks within six months, and not more than four millions a month thereafter. In February, 1867, he was directed to discontinue his operations. A decade was to pass, and the money question to go through various phases, before the country could be brought back to the sound policy of Mr. McCulloch.

Besides Seward, there was left in the Cabinet but one other of the more distinguished figures of the Lincoln group. Harlan, of the Interior Department, Dennison, the Postmaster-General, and Speed, the Attorney-General, were comparative newcomers. Welles, of the navy department, had served throughout the war, and he was a competent official. His own diary and reminiscences will certainly tend to strengthen his already good reputation. But in the popular estimation he did not rank with Chase and Seward and Stanton. Seward and Chase apart, only Sumner in the Senate and Stevens in the House had rivaled Stanton in the parts they played at Washington while the armies were in the field. It was left for him to hold a place still more conspicuous in the public eye than that he held under Lincoln. But even the light that beat upon him then, fierce as it was, has not made it easy to pronounce a judgment on the man. Judged by his work in war time alone, it is easy to say of him that he was a great war minister, — ardent, energetic, strong. He did well the vast amount of work he had to do. If, however, one seeks to ascertain what sort of a man he was inside, Stanton is a baffling character. Subject to the most violent prejudices, swayed by elemental passions, often brutal with anger, sometimes guilty of surprising weakness, now and then exhibiting a religious, even a fanatical fervor, he was, nevertheless, peculiarly secretive. None of his contemporaries has hit upon a phrase to make us understand him. There were particular acts, such as the arrest of Colonel Stone, which puzzled them as they puzzle now a later generation. It seems probable that in his later years he was suffering from the strain and stress of his war-time labors and experiences to such an extent that he was sometimes not altogether himself.

His immediate task of disestablishment was, however, admirably discharged. The last of the Confederate armies, Kirby Smith’s, in Texas, was not surrendered until May 28; and even then the general-in-chief seems to have had more fighting in mind, for he had ordered Sheridan with a strong force to the Mexican border. Apparently, Grant thought that war with Maximilian’s government was inevitable, and he strongly urged upon his chief the plan of forcing the hands of Maximilian and his imperial backer by a show of force. Quite probably he remembered how we made a beginning of that other war in the Southwest, in which his own spurs had been won. But Seward was firm that diplomacy would be sufficient, and the soldiers turned their faces homeward. Even before the surrender of Kirby Smith, the great armies of the East and the West, Grant’s and Sherman’s, were united at Washington, and for the first and last time paraded in honor of the Union and in celebration of their victories.

The parade was Stanton’s idea. The unfriendly greeting between him and Sherman is perhaps the best-remembered incident of the occasion he had prepared; for when Sherman appeared on the reviewing stand the two men did not shake hands, and the quarrel soon attained a wide celebrity. But a single untoward incident could not mar so great and joyous an occasion. For the spectacle was one of the noblest in all our history, — which is, it must be admitted, somewhat chary of spectacles. On May 23, the army of the Potomac, represented by one hundred and fifty-one regiments of infantry, thirtysix of cavalry, and twenty-two batteries, marched down the spacious avenue leading from the Capitol to the White House, passing there before the President. The next day, the armies of Tennessee and Georgia, Sherman’s two wings, followed the same route. An intelligent spectator noted that the men of the East and of the West were quite unlike in certain points of bearing and appearance. But what most impressed him was the youthfulness of the entire mass of soldiery. Grant himself was but forty-three. Many general officers were under thirty. Comparatively few of the men in the ranks were out of their twenties. They were more like college students than the sort of figures one has in mind when one speaks of veterans. It was the youth of the Republic who had saved it.

In a little more than two months three fourths of all the volunteer soldiers of the Union were mustered out. By the middle of November, less than 300,000 were in the service. When the new year began, the number was below 100,000. By the autumn of 1867, all were discharged. Meanwhile, the regular army had been reduced to a peace footing of less than 40,000, and the disbursements for military purchases had fallen from more than half a billion dollars to 42 millions. There were grave fears of the effect upon society of so sudden a disbandment of the armies. Men called to mind the restlessness of the youth of France when Napoleon ceased to provide them wars. There was, it is true, a very slight increase of crime; but none of the direr prophecies came true. The million found their places without disturbance to industry or to social order. Thousands of them turned westward, as did other thousands in the South. A year after the fighting ceased only 127,000 of the veterans were drawing pensions from the government. The total expenditure for pensions for the fiscal year ending in July, 1866, was less than 12 million dollars. The first post of the Grand Army of the Republic was organized at Decatur, Illinois, in April of 1866, and the order grew very rapidly until, in 1892, it reached its highest enrollment of 406,000. In later years, fewer and fewer recruits have joined its thinning ranks.

The naval establishment was reduced almost as rapidly. At the end of a year there were left in the service only one hundred and fifteen vessels of war, and expenses had been cut down by almost two thirds. At the end of five years the number of vessels was but forty-five, and the annual expenditures for this arm were but a sixth part of the total for 1865. The navy of the Civil War, quickly created, passed as quickly out of existence; and it was several decades before another began to be created.

These were,perhaps, the principal facts of American life at the end of the war, and these the first salient happenings of peace. They pertain, however, wholly to the stronger and now victorious half of the Union. Across the long-contested border, all was sadly different. But thither, — to the beaten, ruined South,—the minds of men turned first from that dread climax of the years of carnage which Booth, the half-crazed murderer, had made. There, as the tidings passed from army to army, subduing into sadness the triumphant soldiers of the Union, they fell too on the listless ears of three hundred thousand men in gray. The army of Northern Virginia was indeed no more. The thinned and weary regiments were forever disbanded. Obedient to the last and wisest order of their great commander, putting aside, as he had put aside, the instant impulse to become guerrillas, Lee’s matchless soldiers were wandering back over a dozen states to homes they must build up again from ruins or from ashes. Lee himself, who in that final victory over his own spirit had done his conquerors a service hardly less than that he rendered to his followers, had ridden away on Traveller, and disappeared into the stately silence which he never broke. The honor and love of every heart in the South followed him to the end. The passing years, and a calmer mood, have won him the respect of his adversaries and even, for his last wise word, their gratitude.

In central North Carolina, Joseph E. Johnston, with thirty thousand men, still faced Sherman, with three times as many. Jefferson Davis, with the remnants of the Confederate civil establishment, was hurrying farther southward, and still, unlike Lee, doggedly minded to keep up a hopeless resistance. In Alabama, the Union cavalry general, Wilson, having occupied Montgomery, was now pursuing Forrest eastward, and in a direction that must soon bring the fleeing Davis within his lines. The garrison of Mobile was at length surrendered to Canby. Smaller forces of Confederates were scattered over the several military departments from Georgia to Arkansas. Far away in Texas, Kirby Smith, with eighteen thousand, cut off entirely from the eastern armies, was ready either to keep on fighting or to fall back into Mexico. But Lee had spoken not merely for his own army, but for all Confederate soldiers everywhere.

Along the coasts of the dying Confederacy, watching the mouth of all its harbors, making their way up and down its rivers, or searching the seas for the last of its privateers, seven hundred vessels, manned by sixty thousand officers and seamen, floated the colors of the Union. The North Atlantic squadron was in the River James; these, perhaps, were the first of the warships to half-mast their flags. The South Atlantic squadron was off the coast of South Carolina. The Gulf squadron was at Mobile. The Confederate flag was almost entirely vanished from the seas. It still floated, however, from the mast of the Stonewall, somewhere in the West Indies; and on the other side of the continent the Shenandoah had borne it into the North Pacific and beyond the Arctic circle. In those far waters the tidings from Appomattox and from Washington could not reach her until the winter should drive her southward to find a harbor, and the little cruiser, faithful to her errand and her lost cause, plied her task of destruction among the whalers while the final scenes of the long drama were enacted; while the armies of the Union marched in bright parade at Washington, and the armies of the South broke ranks and disappeared. The sweet spring, which brought to all the soldiers and sailors of the Union the pride of victory and happy thoughts of rest and homecoming, was, doubtless, to the soldiers in gray, more bitter than the winter of their long sacrifice. With minds too dull and hearts too sore to trust the words of patience and well-wishing that Lincoln was forever speaking while he lived, they could not know the meaning, to them and theirs, of his mad taking off. Only the wisest of them understood. Some there were who welcomed the news with curses. Many, no doubt, would have been glad to share with the crew of the little Shenandoah their ignorance that the end was come.

A little while the armies paused and rested on their arms. A little while the squadrons rode idly at anchor. A little while the workers in the cities and the fields, the cowboys on the Western plains, the miners of California and Nevada, ceased from their labors. For one brief moment the whole Republic paused in mid career: as a great vessel, shaken with some sudden jar from her deep inward parts, stills her vast machinery and pauses, trembling, in mid ocean; then once again, steadfast, undiverted, holds on in her long course.