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THE CLANSMAN
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[Illustration: THE REIGN OF THE KLAN]
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THE CLANSMAN
An Historical Romance
of the Ku Klux Klan
By
THOMAS DIXON
Author Of
The Leopard's Spots, Comrades, Etc.
Illustrated With Scenes From The Photo-Play
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Produced And Copyrighted By
Epoch Producing Corporation
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers :: New York
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Copyright, 1905
BY THOMAS DIXON, JR.
The Country Life Press, Garden City, N. Y.
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TO THE MEMORY OF
A SCOTCH-IRISH LEADER OF THE SOUTH
MY UNCLE, COLONEL LEROY MCAFEE
GRAND TITAN OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE
KU KLUX KLAN
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TO THE READER
"The Clansman" is the second book of a series of historical novels planned
on the Race Conflict. "The Leopard's Spots" was the statement in
historical outline of the conditions from the enfranchisement of the negro
to his disfranchisement.
"The Clansman" develops the true story of the "Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy,"
which overturned the Reconstruction regime.
The organization was governed by the Grand Wizard Commander-in-Chief, who
lived at Memphis, Tennessee. The Grand Dragon commanded a State, the Grand
Titan a Congressional District, the Grand Giant a County, and the Grand
Cyclops a Township Den. The twelve volumes of Government reports on the
famous Klan refer chiefly to events which occurred after 1870, the date of
its dissolution.
The chaos of blind passion that followed Lincoln's assassination is
inconceivable to-day. The revolution it produced in our Government, and
the bold attempt of Thaddeus Stevens to Africanize ten great States of the
American Union, read now like tales from "The Arabian Nights."
I have sought to preserve in this romance both the letter and the spirit
of this remarkable period. The men who enact the drama of fierce revenge
into which I have woven a double love story are historical figures. I have
merely changed their names without taking a liberty with any essential
historic fact.
In the darkest hour of the life of the South, when her wounded people lay
helpless amid rags and ashes under the beak and talon of the Vulture,
suddenly from the mists of the mountains appeared a white cloud the size
of a man's hand. It grew until its mantle of mystery enfolded the stricken
earth and sky. An "Invisible Empire" had risen from the field of Death and
challenged the Visible to mortal combat.
How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old
Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds,
daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon's death, and saved the life of a
people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the
Aryan race.
Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Dixondale, Va.
December 14, 1904.
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CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE ASSASSINATION
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Bruised Reed 3
II. The Great Heart 19
III. The Man of War 33
IV. A Clash of Giants 38
IV. The Battle of Love 56
VI. The Assassination 61
VII. The Frenzy of a Nation 80
BOOK II
THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The First Lady of the Land 90
II. Sweethearts 101
III. The Joy of Living 112
IV. Hidden Treasure 115
V. Across the Chasm 120
VI. The Gauge of Battle 131
VII. A Woman Laughs 136
VIII. A Dream 148
IX. The King Amuses Himself 152
X. Tossed by the Storm 162
XI. The Supreme Test 165
XII. Triumph in Defeat 179
BOOK III
THE REIGN OF TERROR
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Fallen Slaveholder's Mansion 187
II. The Eyes of the Jungle 204
III. Augustus Caesar 209
IV. At the Point of the Bayonet 218
V. Forty Acres and a Mule 235
VI. A Whisper in the Crowd 244
VII. By the Light of a Torch 254
VIII. The Riot in the Master's Hall 263
IX. At Lover's Leap 276
X. A Night Hawk 284
XI. The Beat of a Sparrow's Wing 297
XII. At the Dawn of Day 305
BOOK IV
THE KU KLUX KLAN
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Hunt for the Animal 309
II. The Fiery Cross 318
III. The Parting of the Ways 327
IV. The Banner of the Dragon 337
V. The Reign of the Klan 341
VI. The Counter Stroke 351
VII. The Snare of the Fowler 358
VIII. A Ride for a Life 362
IX. "Vengeance Is Mine" 369
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LEADING CHARACTERS OF THE STORY
Scene: Washington and the Foothills of the Carolinas.
Time: 1865 to 1870.
Ben Cameron Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan
Margaret His Sister
Mrs. Cameron His Mother
Dr. Richard Cameron His Father
Hon. Austin Stoneman Radical Leader of Congress
Phil His Son
Elsie His Daughter
Marion Lenoir Ben's First Love
Mrs. Lenoir Her Mother
Jake A Faithful Man
Silas Lynch A Negro Missionary
Uncle Aleck The Member from Ulster
Cindy His Wife
Colonel Howle A Carpet-bagger
Augustus Caesar Of the Black Guard
Charles Sumner Of Massachusetts
Gen. Benjamin F. Butler Of Fort Fisher
Andrew Johnson The President
U. S. Grant The Commanding General
Abraham Lincoln The Friend of the South
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THE CLANSMAN
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Book I--The Assassination
CHAPTER I
THE BRUISED REED
The fair girl who was playing a banjo and singing to the wounded soldiers
suddenly stopped, and, turning to the surgeon, whispered:
"What's that?"
"It sounds like a mob----"
With a common impulse they moved to the open window of the hospital and
listened.
On the soft spring air came the roar of excited thousands sweeping down
the avenue from the Capitol toward the White House. Above all rang the
cries of struggling newsboys screaming an "Extra." One of them darted
around the corner, his shrill voice quivering with excitement:
"_Extra! Extra! Peace! Victory!_"
Windows were suddenly raised, women thrust their heads out, and others
rushed into the street and crowded around the boy, struggling to get his
papers. He threw them right and left and snatched the money--no one asked
for change. Without ceasing rose his cry:
"_Extra! Peace! Victory! Lee has surrendered!_"
At last the end had come.
The great North, with its millions of sturdy people and their exhaustless
resources, had greeted the first shot on Sumter with contempt and
incredulity. A few regiments went forward for a month's outing to settle
the trouble. The Thirteenth Brooklyn marched gayly Southward on a thirty
days' jaunt, with pieces of rope conspicuously tied to their muskets with
which to bring back each man a Southern prisoner to be led in a noose
through the streets on their early triumphant return! It would be unkind
to tell what became of those ropes when they suddenly started back home
ahead of the scheduled time from the first battle of Bull Run.
People from the South, equally wise, marched gayly North, to whip five
Yankees each before breakfast, and encountered unforeseen difficulties.
Both sides had things to learn, and learned them in a school whose logic
is final--a four years' course in the University of Hell--the scream of
eagles, the howl of wolves, the bay of tigers, the roar of lions--all
locked in Death's embrace, and each mad scene lit by the glare of
volcanoes of savage passions!
But the long agony was over.
The city bells began to ring. The guns of the forts joined the chorus, and
their deep steel throats roared until the earth trembled.
Just across the street a mother who was reading the fateful news turned
and suddenly clasped a boy to her heart, crying for joy. The last draft of
half a million had called for him.
The Capital of the Nation was shaking off the long nightmare of horror and
suspense. More than once the city had shivered at the mercy of those
daring men in gray, and the reveille of their drums had startled even the
President at his desk.
Again and again had the destiny of the Republic hung on the turning of a
hair, and in every crisis, Luck, Fate, God, had tipped the scale for the
Union.
A procession of more than five hundred Confederate deserters, who had
crossed the lines in groups, swung into view, marching past the hospital,
indifferent to the tumult. Only a nominal guard flanked them as they
shuffled along, tired, ragged, and dirty. The gray in their uniforms was
now the colour of clay. Some had on blue pantaloons, some, blue vests,
others blue coats captured on the field of blood. Some had pieces of
carpet, and others old bags around their shoulders. They had been passing
thus for weeks. Nobody paid any attention to them.
"One of the secrets of the surrender!" exclaimed Doctor Barnes. "Mr.
Lincoln has been at the front for the past weeks with offers of peace and
mercy, if they would lay down their arms. The great soul of the President,
even the genius of Lee could not resist. His smile began to melt those
gray ranks as the sun is warming the earth to-day."
"You are a great admirer of the President," said the girl, with a curious
smile.
"Yes, Miss Elsie, and so are all who know him."
She turned from the window without reply. A shadow crossed her face as she
looked past the long rows of cots, on which rested the men in blue, until
her eyes found one on which lay, alone among his enemies, a young
Confederate officer.
The surgeon turned with her toward the man.
"Will he live?" she asked.
"Yes, only to be hung."
"For what?" she cried.
"Sentenced by court-martial as a guerilla. It's a lie, but there's some
powerful hand back of it--some mysterious influence in high authority. The
boy wasn't fully conscious at the trial."
"We must appeal to Mr. Stanton."
"As well appeal to the devil. They say the order came from his office."
"A boy of nineteen!" she exclaimed. "It's a shame. I'm looking for his
mother. You told me to telegraph to Richmond for her."
"Yes, I'll never forget his cries that night, so utterly pitiful and
childlike. I've heard many a cry of pain, but in all my life nothing so
heartbreaking as that boy in fevered delirium talking to his mother. His
voice is one of peculiar tenderness, penetrating and musical. It goes
quivering into your soul, and compels you to listen until you swear it's
your brother or sweetheart or sister or mother calling you. You should
have seen him the day he fell. God of mercies, the pity and the glory of
it!"
[Illustration: "YOUR BROTHER SPRANG FORWARD AND CAUGHT HIM IN HIS ARMS."]
"Phil wrote me that he was a hero and asked me to look after him. Were you
there?"
"Yes, with the battery your brother was supporting. He was the colonel of
a shattered rebel regiment lying just in front of us before Petersburg.
Richmond was doomed, resistance was madness, but there they were, ragged
and half starved, a handful of men, not more than four hundred, but their
bayonets gleamed and flashed in the sunlight. In the face of a murderous
fire he charged and actually drove our men out of an entrenchment. We
concentrated our guns on him as he crouched behind this earthwork. Our own
men lay outside in scores, dead, dying, and wounded. When the fire
slacked, we could hear their cries for water.
"Suddenly this boy sprang on the breastwork. He was dressed in a new gray
colonel's uniform that mother of his, in the pride of her soul, had sent
him.
"He was a handsome figure--tall, slender, straight, a gorgeous yellow sash
tasselled with gold around his waist, his sword flashing in the sun, his
slouch hat cocked on one side and an eagle's feather in it.
"We thought he was going to lead another charge, but just as the battery
was making ready to fire he deliberately walked down the embankment in a
hail of musketry and began to give water to our wounded men.
"Every gun ceased firing, and we watched him. He walked back to the
trench, his naked sword flashed suddenly above that eagle's feather, and
his grizzled ragamuffins sprang forward and charged us like so many
demons.
"There were not more than three hundred of them now, but on they came,
giving that hellish rebel yell at every jump--the cry of the hunter from
the hilltop at the sight of his game! All Southern men are hunters, and
that cry was transformed in war into something unearthly when it came from
a hundred throats in chorus and the game was human.
"Of course, it was madness. We blew them down that hill like chaff before
a hurricane. When the last man had staggered back or fallen, on came this
boy alone, carrying the colours he had snatched from a falling soldier, as
if he were leading a million men to victory.
"A bullet had blown his hat from his head, and we could see the blood
streaming down the side of his face. He charged straight into the jaws of
one of our guns. And then, with a smile on his lips and a dare to death in
his big brown eyes, he rammed that flag into the cannon's mouth, reeled,
and fell! A cheer broke from our men.
"Your brother sprang forward and caught him in his arms, and as we bent
over the unconscious form, he exclaimed: 'My God, doctor, look at him! He
is so much like me I feel as if I had been shot myself!' They were as much
alike as twins--only his hair was darker. I tell you, Miss Elsie, it's a
sin to kill men like that. One such man is worth more to this nation than
every negro that ever set his flat foot on this continent!"
The girl's eyes had grown dim as she listened to the story.
"I will appeal to the President," she said firmly.
"It's the only chance. And just now he is under tremendous pressure. His
friendly order to the Virginia Legislature to return to Richmond, Stanton
forced him to cancel. A master hand has organized a conspiracy in Congress
to crush the President. They curse his policy of mercy as imbecility, and
swear to make the South a second Poland. Their watchwords are vengeance
and confiscation. Four fifths of his party in Congress are in this plot.
The President has less than a dozen real friends in either House on whom
he can depend. They say that Stanton is to be given a free hand, and that
the gallows will be busy. This cancelled order of the President looks like
it."
"I'll try my hand with Mr. Stanton," she said with slow emphasis.
"Good luck, Little Sister--let me know if I can help," the surgeon
answered cheerily as he passed on his round of work.
Elsie Stoneman took her seat beside the cot of the wounded Confederate and
began softly to sing and play.
A little farther along the same row a soldier was dying, a faint choking
just audible in his throat. An attendant sat beside him and would not
leave till the last. The ordinary chat and hum of the ward went on
indifferent to peace, victory, life, or death. Before the finality of the
hospital all other events of earth fade. Some were playing cards or
checkers, some laughing and joking, and others reading.
At the first soft note from the singer the games ceased, and the reader
put down his book.
The banjo had come to Washington with the negroes following the wake of
the army. She had laid aside her guitar and learned to play all the
stirring camp songs of the South. Her voice was low, soothing, and tender.
It held every silent listener in a spell.
As she played and sang the songs the wounded man loved, her eyes lingered
in pity on his sun-bronzed face, pinched and drawn with fever. He was
sleeping the stupid sleep that gives no rest. She could count the
irregular pounding of his heart in the throb of the big vein on his neck.
His lips were dry and burnt, and the little boyish moustache curled upward
from the row of white teeth as if scorched by the fiery breath.
He began to talk in flighty sentences, and she listened--his mother--his
sister--and yes, she was sure as she bent nearer--a little sweetheart who
lived next door. They all had sweethearts--these Southern boys. Again he
was teasing his dog--and then back in battle.
At length he opened his eyes, great dark-brown eyes, unnaturally bright,
with a strange yearning look in their depths as they rested on Elsie. He
tried to smile and feebly said:
"Here's--a--fly--on--my--left--ear--my--guns--can't--somehow--
reach--him--won't--you--"
She sprang forward and brushed the fly away.
Again he opened his eyes.
"Excuse--me--for--asking--but am I alive?"
"Yes, indeed," was the cheerful answer.
"Well, now, then, is this me, or is it not me, or has a cannon shot me, or
has the devil got me?"
"It's you. The cannon didn't shoot you, but three muskets did. The devil
hasn't got you yet, but he will unless you're good."
"I'll be good if you won't leave me----"
Elsie turned her head away smiling, and he went on slowly:
"But I'm dead, I know. I'm sleeping on a cot with a canopy over it. I
ain't hungry any more, and an angel has been hovering over me playing on a
harp of gold----"
"Only a little Yankee girl playing the banjo."
"Can't fool me--I'm in heaven."
"You're in the hospital."
"Funny hospital--look at that harp and that big trumpet hanging close by
it--that's Gabriel's trumpet----"
"No," she laughed. "This is the Patent Office building, that covers two
blocks, now a temporary hospital. There are seventy thousand wounded
soldiers in town, and more coming on every train. The thirty-five
hospitals are overcrowded."
He closed his eyes a moment in silence, and then spoke with a feeble
tremor:
"I'm afraid you don't know who I am--I can't impose on you--I'm a
rebel----"
"Yes, I know. You are Colonel Ben Cameron. It makes no difference to me
now which side you fought on."
"Well, I'm in heaven--been dead a long time. I can prove it, if you'll
play again."
"What shall I play?"
"First, '_O Jonny Booker Help dis Nigger_.'"
She played and sang it beautifully.
"Now, '_Wake Up in the Morning_.'"
Again he listened with wide, staring eyes that saw nothing except visions
within.
"Now, then, '_The Ole Gray Hoss_.'"
As the last notes died away he tried to smile again:
"One more--'_Hard Times an' Wuss er Comin'_.'"
With deft, sure touch and soft negro dialect she sang it through.
"Now, didn't I tell you that you couldn't fool me? No Yankee girl could
play and sing these songs, I'm in heaven, and you're an angel."
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself to flirt with me, with one foot in the
grave?"
"That's the time to get on good terms with the angels--but I'm done
dead----"
Elsie laughed in spite of herself.
"I know it," he went on, "because you have shining golden hair and amber
eyes instead of blue ones. I never saw a girl in my life before with such
eyes and hair."
"But you're young yet."
"Never--was--such--a--girl--on--earth--you're--an----"
She lifted her finger in warning, and his eyelids drooped In exhausted
stupor.
"You musn't talk any more," she whispered, shaking her head.
A commotion at the door caused Elsie to turn from the cot. A sweet
motherly woman of fifty, in an old faded black dress, was pleading with
the guard to be allowed to pass.
"Can't do it, m'um. It's agin the rules."
"But I must go in. I've tramped for four days through a wilderness of
hospitals, and I know he must be here."
"Special orders, m'um--wounded rebels in here that belong in prison."
"Very well, young man," said the pleading voice. "My baby boy's in this
place, wounded and about to die. I'm going in there. You can shoot me if
you like, or you can turn your head the other way."
She stepped quickly past the soldier, who merely stared with dim eyes out
the door and saw nothing.
She stood for a moment with a look of helpless bewilderment. The vast area
of the second story of the great monolithic pile was crowded with rows of
sick, wounded, and dying men--a strange, solemn, and curious sight.
Against the walls were ponderous glass cases, filled with models of every
kind of invention the genius of man had dreamed. Between these cases were
deep lateral openings, eight feet wide, crowded with the sick, and long
rows of them were stretched through the centre of the hall. A gallery ran
around above the cases, and this was filled with cots. The clatter of the
feet of passing surgeons and nurses over the marble floor added to the
weird impression.
Elsie saw the look of helpless appeal in the mother's face and hurried
forward to meet her:
"Is this Mrs. Cameron, of South Carolina?"
The trembling figure in black grasped her hand eagerly:
"Yes, yes, my dear, and I'm looking for my boy, who is wounded unto death.
Can you help me?"
"I thought I recognized you from a miniature I've seen," she answered
softly. "I'll lead you direct to his cot."
"Thank you, thank you!" came the low reply.
In a moment she was beside him, and Elsie walked away to the open window
through which came the chirp of sparrows from the lilac bushes in full
bloom below.
The mother threw one look of infinite tenderness on the drawn face, and
her hands suddenly clasped in prayer:
"I thank Thee, Lord Jesus, for this hour! Thou hast heard the cry of my
soul and led my feet!" She gently knelt, kissed the hot lips, smoothed the
dark tangled hair back from his forehead, and her hand rested over his
eyes.
A faint flush tinged his face.
"It's you,
Mamma--I--know--you--that's--your--hand--or--else--it's--God's!"
She slipped her arms about him.
"My hero, my darling, my baby!"
"I'll get well now, Mamma, never fear. You see, I had whipped them
that day as I had many a time before. I don't know how it happened--my
men seemed all to go down at once. You know--I couldn't surrender in
that new uniform of a colonel you sent me--we made a gallant fight,
and--now--I'm--just--a--little--tired--but you are here, and it's all
right."
"Yes, yes, dear. It's all over now. General Lee has surrendered, and when
you are better I'll take you home, where the sunshine and flowers will
give you strength again."
"How's my little sis?"
"Hunting in another part of the city for you. She's grown so tall and
stately you'll hardly know her. Your papa is at home, and don't know yet
that you are wounded."
"And my sweetheart, Marion Lenoir?"
"The most beautiful little girl in Piedmont--as sweet and mischievous as
ever. Mr. Lenoir is very ill, but he has written a glorious poem about one
of your charges. I'll show it to you to-morrow. He is our greatest poet.
The South worships him. Marion sent her love to you and a kiss for the
young hero of Piedmont. I'll give it to you now."
She bent again and kissed him.
"And my dogs?"
"General Sherman left them, at least."
"Well, I'm glad of that--my mare all right?"
"Yes, but we had a time to save her--Jake hid her in the woods till the
army passed."
"Bully for Jake."
"I don't know what we should have done without him."
"Old Aleck still at home and getting drunk as usual?"
"No, he ran away with the army and persuaded every negro on the Lenoir
place to go, except his wife, Aunt Cindy."
"The old rascal, when Mrs. Lenoir's mother saved him from burning to death
when he was a boy!"
"Yes, and he told the Yankees those fire scars were made with the lash,
and led a squad to the house one night to burn the barns. Jake headed them
off and told on him. The soldiers were so mad they strung him up and
thrashed him nearly to death. We haven't seen him since."
"Well, I'll take care of you, Mamma, when I get home. Of course I'll get
well. It's absurd to die at nineteen. You know I never believed the bullet
had been moulded that could hit me. In three years of battle I lived a
charmed life and never got a scratch."
His voice had grown feeble and laboured, and his face flushed. His mother
placed her hand on his lips.
"Just one more," he pleaded feebly. "Did you see the little angel who has
been playing and singing for me? You must thank her."
"Yes, I see her coming now. I must go and tell Margaret, and we will get a
pass and come every day."
She kissed him, and went to meet Elsie.
"And you are the dear girl who has been playing and singing for my boy, a
wounded stranger here alone among his foes?"
"Yes, and for all the others, too."
Mrs. Cameron seized both of her hands and looked at her tenderly.
"You will let me kiss you? I shall always love you."
She pressed Elsie to her heart. In spite of the girl's reserve, a sob
caught her breath at the touch of the warm lips. Her own mother had died
when she was a baby, and a shy, hungry heart, long hidden from the world,
leaped in tenderness and pain to meet that embrace.
Elsie walked with her to the door, wondering how the terrible truth of her
boy's doom could be told.
She tried to speak, looked into Mrs. Cameron's face, radiant with grateful
joy, and the words froze on her lips. She decided to walk a little way
with her. But the task became all the harder.
At the corner she stopped abruptly and bade her good-bye:
"I must leave you now, Mrs. Cameron. I will call for you in the morning
and help you secure the passes to enter the hospital."
The mother stroked the girl's hand and held it lingeringly.
"How good you are," she said softly. "And you have not told me your
name?"
Elsie hesitated and said:
"That's a little secret. They call me Sister Elsie, the Banjo Maid, in the
hospitals. My father is a man of distinction. I should be annoyed if my
full name were known. I'm Elsie Stoneman. My father is the leader of the
House. I live with my aunt."
"Thank you," she whispered, pressing her hand.
Elsie watched the dark figure disappear in the crowd with a strange tumult
of feeling.
The mention of her father had revived the suspicion that he was the
mysterious power threatening the policy of the President and planning a
reign of terror for the South. Next to the President, he was the most
powerful man in Washington, and the unrelenting foe of Mr. Lincoln,
although the leader of his party in Congress, which he ruled with a rod of
iron. He was a man of fierce and terrible resentments. And yet, in his
personal life, to those he knew, he was generous and considerate. "Old
Austin Stoneman, the Great Commoner," he was called, and his name was one
to conjure with in the world of deeds. To this fair girl he was the
noblest Roman of them all, her ideal of greatness. He was an indulgent
father, and while not demonstrative, loved his children with passionate
devotion.
She paused and looked up at the huge marble columns that seemed each a
sentinel beckoning her to return within to the cot that held a wounded
foe. The twilight had deepened, and the soft light of the rising moon had
clothed the solemn majesty of the building with shimmering tenderness and
beauty.
"Why should I be distressed for one, an enemy, among these thousands who
have fallen?" she asked herself. Every detail of the scene she had passed
through with him and his mother stood out in her soul with startling
distinctness--and the horror of his doom cut with the deep sense of
personal anguish.
"He shall not die," she said, with sudden resolution. "I'll take his
mother to the President. He can't resist her. I'll send for Phil to help
me."
She hurried to the telegraph office and summoned her brother.
CHAPTER II
THE GREAT HEART
The next morning, when Elsie reached the obscure boarding-house at which
Mrs. Cameron stopped, the mother had gone to the market to buy a bunch of
roses to place beside her boy's cot.
As Elsie awaited her return, the practical little Yankee maid thought with
a pang of the tenderness and folly of such people. She knew this mother
had scarcely enough to eat, but to her bread was of small importance,
flowers necessary to life. After all, it was very sweet, this foolishness
of these Southern people, and it somehow made her homesick.
"How can I tell her!" she sighed. "And yet I must."
She had only waited a moment when Mrs. Cameron suddenly entered with her
daughter. She threw her flowers on the table, sprang forward to meet
Elsie, seized her hands and called to Margaret.
"How good of you to come so soon! This, Margaret, is our dear little
friend who has been so good to Ben and to me."
Margaret took Elsie's hand and longed to throw her arms around her neck,
but something in the quiet dignity of the Northern girl's manner held her
back. She only smiled tenderly through her big dark eyes, and softly
said:
"We love you! Ben was my last brother. We were playmates and chums. My
heart broke when he ran away to the front. How can we thank you and your
brother!"
"I'm sure we've done nothing more than you would have done for us," said
Elsie, as Mrs. Cameron left the room.
"Yes, I know, but we can never tell you how grateful we are to you. We
feel that you have saved Ben's life and ours. The war has been one long
horror to us since my first brother was killed. But now it's over, and we
have Ben left, and our hearts have been crying for joy all night."
"I hoped my brother, Captain Phil Stoneman, would be here to-day to meet
you and help me, but he can't reach Washington before Friday."
"He caught Ben in his arms!" cried Margaret. "I know he's brave, and you
must be proud of him."
"Doctor Barnes says they are as much alike as twins--only Phil is not
quite so tall and has blond hair like mine."
"You will let me see him and thank him the moment he comes?"
"Hurry, Margaret!" cheerily cried Mrs. Cameron, reentering the parlour.
"Get ready; we must go at once to the hospital."
Margaret turned and with stately grace hurried from the room. The old
dress she wore as unconscious of its shabbiness as though it were a royal
robe.
"And now, my dear, what must I do to get the passes?" asked the mother
eagerly.
Elsie's warm amber eyes grew misty for a moment, and the fair skin with
its gorgeous rose tints of the North paled. She hesitated, tried to speak,
and was silent.
The sensitive soul of the Southern woman read the message of sorrow words
had not framed.
"Tell me, quickly! The
doctor--has--not--concealed--his--true--condition--from--me?"
"No, he is certain to recover."
"What then?"
"Worse--he is condemned to death by court-martial."
"Condemned to death--a--wounded--prisoner--of--war!" she whispered slowly,
with blanched face.
"Yes, he was accused of violating the rules of war as a guerilla raider in
the invasion of Pennsylvania."
"Absurd and monstrous! He was on General Jeb Stuart's staff and could have
acted only under his orders. He joined the infantry after Stuart's death,
and rose to be a colonel, though but a boy. There's some terrible
mistake!"
"Unless we can obtain his pardon," Elsie went on in even, restrained
tones, "there is no hope. We must appeal to the President."
The mother's lips trembled, and she seemed about to faint.
"Could I see the President?" she asked, recovering herself with an
effort.
"He has just reached Washington from the front, and is thronged by
thousands. It will be difficult."
The mother's lips were moving in silent prayer, and her eyes were tightly
closed to keep back the tears.
"Can you help me, dear?" she asked piteously.
"Yes," was the quick response.
"You see," she went on, "I feel so helpless. I have never been to the
White House or seen the President, and I don't know how to go about seeing
him or how to ask him--and--I am afraid of Mr. Lincoln! I have heard so
many harsh things said of him."
"I'll do my best, Mrs. Cameron. We must go at once to the White House and
try to see him."
The mother lifted the girl's hand and stroked it gently.
"We will not tell Margaret. Poor child! she could not endure this. When we
return, we may have better news. It can't be worse. I'll send her on an
errand."
She took up the bouquet of gorgeous roses with a sigh, buried her face in
the fresh perfume, as if to gain strength in their beauty and fragrance,
and left the room.
In a few moments she had returned and was on her way with Elsie to the
White House.
It was a beautiful spring morning, this eleventh day of April, 1865. The
glorious sunshine, the shimmering green of the grass, the warm breezes,
and the shouts of victory mocked the mother's anguish.
At the White House gates they passed the blue sentry pacing silently back
and forth, who merely glanced at them with keen eyes and said nothing. In
the steady beat of his feet the mother could hear the tramp of soldiers
leading her boy to the place of death!
A great lump rose in her throat as she caught the first view of the
Executive Mansion gleaming white and silent and ghostlike among the
budding trees. The tall columns of the great facade, spotless as snow, the
spray of the fountain, the marble walls, pure, dazzling, and cold, seemed
to her the gateway to some great tomb in which her own dead and the dead
of all the people lay! To her the fair white palace, basking there in the
sunlight and budding grass, shrub, and tree, was the Judgment House of
Fate. She thought of all the weary feet that had climbed its fateful steps
in hope to return in despair, of its fierce dramas on which the lives of
millions had hung, and her heart grew sick.
A long line of people already stretched from the entrance under the
portico far out across the park, awaiting their turn to see the
President.
Mrs. Cameron placed her hand falteringly on Elsie's shoulder.
"Look, my dear, what a crowd already! Must we wait in line?"
"No, I can get you past the throng with my father's name."
"Will it be very difficult to reach the President?"
"No, it's very easy. Guards and sentinels annoy him. He frets until they
are removed. An assassin or maniac could kill him almost any hour of the
day or night. The doors are open at all hours, very late at night. I have
often walked up to the rooms of his secretaries as late as nine o'clock
without being challenged by a soul."
"What must I call him? Must I say 'Your Excellency?'"
"By no means--he hates titles and forms. You should say 'Mr. President' in
addressing him. But you will please him best if, in your sweet, homelike
way, you will just call him by his name. You can rely on his sympathy.
Read this letter of his to a widow. I brought it to show you."
She handed Mrs. Cameron a newspaper clipping on which was printed Mr.
Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby, of Boston, who had lost five sons in the
war.
Over and over she read its sentences until they echoed as solemn music in
her soul:
"I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should
attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I
cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the
thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father
may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the
cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be
yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
"Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
"ABRAHAM LINCOLN."
"And the President paused amid a thousand cares to write that letter to a
broken-hearted woman?" the mother asked.
"Yes."
"Then he is good down to the last secret depths of a great heart! Only a
Christian father could have written that letter. I shall not be afraid to
speak to him. And they told me he was an infidel!"
Elsie led her by a private way past the crowd and into the office of Major
Hay, the President's private secretary. A word from the Great Commoner's
daughter admitted them at once to the President's room.
"Just take a seat on one side, Miss Elsie," said Major Hay; "watch your
first opportunity and introduce your friend."
On entering the room, Mrs. Cameron could not see the President, who was
seated at his desk surrounded by three men in deep consultation over a
mass of official documents.
She looked about the room nervously and felt reassured by its plain
aspect. It was a medium-sized, officelike place, with no signs of elegance
or ceremony. Mr. Lincoln was seated in an armchair beside a high
writing-desk and table combined. She noticed that his feet were large and
that they rested on a piece of simple straw matting. Around the room were
sofas and chairs covered with green worsted.
When the group about the chair parted a moment, she caught the first
glimpse of the man who held her life in the hollow of his hand. She
studied him with breathless interest. His back was still turned. Even
while seated, she saw that he was a man of enormous stature, fully six
feet four inches tall, legs and arms abnormally long, and huge broad
shoulders slightly stooped. His head was powerful and crowned with a mass
of heavy brown hair, tinged with silver.
He turned his head slightly and she saw his profile set in its short dark
beard--the broad intellectual brow, half covered by unmanageable hair, his
face marked with deep-cut lines of life and death, with great hollows in
the cheeks and under the eyes. In the lines which marked the corners of
his mouth she could see firmness, and his beetling brows and unusually
heavy eyelids looked stern and formidable. Her heart sank. She looked
again and saw goodness, tenderness, sorrow, canny shrewdness, and a
strange lurking smile all haunting his mouth and eye.
Suddenly he threw himself forward in his chair, wheeled and faced one of
his tormentors with a curious and comical expression. With one hand
patting the other, and a funny look overspreading his face, he said:
"My friend, let me tell you something----"
The man again stepped before him, and she could hear nothing. When the
story was finished, the man tried to laugh. It died in a feeble effort.
But the President laughed heartily, laughed all over, and laughed his
visitors out of the room.
Mrs. Cameron turned toward Elsie with a mute look of appeal to give her
this moment of good-humour in which to plead her cause, but before she
could move a man of military bearing suddenly stepped before the
President.
He began to speak, but seeing the look of stern decision in Mr. Lincoln's
face, turned abruptly and said:
"Mr. President, I see you are fully determined not to do me justice!"
Mr. Lincoln slightly compressed his lips, rose quietly, seized the
intruder by the arm, and led him toward the door.
"This is the third time you have forced your presence on me, sir, asking
that I reverse the just sentence of a court-martial, dismissing you from
the service. I told you my decision was carefully made and was final. Now
I give you fair warning never to show yourself in this room again. I can
bear censure, but I will not endure insult!"
In whining tones the man begged for his papers he had dropped.
"Begone, sir," said the President, as he thrust him through the door.
"Your papers will be sent to you."
The poor mother trembled at this startling act and sank back limp in her
seat.
With quick, swinging stride the President walked back to his desk,
accompanied by Major Hay and a young German girl, whose simple dress told
that she was from the Western plains.
He handed the secretary an official paper.
"Give this pardon to the boy's mother when she comes this morning," he
said kindly to the secretary, his eyes suddenly full of gentleness.
"How could I consent to shoot a boy raised on a farm, in the habit of
going to bed at dark, for falling asleep at his post when required to
watch all night? I'll never go into eternity with the blood of such a boy
on my skirts."
Again the mother's heart rose.
"You remember the young man I pardoned for a similar offence in '62, about
which Stanton made such a fuss?" he went on in softly reminiscent tones.
"Well, here is that pardon."
He drew from the lining of his silk hat a photograph, around which was
wrapped an executive pardon. Through the lower end of it was a bullet-hole
stained with blood.
"I got this in Richmond. They found him dead on the field. He fell in the
front ranks with my photograph in his pocket next to his heart, this
pardon wrapped around it, and on the back of it in his boy's scrawl, '_God
bless Abraham Lincoln_.' I love to invest in bonds like that."
The secretary returned to his room, the girl who was waiting stepped
forward, and the President rose to receive her.
The mother's quick eye noted, with surprise, the simple dignity and
chivalry of manner with which he received this humble woman of the
people.
With straightforward eloquence the girl poured out her story, begging for
the pardon of her young brother who had been sentenced to death as a
deserter. He listened in silence.
How pathetic the deep melancholy of his sad face! Yes, she was sure, the
saddest face that God ever made in all the world! Her own stricken heart
for a moment went out to him in sympathy.
The President took off his spectacles, wiped his forehead with the large
red silk handkerchief he carried, and his eyes twinkled kindly down into
the good German face.
"You seem an honest, truthful, sweet girl," he said, "and"--he
smiled--"you don't wear hoop skirts! I may be whipped for this, but I'll
trust you and your brother, too. He shall be pardoned." Elsie rose to
introduce Mrs. Cameron, when a Congressman from Massachusetts suddenly
stepped before her and pressed for the pardon of a slave trader whose ship
had been confiscated. He had spent five years in prison, but could not pay
the heavy fine in money imposed.
The President had taken his seat again, and read the eloquent appeal for
mercy. He looked up over his spectacles, fixed his eyes piercingly on the
Congressman and said:
"This is a moving appeal, sir, expressed with great eloquence. I might
pardon a murderer under the spell of such words, but a man who can make a
business of going to Africa and robbing her of her helpless children and
selling them into bondage--no, sir--he may rot in jail before he shall
have liberty by any act of mine!"
Again the mother's heart sank.
Her hour had come. She must put the issue of life or death to the test,
and as Elsie rose and stepped quickly forward, she followed; nerving
herself for the ordeal.
The President took Elsie's hand familiarly and smiled without rising.
Evidently she was well known to him.
"Will you hear the prayer of a broken-hearted mother of the South, who has
lost four sons in General Lee's army?" she asked.
Looking quietly past the girl, he caught sight, for the first time, of the
faded dress and the sorrow-shadowed face.
He was on his feet in a moment, extended his hand and led her to a chair.
"Take this seat, Madam, and then tell me in your own way what I can do for
you." In simple words, mighty with the eloquence of a mother's heart, she
told her story and asked for the pardon of her boy, promising his word of
honour and her own that he would never again take up arms against the
Union.
"The war is over now, Mr. Lincoln," she said, "and we have lost all. Can
you conceive the desolation of _my_ heart? My four boys were noble men.
They may have been wrong, but they fought for what they believed to be
right. You, too, have lost a boy."
The President's eyes grew dim.
"Yes, a beautiful boy----" he said simply.
"Well, mine are all gone but this baby. One of them sleeps in an unmarked
grave at Gettysburg. One died in a Northern prison. One fell at
Chancellorsville, one in the Wilderness, and this, my baby, before
Petersburg. Perhaps I've loved him too much, this last one--he's only a
child yet----"
"You shall have your boy, my dear Madam," the President said simply,
seating himself and writing a brief order to the Secretary of War.
The mother drew near his desk, softly crying. Through her tears she said:
"My heart is heavy, Mr. Lincoln, when I think of all the hard and bitter
things we have heard of you."
"Well, give my love to the people of South Carolina when you go home, and
tell them that I am their President, and that I have never forgotten this
fact in the darkest hours of this awful war; and I am going to do
everything in my power to help them." "You will never regret this generous
act," the mother cried with gratitude.
"I reckon not," he answered. "I'll tell you something, Madam, if you won't
tell anybody. It's a secret of my administration. I'm only too glad of an
excuse to save a life when I can. Every drop of blood shed in this war
North and South has been as if it were wrung out of my heart. A strange
fate decreed that the bloodiest war in human history should be fought
under my direction. And I--to whom the sight of blood is a sickening
horror--I have been compelled to look on in silent anguish because I could
not stop it! Now that the Union is saved, not another drop of blood shall
be spilled if I can prevent it."
"May God bless you!" the mother cried, as she received from him the
order.
She held his hand an instant as she took her leave, laughing and sobbing
in her great joy.
"I must tell you, Mr. President," she said, "how surprised and how pleased
I am to find you are a Southern man."
"Why, didn't you know that my parents were Virginians, and that I was born
in Kentucky?"
"Very few people in the South know it. I am ashamed to say I did not."
"Then, how did you know I am a Southerner?"
"By your looks, your manner of speech, your easy, kindly ways, your
tenderness and humour, your firmness in the right as you see it, and,
above all, the way you rose and bowed to a woman in an old, faded black
dress, whom you knew to be an enemy." "No, Madam, not an enemy now," he
said softly. "That word is out of date."
"If we had only known you in time----"
The President accompanied her to the door with a deference of manner that
showed he had been deeply touched.
"Take this letter to Mr. Stanton at once," he said. "Some folks complain
of my pardons, but it rests me after a hard day's work if I can save some
poor boy's life. I go to bed happy, thinking of the joy I have given to
those who love him."
As the last words were spoken, a peculiar dreaminess of expression stole
over his careworn face, as if a throng of gracious memories had lifted for
a moment the burden of his life.
CHAPTER III
THE MAN OF WAR
Elsie led Mrs. Cameron direct from the White House to the War Department.
"Well, Mrs. Cameron, what did you think of the President?" she asked.
"I hardly know," was the thoughtful answer. "He is the greatest man I ever
met. One feels this instinctively."
When Mrs. Cameron was ushered into the Secretary's Office, Mr. Stanton was
seated at his desk writing.
She handed the order of the President to a clerk, who gave it to the
Secretary.
He was a man in the full prime of life, intellectual and physical, low and
heavy set, about five feet eight inches in height and inclined to fat. His
movements, however, were quick, and as he swung in his chair the keenest
vigour marked every movement of body and every change of his countenance.
His face was swarthy and covered with a long, dark beard touched with
gray. He turned a pair of little black piercing eyes on her and without
rising said:
"So you are the woman who has a wounded son under sentence of death as a
guerilla?"
"I am so unfortunate," she answered.
"Well, I have nothing to say to you," he went on in a louder and sterner
tone, "and no time to waste on you. If you have raised up men to rebel
against the best government under the sun, you can take the
consequences----"
"But, my dear sir," broke in the mother, "he is a mere boy of nineteen,
who ran away three years ago and entered the service----"
"I don't want to hear another word from you!" he yelled in rage. "I have
no time to waste--go at once. I'll do nothing for you."
"But I bring you an order from the President," protested the mother.
"Yes, I know it," he answered with a sneer, "and I'll do with it what I've
done with many others--see that it is not executed--now go."
"But the President told me you would give me a pass to the hospital, and
that a full pardon would be issued to my boy!"
"Yes, I see. But let me give you some information. The President is a
fool--a d---- fool! Now, will you go?"
With a sinking sense of horror, Mrs. Cameron withdrew and reported to
Elsie the unexpected encounter.
"The brute!" cried the girl. "We'll go back immediately and report this
insult to the President."
"Why are such men intrusted with power?" the mother sighed.
"It's a mystery to me, I'm sure. They say he is the greatest Secretary of
War in our history. I don't believe it. Phil hates the sight of him, and
so does every army officer I know, from General Grant down. I hope Mr.
Lincoln will expel him from the Cabinet for this insult."
When, they were again ushered into the President's office, Elsie hastened
to inform him of the outrageous reply the Secretary of War had made to his
order.
"Did Stanton say that I was a fool?" he asked, with a quizzical look out
of his kindly eyes.
"Yes, he did," snapped Elsie. "And he repeated it with a blankety
prefix."
The President looked good-humouredly out of the window toward the War
Office and musingly said:
"Well, if Stanton says that I am a blankety fool, it must be so, for I
have found out that he is nearly always right, and generally means what he
says. I'll just step over and see Stanton."
As he spoke the last sentence, the humour slowly faded from his face, and
the anxious mother saw back of those patient gray eyes the sudden gleam of
the courage and conscious power of a lion.
He dismissed them with instructions to return the next day for his final
orders and walked over to the War Department alone.
The Secretary of War was in one of his ugliest moods, and made no effort
to conceal it when asked his reasons for the refusal to execute the
order.
"The grounds for my action are very simple," he said with bitter emphasis.
"The execution of this traitor is part of a carefully considered policy of
justice on which the future security of the Nation depends. If I am to
administer this office, I will not be hamstrung by constant Executive
interference. Besides, in this particular case, I was urged that justice
be promptly executed by the most powerful man in Congress. I advise you to
avoid a quarrel with old Stoneman at this crisis in our history."
The President sat on a sofa with his legs crossed, relapsed into an
attitude of resignation, and listened in silence until the last sentence,
when suddenly he sat bolt upright, fixed his deep gray eyes intently on
Stanton and said:
"Mr. Secretary, I reckon you will have to execute that order."
"I cannot do it," came the firm answer. "It is an interference with
justice, and I will not execute it."
Mr. Lincoln held his eyes steadily on Stanton and slowly said:
"Mr. Secretary, it will have to be done."
Stanton wheeled in his chair, seized a pen and wrote very rapidly a few
lines to which he fixed his signature. He rose with the paper in his hand,
walked to his chief, and with deep emotion said:
"Mr. President, I wish to thank you for your constant friendship during
the trying years I have held this office. The war is ended, and my work is
done. I hand you my resignation."
Mr. Lincoln's lips came suddenly together, he slowly rose, and looked down
with surprise into the flushed angry face.
He took the paper, tore it into pieces, slipped one of his long arms
around the Secretary, and said in low accents:
"Stanton, you have been a faithful public servant, and it is not for you
to say when you will no longer be needed. Go on with your work. I will
have my way in this matter; but I will attend to it personally."
Stanton resumed his seat, and the President returned to the White House.
CHAPTER IV
A CLASH OF GIANTS
Elsie secured from the Surgeon-General temporary passes for the day, and
sent her friends to the hospital with the promise that she would not leave
the White House until she had secured the pardon.
The President greeted her with unusual warmth. The smile that had only
haunted his sad face during four years of struggle, defeat, and
uncertainty had now burst into joy that made his powerful head radiate
light. Victory had lifted the veil from his soul, and he was girding
himself for the task of healing the Nation's wounds.
"I'll have it ready for you in a moment, Miss Elsie," he said, touching
with his sinewy hand a paper which lay on his desk, bearing on its face
the red seal of the Republic. "I am only waiting to receive the passes."
"I am very grateful to you, Mr. President," the girl said feelingly.
"But tell me," he said, with quaint, fatherly humour, "why you, of all our
girls, the brightest, fiercest little Yankee in town, so take to heart a
rebel boy's sorrows?"
Elsie blushed, and then looked at him frankly with a saucy smile.
"I am fulfilling the Commandments."
"Love your enemies?"
"Certainly. How could one help loving the sweet, motherly face you saw
yesterday."
The President laughed heartily. "I see--of course, of course!"
"The Honourable Austin Stoneman," suddenly announced a clerk at his
elbow.
Elsie started in surprise and whispered:
"Do not let my father know I am here. I will wait in the next room. You'll
let nothing delay the pardon, will you, Mr. President?"
Mr. Lincoln warmly pressed her hand as she disappeared through the door
leading into Major Hay's room, and turned to meet the Great Commoner who
hobbled slowly in, leaning on his crooked cane.
At this moment he was a startling and portentous figure in the drama of
the Nation, the most powerful parliamentary leader in American history,
not excepting Henry Clay.
No stranger ever passed this man without a second look. His clean-shaven
face, the massive chiselled features, his grim eagle look, and cold,
colourless eyes, with the frosts of his native Vermont sparkling in their
depths, compelled attention.
His walk was a painful hobble. He was lame in both feet, and one of them
was deformed. The left leg ended in a mere bunch of flesh, resembling more
closely an elephant's hoof than the foot of a man.
He was absolutely bald, and wore a heavy brown wig that seemed too small
to reach the edge of his enormous forehead.
He rarely visited the White House. He was the able, bold, unscrupulous
leader of leaders, and men came to see him. He rarely smiled, and when he
did it was the smile of the cynic and misanthrope. His tongue had the lash
of a scorpion. He was a greater terror to the trimmers and time-servers of
his own party than to his political foes. He had hated the President with
sullen, consistent, and unyielding venom from his first nomination at
Chicago down to the last rumour of his new proclamation.
In temperament a fanatic, in impulse a born revolutionist, the word
conservatism was to him as a red rag to a bull. The first clash of arms
was music to his soul. He laughed at the call for 75,000 volunteers, and
demanded the immediate equipment of an army of a million men. He saw it
grow to 2,000,000. From the first, his eagle eye had seen the end and all
the long, blood-marked way between. And from the first, he began to plot
the most cruel and awful vengeance in human history.
And now his time had come.
The giant figure in the White House alone had dared to brook his anger and
block the way; for old Stoneman was the Congress of the United States. The
opposition was too weak even for his contempt. Cool, deliberate, and
venomous alike in victory or defeat, the fascination of his positive faith
and revolutionary programme had drawn the rank and file of his party in
Congress to him as charmed satellites.
The President greeted him cordially, and with his habitual deference to
age and physical infirmity hastened to place for him an easy chair near
his desk.
He was breathing heavily and evidently labouring under great emotion. He
brought his cane to the floor with violence, placed both hands on its
crook, leaned his massive jaws on his hands for a moment, and then said:
"Mr. President, I have not annoyed you with many requests during the past
four years, nor am I here to-day to ask any favours. I have come to warn
you that, in the course you have mapped out, the executive and legislative
branches have come to the parting of the ways, and that your encroachments
on the functions of Congress will be tolerated, now that the Rebellion is
crushed, not for a single moment!"
Mr. Lincoln listened with dignity, and a ripple of fun played about his
eyes as he looked at his grim visitor. The two men were face to face at
last--the two men above all others who had built and were to build the
foundations of the New Nation--Lincoln's in love and wisdom to endure
forever, the Great Commoner's in hate and madness, to bear its harvest of
tragedy and death for generations yet unborn.
"Well, now, Stoneman," began the good-humoured voice, "that puts me in
mind----"
The old Commoner lifted his hand with a gesture of angry impatience:
"Save your fables for fools. Is it true that you have prepared a
proclamation restoring the conquered province of North Carolina to its
place as a State in the Union with no provision for negro suffrage or the
exile and disfranchisement of its rebels?"
The President rose and walked back and forth with his hands folded behind
him before answering.
"I have. The Constitution grants to the National Government no power to
regulate suffrage, and makes no provision for the control of 'conquered
provinces.'"
"Constitution!" thundered Stoneman. "I have a hundred constitutions in the
pigeonholes of my desk!"
"I have sworn to support but one."
"A worn-out rag----"
"Rag or silk, I've sworn to execute it, and I'll do it, so help me God!"
said the quiet voice.
"You've been doing it for the past four years, haven't you!" sneered the
Commoner. "What right had you under the Constitution to declare war
against a 'sovereign' State? To invade one for coercion? To blockade a
port? To declare slaves free? To suspend the writ of _habeas corpus_? To
create the State of West Virginia by the consent of two states, one of
which was dead, and the other one of which lived in Ohio? By what
authority have you appointed military governors in the 'sovereign' States
of Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana? Why trim the hedge and lie about
it? We, too, are revolutionists, and you are our executive. The
Constitution sustained and protected slavery. It _was_ 'a league with
death and a covenant with hell,' and our flag 'a polluted rag!'"
"In the stress of war," said the President, with a far-away look, "it was
necessary that I do things as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy to
save the Union which I have no right to do now that the Union is saved and
its Constitution preserved. My first duty is to re-establish the
Constitution as our supreme law over every inch of our soil."
"The Constitution be d----d!" hissed the old man. "It was the creation,
both in letter and spirit, of the slaveholders of the South."
"Then the world is their debtor, and their work is a monument of
imperishable glory to them and to their children. I have sworn to preserve
it!"
"We have outgrown the swaddling clothes of a babe. We will make new
constitutions!"
"'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,'" softly spoke the tall,
self-contained man.
For the first time the old leader winced. He had long ago exhausted the
vocabulary of contempt on the President, his character, ability, and
policy. He felt as a shock the first impression of supreme authority with
which he spoke. The man he had despised had grown into the great
constructive statesman who would dispute with him every inch of ground in
the attainment of his sinister life purpose.
His hatred grew more intense as he realized the prestige and power with
which he was clothed by his mighty office.
With an effort he restrained his anger, and assumed an argumentative
tone.
"Can't you see that your so-called States are now but conquered provinces?
That North Carolina and other waste territories of the United States are
unfit to associate with civilized communities?"
"We fought no war of conquest," quietly urged the President, "but one of
self-preservation as an indissoluble Union. No State ever got out of it,
by the grace of God and the power of our arms. Now that we have won, and
established for all time its unity, shall we stultify ourselves by
declaring we were wrong? These States must be immediately restored to
their rights, or we shall betray the blood we have shed. There are no
'conquered provinces' for us to spoil. A nation cannot make conquest of
its own territory."
"But we are acting outside the Constitution," interrupted Stoneman.
"Congress has no existence outside the Constitution," was the quick
answer.
The old Commoner scowled, and his beetling brows hid for a moment his
eyes. His keen intellect was catching its first glimpse of the
intellectual grandeur of the man with whom he was grappling. The facility
with which he could see all sides of a question, and the vivid imagination
which lit his mental processes, were a revelation. We always underestimate
the men we despise.
"Why not out with it?" cried Stoneman, suddenly changing his tack. "You
are determined to oppose negro suffrage?"
"I have suggested to Governor Hahn of Louisiana to consider the policy of
admitting the more intelligent and those who served in the war. It is only
a suggestion. The State alone has the power to confer the ballot."
"But the truth is this little 'suggestion' of yours is only a bone thrown
to radical dogs to satisfy our howlings for the moment! In your soul of
souls you don't believe in the equality of man if the man under comparison
be a negro?"
"I believe that there is a physical difference between the white and black
races which will forever forbid their living together on terms of
political and social equality. If such be attempted, one must go to the
wall."
"Very well, pin the Southern white man to the wall. Our party and the
Nation will then be safe."
"That is to say, destroy African slavery and establish white slavery under
negro masters! That would be progress with a vengeance."
A grim smile twitched the old man's lips as he said:
"Yes, your prim conservative snobs and male waiting-maids in Congress went
into hysterics when I armed the negroes. Yet the heavens have not
fallen."
"True. Yet no more insane blunder could now be made than any further
attempt to use these negro troops. There can be no such thing as restoring
this Union to its basis of fraternal peace with armed negroes, wearing the
uniform of this Nation, tramping over the South, and rousing the basest
passions of the freedmen and their former masters. General Butler, their
old commander, is now making plans for their removal, at my request. He
expects to dig the Panama Canal with these black troops."
"Fine scheme that--on a par with your messages to Congress asking for the
colonization of the whole negro race!"
"It will come to that ultimately," said the President firmly. "The negro
has cost us $5,000,000,000, the desolation of ten great States, and rivers
of blood. We can well afford a few million dollars more to effect a
permanent settlement of the issue. This is the only policy on which Seward
and I have differed----"
"Then Seward was not an utterly hopeless fool. I'm glad to hear something
to his credit," growled the old Commoner.
"I have urged the colonization of the negroes, and I shall continue until
it is accomplished. My emancipation proclamation was linked with this
plan. Thousands of them have lived in the North for a hundred years, yet
not one is the pastor of a white church, a judge, a governor, a mayor, or
a college president. There is no room for two distinct races of white men
in America, much less for two distinct races of whites and blacks. We can
have no inferior servile class, peon or peasant. We must assimilate or
expel. The American is a citizen king or nothing. I can conceive of no
greater calamity than the assimilation of the negro into our social and
political life as our equal. A mulatto citizenship would be too dear a
price to pay even for emancipation."
"Words have no power to express my loathing for such twaddle!" cried
Stoneman, snapping his great jaws together and pursing his lips with
contempt.
"If the negro were not here would we allow him to land?" the President
went on, as if talking to himself. "The duty to exclude carries the right
to expel. Within twenty years we can peacefully colonize the negro in the
tropics, and give him our language, literature, religion, and system of
government under conditions in which he can rise to the full measure of
manhood. This he can never do here. It was the fear of the black tragedy
behind emancipation that led the South into the insanity of secession. We
can never attain the ideal Union our fathers dreamed, with millions of an
alien, inferior race among us, whose assimilation is neither possible nor
desirable. The Nation cannot now exist half white and half black, any more
than it could exist half slave and half free."
"Yet 'God hath made of one blood all races,'" quoted the cynic with a
sneer.
"Yes--but finish the sentence--'and fixed the bounds of their habitation.'
God never meant that the negro should leave his habitat or the white man
invade his home. Our violation of this law is written in two centuries of
shame and blood. And the tragedy will not be closed until the black man is
restored to his home."
"I marvel that the minions of slavery elected Jeff Davis their chief with
so much better material at hand!"
"His election was a tragic and superfluous blunder. I am the President of
the United States, North and South," was the firm reply.
"Particularly the South!" hissed Stoneman. "During all this hideous war
they have been your pets--these rebel savages who have been murdering our
sons. You have been the ever-ready champion of traitors. And you now dare
to bend this high office to their defence----"
"My God, Stoneman, are you a man or a savage!" cried the President. "Is
not the North equally responsible for slavery? Has not the South lost all?
Have not the Southern people paid the full penalty of all the crimes of
war? Are our skirts free? Was Sherman's march a picnic? This war has been
a giant conflict of principles to decide whether we are a bundle of petty
sovereignties held by a rope of sand or a mighty nation of freemen. But
for the loyalty of four border Southern States--but for Farragut and
Thomas and their two hundred thousand heroic Southern brethren who fought
for the Union against their own flesh and blood, we should have lost. You
cannot indict a people----"
"I do indict them!" muttered the old man.
"Surely," went on the even, throbbing voice, "surely, the vastness of this
war, its titanic battles, its heroism, its sublime earnestness, should
sink into oblivion all low schemes of vengeance! Before the sheer grandeur
of its history our children will walk with silent lips and uncovered
heads."
"And forget the prison pen at Andersonville!"
"Yes. We refused, as a policy of war, to exchange those prisoners,
blockaded their ports, made medicine contraband, and brought the Southern
Army itself to starvation. The prison records, when made at last for
history, will show as many deaths on our side as on theirs."
"The murderer on the gallows always wins more sympathy than his forgotten
victim," interrupted the cynic.
"The sin of vengeance is an easy one under the subtle plea of justice,"
said the sorrowful voice. "Have we not had enough bloodshed? Is not God's
vengeance enough? When Sherman's army swept to the sea, before him lay the
Garden of Eden, behind him stretched a desert! A hundred years cannot give
back to the wasted South her wealth, or two hundred years restore to her
the lost seed treasures of her young manhood----"
"The imbecility of a policy of mercy in this crisis can only mean the
reign of treason and violence," persisted the old man, ignoring the
President's words.
"I leave my policy before the judgment bar of time, content with its
verdict. In my place, radicalism would have driven the border States into
the Confederacy, every Southern man back to his kinsmen, and divided the
North itself into civil conflict. I have sought to guide and control
public opinion into the ways on which depended our life. This rational
flexibility of policy you and your fellow radicals have been pleased to
call my vacillating imbecility."
"And what is your message for the South?"
"Simply this: 'Abolish slavery, come back home, and behave yourself.' Lee
surrendered to our offers of peace and amnesty. In my last message to
Congress I told the Southern people they could have peace at any moment by
simply laying down their arms and submitting to National authority. Now
that they have taken me at my word, shall I betray them by an ignoble
revenge? Vengeance cannot heal and purify: it can only brutalize and
destroy."
Stoneman shuffled to his feet with impatience.
"I see it is useless to argue with you. I'll not waste my breath. I give
you an ultimatum. The South is conquered soil. I mean to blot it from the
map. Rather than admit one traitor to the halls of Congress from these
so-called States I will shatter the Union itself into ten thousand
fragments! I will not sit beside men whose clothes smell of the blood of
my kindred. At least dry them before they come in. Four years ago, with
yells and curses, these traitors left the halls of Congress to join the
armies of Catiline. Shall they return to rule?"
"I repeat," said the President, "you cannot indict a people. Treason is an
easy word to speak. A traitor is one who fights and loses. Washington was
a traitor to George III. Treason won, and Washington is immortal. Treason
is a word that victors hurl at those who fail."
"Listen to me," Stoneman interrupted with vehemence. "The life of our
party demands that the negro be given the ballot and made the ruler of the
South. This can be done only by the extermination of its landed
aristocracy, that their mothers shall not breed another race of traitors.
This is not vengeance. It is justice, it is patriotism, it is the highest
wisdom and humanity. Nature, at times, blots out whole communities and
races that obstruct progress. Such is the political genius of these people
that, unless you make the negro the ruler, the South will yet reconquer
the North and undo the work of this war."
"If the South in poverty and ruin can do this, we deserve to be ruled! The
North is rich and powerful--the South a land of wreck and tomb. I greet
with wonder, shame, and scorn such ignoble fear! The Nation cannot be
healed until the South is healed. Let the gulf be closed in which we bury
slavery, sectional animosity, and all strifes and hatreds. The good sense
of our people will never consent to your scheme of insane vengeance."
"The people have no sense. A new fool is born every second. They are ruled
by impulse and passion."
"I have trusted them before, and they have not failed me. The day I left
for Gettysburg to dedicate the battlefield, you were so sure of my defeat
in the approaching convention that you shouted across the street to a
friend as I passed: 'Let the dead bury the dead!' It was a brilliant sally
of wit. I laughed at it myself. And yet the people unanimously called me
again to lead them to victory."
"Yes, in the past," said Stoneman bitterly, "you have triumphed, but mark
my word: from this hour your star grows dim. The slumbering fires of
passion will be kindled. In the fight we join to-day I'll break your back
and wring the neck of every dastard and time-server who fawns at your
feet."
The President broke into a laugh that only increased the old man's wrath.
"I protest against the insult of your buffoonery!"
"Excuse me, Stoneman; I have to laugh or die beneath the burdens I bear,
surrounded by such supporters!"
"Mark my word," growled the old leader, "from the moment you publish that
North Carolina proclamation, your name will be a by-word in Congress."
"There are higher powers."
"You will need them."
"I'll have help," was the calm reply, as the dreaminess of the poet and
mystic stole over the rugged face. "I would be a presumptuous fool,
indeed, if I thought that for a day I could discharge the duties of this
great office without the aid of One who is wiser and stronger than all
others."
"You'll need the help of Almighty God in the course you've mapped out!"
"Some ships come into port that are not steered," went on the dreamy
voice. "Suppose Pickett had charged one hour earlier at Gettysburg?
Suppose the _Monitor_ had arrived one hour later at Hampton Roads? I had a
dream last night that always presages great events. I saw a white ship
passing swiftly under full sail. I have often seen her before. I have
never known her port of entry, or her destination, but I have always known
her Pilot!"
The cynic's lips curled with scorn. He leaned heavily on his cane, and
took a shambling step toward the door.
"You refuse to heed the wishes of Congress?"
"If your words voice them, yes. Force your scheme of revenge on the South,
and you sow the wind to reap the whirlwind."
"Indeed! and from what secret cave will this whirlwind come?"
"The despair of a mighty race of world-conquering men, even in defeat, is
still a force that statesmen reckon with."
"I defy them," growled the old Commoner.
Again the dreamy look returned to Lincoln's face, and he spoke as if
repeating a message of the soul caught in the clouds in an hour of
transfiguration:
"And I'll trust the honour of Lee and his people. The mystic chords of
memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every
living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the
chorus of the Union, when touched again, as they surely will be, by the
better angels of our nature."
"You'll be lucky to live to hear that chorus."
"To dream it is enough. If I fall by the hand of an assassin now, he will
not come from the South. I was safer in Richmond, this week, than I am in
Washington, to-day."
The cynic grunted and shuffled another step toward the door.
The President came closer.
"Look here, Stoneman; have you some deep personal motive in this vengeance
on the South? Come, now, I've never in my life known you to tell a lie."
The answer was silence and a scowl.
"Am I right?"
"Yes and no. I hate the South because I hate the Satanic Institution of
Slavery with consuming fury. It has long ago rotted the heart out of the
Southern people. Humanity cannot live in its tainted air, and its children
are doomed. If my personal wrongs have ordained me for a mighty task, no
matter; I am simply the chosen instrument of Justice!"
Again the mystic light clothed the rugged face, calm and patient as
Destiny, as the President slowly repeated:
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right, as God gives me to see the right, I shall strive to finish the work
we are in, and bind up the Nation's wounds."
"I've given you fair warning," cried the old Commoner, trembling with
rage, as he hobbled nearer the door. "From this hour your administration
is doomed."
"Stoneman," said the kindly voice, "I can't tell you how your venomous
philanthropy sickens me. You have misunderstood and abused me at every
step during the past four years. I bear you no ill will. If I have said
anything to-day to hurt your feelings, forgive me. The earnestness with
which you pressed the war was an invaluable service to me and to the
Nation. I'd rather work with you than fight you. But now that we have to
fight, I'd as well tell you I'm not afraid of you. I'll suffer my right
arm to be severed from my body before I'll sign one measure of ignoble
revenge on a brave, fallen foe, and I'll keep up this fight until I win,
die, or my country forsakes me."
"I have always known you had a sneaking admiration for the South," came
the sullen sneer.
"I love the South! It is a part of this Union. I love every foot of its
soil, every hill and valley, mountain, lake, and sea, and every man,
woman, and child that breathes beneath its skies. I am an American."
As the burning words leaped from the heart of the President the broad
shoulders of his tall form lifted, and his massive head rose in
unconscious heroic pose.
"I marvel that you ever made war upon your loved ones!" cried the cynic.
"We fought the South because we loved her and would not let her go. Now
that she is crushed and lies bleeding at our feet--you shall not make war
on the wounded, dying, and the dead!"
Again the lion gleamed in the calm gray eyes.
CHAPTER IV
THE BATTLE OF LOVE
Elsie carried Ben Cameron's pardon to the anxious mother and sister with
her mind in a tumult. The name on these fateful papers fascinated her. She
read it again and again with a curious personal joy that she had saved a
life!
She had entered on her work among the hospitals a bitter partisan of her
father's school, with the simple idea that all Southerners were savage
brutes. Yet as she had seen the wounded boys from the South among the men
in blue, more and more she had forgotten the difference between them. They
were so young, these slender, dark-haired ones from Dixie--so pitifully
young! Some of them were only fifteen, and hundreds not over sixteen. A
lad of fourteen she had kissed one day in sheer agony of pity for his
loneliness.
The part her father was playing in the drama on which Ben Cameron's life
had hung puzzled her. Was his the mysterious arm back of Stanton? Echoes
of the fierce struggle with the President had floated through the
half-open door.
She had implicit faith in her father's patriotism and pride in his giant
intellect. She knew that he was a king among men by divine right of
inherent power. His sensitive spirit, brooding over a pitiful lameness,
had hidden from the world behind a frowning brow like a wounded animal.
Yet her hand in hours of love, when no eye save God's could see, had led
his great soul out of its dark lair. She loved him with brooding
tenderness, knowing that she had gotten closer to his inner life than any
other human being--closer than her own mother, who had died while she was
a babe. Her aunt, with whom she and Phil now lived, had told her the
mother's life was not a happy one. Their natures had not proved congenial,
and her gentle Quaker spirit had died of grief in the quiet home in
southern Pennsylvania.
Yet there were times when he was a stranger even to her. Some secret, dark
and cold, stood between them. Once she had tenderly asked him what it
meant. He merely pressed her hand, smiled wearily, and said:
"Nothing, my dear, only the Blue Devils after me again."
He had always lived in Washington in a little house with black shutters,
near the Capitol, while the children had lived with his sister, near the
White House, where they had grown from babyhood.
A curious fact about this place on the Capitol hill was that his
housekeeper, Lydia Brown, was a mulatto, a woman of extraordinary animal
beauty and the fiery temper of a leopardess. Elsie had ventured there once
and got such a welcome she would never return. All sorts of gossip could
be heard in Washington about this woman, her jewels, her dresses, her
airs, her assumption of the dignity of the presiding genius of National
legislation and her domination of the old Commoner and his life. It
gradually crept into the newspapers and magazines, but he never once
condescended to notice it.
Elsie begged her father to close this house and live with them.
His reply was short and emphatic:
"Impossible, my child. This club foot must live next door to the Capitol.
My house is simply an executive office at which I sleep. Half the business
of the Nation is transacted there. Don't mention this subject again."
Elsie choked back a sob at the cold menace in the tones of this command,
and never repeated her request. It was the only wish he had ever denied
her, and, somehow, her heart would come back to it with persistence and
brood and wonder over his motive.
The nearer she drew, this morning, to the hospital door, the closer the
wounded boy's life and loved ones seemed to hers. She thought with anguish
of the storm about to break between her father and the President--the one
demanding the desolation of their land, wasted, harried, and unarmed!--the
President firm in his policy of mercy, generosity, and healing.
Her father would not mince words. His scorpion tongue, set on fires of
hell, might start a conflagration that would light the Nation with its
glare. Would not his name be a terror for every man and woman born under
Southern skies? The sickening feeling stole over her that he was wrong,
and his policy cruel and unjust.
She had never before admired the President. It was fashionable to speak
with contempt of him in Washington. He had little following in Congress.
Nine tenths of the politicians hated or feared him, and she knew her
father had been the soul of a conspiracy at the Capitol to prevent his
second nomination and create a dictatorship, under which to carry out an
iron policy of reconstruction in the South. And now she found herself
heart and soul the champion of the President.
She was ashamed of her disloyalty, and felt a rush of impetuous anger
against Ben and his people for thrusting themselves between her and her
own. Yet how absurd to feel thus against the innocent victims of a great
tragedy! She put the thought from her. Still she must part from them now
before the brewing storm burst. It would be best for her and best for
them. This pardon delivered would end their relations. She would send the
papers by a messenger and not see them again. And then she thought with a
throb of girlish pride of the hour to come in the future when Ben's big
brown eyes would be softened with a tear when he would learn that she had
saved his life. They had concealed all from him as yet.
She was afraid to question too closely in her own heart the shadowy motive
that lay back of her joy. She read again with a lingering smile the name
"Ben Cameron" on the paper with its big red Seal of Life. She had laughed
at boys who had made love to her, dreaming a wider, nobler life of heroic
service. And she felt that she was fulfilling her ideal in the generous
hand she had extended to these who were friendless. Were they not the
children of her soul in that larger, finer world of which she had dreamed
and sung? Why should she give them up now for brutal politics? Their
sorrow had been hers, their joy should be hers, too. She would take the
papers herself and then say good-bye.
She found the mother and sister beside the cot. Ben was sleeping with
Margaret holding one of his hands. The mother was busy sewing for the
wounded Confederate boys she had found scattered through the hospital.
At the sight of Elsie holding aloft the message of life she sprang to meet
her with a cry of joy.
She clasped the girl to her breast, unable to speak. At last she released
her and said with a sob:
"My child, through good report and through evil report my love will enfold
you!"
Elsie stammered, looked away, and tried to hide her emotion. Margaret had
knelt and bowed her head on Ben's cot. She rose at length, threw her arms
around Elsie in a resistless impulse, kissed her and whispered:
"My sweet sister!"
Elsie's heart leaped at the words, as her eyes rested on the face of the
sleeping soldier.
CHAPTER VI
THE ASSASSINATION
Elsie called in the afternoon at the Camerons' lodgings, radiant with
pride, accompanied by her brother.
Captain Phil Stoneman, athletic, bronzed, a veteran of two years' service,
dressed in his full uniform, was the ideal soldier, and yet he had never
loved war. He was bubbling over with quiet joy that the end had come and
he could soon return to a rational life. Inheriting his mother's
temperament, he was generous, enterprising, quick, intelligent, modest,
and ambitious. War had seemed to him a horrible tragedy from the first. He
had early learned to respect a brave foe, and bitterness had long since
melted out of his heart.
He had laughed at his father's harsh ideas of Southern life gained as a
politician, and, while loyal to him after a boy's fashion, he took no
stock in his Radical programme.
The father, colossal egotist that he was, heard Phil's protests with mild
amusement and quiet pride in his independence, for he loved this boy with
deep tenderness.
Phil had been touched by the story of Ben's narrow escape, and was anxious
to show his mother and sister every courtesy possible in part atonement
for the wrong he felt had been done them. He was timid with girls, and yet
he wished to give Margaret a cordial greeting for Elsie's sake. He was not
prepared for the shock the first appearance of the Southern girl gave
him.
When the stately figure swept through the door to greet him, her black
eyes sparkling with welcome, her voice low and tender with genuine
feeling, he caught his breath in surprise.
Elsie noted his confusion with amusement and said:
"I must go to the hospital for a little work. Now, Phil, I'll meet you at
the door at eight o'clock."
"I'll not forget," he answered abstractedly, watching Margaret intently as
she walked with Elsie to the door.
He saw that her dress was of coarse, unbleached cotton, dyed with the
juice of walnut hulls and set with wooden hand-made buttons. The story
these things told of war and want was eloquent, yet she wore them with
unconscious dignity. She had not a pin or brooch or piece of jewellery.
Everything about her was plain and smooth, graceful and gracious. Her face
was large--the lovely oval type--and her luxuriant hair, parted in the
middle, fell downward in two great waves. Tall, stately, handsome, her
dark rare Southern beauty full of subtle languor and indolent grace, she
was to Phil a revelation.
The coarse black dress that clung closely to her figure seemed alive when
she moved, vital with her beauty. The musical cadences of her voice were
vibrant with feeling, sweet, tender, and homelike. And the odour of the
rose she wore pinned low on her breast he could swear was the perfume of
her breath.
Lingering in her eyes and echoing in the tones of her voice, he caught the
shadowy memory of tears for the loved and lost that gave a strange pathos
and haunting charm to her youth.
She had returned quickly and was talking at ease with him.
"I'm not going to tell you, Captain Stoneman, that I hope to be a sister
to you. You have already made yourself my brother in what you did for
Ben."
"Nothing, I assure you, Miss Cameron, that any soldier wouldn't do for a
brave foe."
"Perhaps; but when the foe happens to be an only brother, my chum and
playmate, brave and generous, whom I've worshipped as my beau-ideal
man--why, you know I must thank you for taking him in your arms that day.
May I, again?"
Phil felt the soft warm hand clasp his, while the black eyes sparkled and
glowed their friendly message.
He murmured something incoherently, looked at Margaret as if in a spell,
and forgot to let her hand go.
She laughed at last, and he blushed and dropped it as though it were a
live coal.
"I was about to forget, Miss Cameron. I wish to take you to the theatre
to-night, if you will go?"
"To the theatre?"
"Yes. It's to be an occasion, Elsie tells me. Laura Keene's last
appearance in 'Our American Cousin,' and her one-thousandth performance of
the play. She played it in Chicago at McVicker's, when the President was
first nominated, to hundreds of the delegates who voted for him. He is to
be present to-night, so the _Evening Star_ has announced, and General and
Mrs. Grant with him. It will be the opportunity of your life to see these
famous men--besides, I wish you to see the city illuminated on the way."
Margaret hesitated.
"I should like to go," she said with some confusion. "But you see we are
old-fashioned Scotch Presbyterians down in our village in South Carolina.
I never was in a theatre--and this is Good Friday----"
"That's a fact, sure," said Phil thoughtfully. "It never occurred to me.
War is not exactly a spiritual stimulant, and it blurs the calendar. I
believe we fight on Sundays oftener than on any other day."
"But I'm crazy to see the President since Ben's pardon. Mamma will be here
in a moment, and I'll ask her."
"You see, it's really an occasion," Phil went on. "The people are all
going there to see President Lincoln in the hour of his triumph, and his
great General fresh from the field of victory. Grant has just arrived in
town."
Mrs. Cameron entered and greeted Phil with motherly tenderness.
"Captain, you're so much like my boy! Had you noticed it, Margaret?"
"Of course, Mamma, but I was afraid I'd tire him with flattery if I tried
to tell him."
"Only his hair is light and wavy, and Ben's straight and black, or you'd
call them twins. Ben's a little taller--excuse us, Captain Stoneman, but
we've fallen so in love with your little sister we feel we've known you
all our lives."
"I assure you, Mrs. Cameron, your flattery is very sweet. Elsie and I do
not remember our mother, and all this friendly criticism is more than
welcome."
"Mamma, Captain Stoneman asks me to go with him and his sister to-night to
see the President at the theatre. May I go?"
"Will the President be there, Captain?" asked Mrs. Cameron.
"Yes, Madam, with General and Mrs. Grant--it's really a great public
function in celebration of peace and victory. To-day the flag was raised
over Fort Sumter, the anniversary of its surrender four years ago. The
city will be illuminated."
"Then, of course, you can go. I will sit with Ben. I wish you to see the
President."
At seven o'clock Phil called for Margaret. They walked to the Capitol hill
and down Pennsylvania Avenue.
The city was in a ferment. Vast crowds thronged the streets. In front of
the hotel where General Grant stopped the throng was so dense the streets
were completely blocked. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, at every turn, in
squads, in companies, in regimental crowds, shouting cries of victory.
The display of lights was dazzling in its splendour. Every building in
every street, in every nook and corner of the city, was lighted from attic
to cellar. The public buildings and churches vied with each other in the
magnificence of their decorations and splendour of illuminations.
They turned a corner, and suddenly the Capitol on the throne of its
imperial hill loomed a grand constellation in the heavens! Another look,
and it seemed a huge bonfire against the background of the dark skies.
Every window in its labyrinths of marble, from the massive base to its
crowning statue of Freedom, gleamed and flashed with light--more than ten
thousand jets poured their rays through its windows, besides the
innumerable lights that circled the mighty dome within and without.
Margaret stopped, and Phil felt her soft hand grip his arm with sudden
emotion.
"Isn't it sublime!" she whispered.
"Glorious!" he echoed.
But he was thinking of the pressure of her hand on his arm and the subtle
tones of her voice. Somehow he felt that the light came from her eyes. He
forgot the Capitol and the surging crowds before the sweeter creative
wonder silently growing in his soul.
"And yet," she faltered, "when I think of what all this means for our
people at home--their sorrow and poverty and ruin--you know it makes me
faint."
Phil's hand timidly sought the soft one resting on his arm and touched it
reverently.
"Believe me, Miss Margaret, it will be all for the best in the end. The
South will yet rise to a nobler life than she has ever lived in the past.
This is her victory as well as ours."
"I wish I could think so," she answered.
They passed the City Hall and saw across its front, in giant letters of
fire thirty feet deep, the words:
"UNION, SHERMAN, AND GRANT"
On Pennsylvania Avenue the hotels and stores had hung every window,
awning, cornice, and swaying tree-top with lanterns. The grand avenue was
bridged by tri-coloured balloons floating and shimmering ghostlike far up
in the dark sky. Above these, in the blacker zone toward the stars, the
heavens were flashing sheets of chameleon flames from bursting rockets.
Margaret had never dreamed such a spectacle. She walked in awed silence,
now and then suppressing a sob for the memory of those she had loved and
lost. A moment of bitterness would cloud her heart, and then with the
sense of Phil's nearness, his generous nature, the beauty and goodness of
his sister, and all they owed to her for Ben's life, the cloud would
pass.
At every public building, and in front of every great hotel, bands were
playing. The wild war strains, floating skyward, seemed part of the
changing scheme of light. The odour of burnt powder and smouldering
rockets filled the warm spring air.
The deep bay of the great fort guns now began to echo from every hilltop
commanding the city, while a thousand smaller guns barked and growled from
every square and park and crossing.
Jay Cooke & Co's. banking-house had stretched across its front, in
enormous blazing letters, the words:
"THE BUSY B'S--BALLS, BALLOTS, AND BONDS"
Every telegraph and newspaper office was a roaring whirlpool of
excitement, for the same scenes were being enacted in every centre of the
North. The whole city was now a fairy dream, its dirt and sin, shame and
crime, all wrapped in glorious light.
But above all other impressions was the contagion of the thunder shouts of
hosts of men surging through the streets--the human roar with its animal
and spiritual magnetism, wild, resistless, unlike any other force in the
universe!
Margaret's hand again and again unconsciously tightened its hold on Phil's
arm, and he felt that the whole celebration had been gotten up for his
benefit.
They passed through a little park on their way to Ford's Theatre on 10th
Street, and the eye of the Southern girl was quick to note the budding
flowers and full-blown lilacs.
"See what an early spring!" she cried. "I know the flowers at home are
gorgeous now."
"I shall hope to see you among them some day, when all the clouds have
lifted," he said.
She smiled and replied with simple earnestness:
"A warm welcome will await your coming."
And Phil resolved to lose no time in testing it.
They turned into 10th Street, and in the middle of the block stood the
plain three-story brick structure of Ford's Theatre, an enormous crowd
surging about its five doorways and spreading out on the sidewalk and half
across the driveway.
"Is that the theatre?" asked Margaret.
"Yes."
"Why, it looks like a church without a steeple."
"Exactly what it really is, Miss Margaret. It was a Baptist church. They
turned it into a playhouse, by remodelling its gallery into a dress-circle
and balcony and adding another gallery above. My grandmother Stoneman is a
devoted Baptist, and was an attendant at this church. My father never goes
to church, but he used to go here occasionally to please her. Elsie and I
frequently came."
Phil pushed his way rapidly through the crowd with a peculiar sense of
pleasure in making a way for Margaret and in defending her from the
jostling throng.
They found Elsie at the door, stamping her foot with impatience.
"Well, I must say, Phil, this is prompt for a soldier who had positive
orders," she cried. "I've been here an hour."
"Nonsense, Sis, I'm ahead of time," he protested.
Elsie held up her watch.
"It's a quarter past eight. Every seat is filled, and they've stopped
selling standing-room. I hope you have good seats."
"The best in the house to-night, the first row in the balcony
dress-circle, opposite the President's box. We can see everything on the
stage, in the box, and every nook and corner of the house."
"Then I'll forgive you for keeping me waiting."
They ascended the stairs, pushed through the throng standing, and at last
reached the seats.
What a crowd! The building was a mass of throbbing humanity, and, over
all, the hum of the thrilling wonder of peace and victory!
The women in magnificent costumes, officers in uniforms flashing with
gold, the show of wealth and power, the perfume of flowers and the music
of violin and flutes gave Margaret the impression of a dream, so sharp was
the contrast with her own life and people in the South.
The interior of the house was a billow of red, white, and blue. The
President's box was wrapped in two enormous silk flags with gold-fringed
edges gracefully draped and hanging in festoons.
Withers, the leader of the orchestra, was in high feather. He raised his
baton with quick, inspired movement. It was for him a personal triumph,
too. He had composed the music of a song for the occasion. It was
dedicated to the President, and the programme announced that it would be
rendered during the evening between the acts by a famous quartet, assisted
by the whole company in chorus. The National flag would be draped about
each singer, worn as the togas of ancient Greece and Rome.
It was already known by the crowd that General and Mrs. Grant had left the
city for the North and could not be present, but every eye was fixed on
the door through which the President and Mrs. Lincoln would enter. It was
the hour of his supreme triumph.
[Illustration: THE ASSASSINATION.]
What a romance his life! The thought of it thrilled the crowd as they
waited. A few years ago this tall, sad-faced man had floated down the
Sangamon River into a rough Illinois town, ragged, penniless, friendless,
alone, begging for work. Four years before he had entered Washington as
President of the United States--but he came under cover of the night with
a handful of personal friends, amid universal contempt for his ability and
the loud expressed conviction of his failure from within and without his
party. He faced a divided Nation and the most awful civil convulsion in
history. Through it all he had led the Nation in safety, growing each day
in power and fame, until to-night, amid the victorious shouts of millions
of a Union fixed in eternal granite, he stood forth the idol of the
people, the first great American, the foremost man of the world.
There was a stir at the door, and the tall figure suddenly loomed in view
of the crowd. With one impulse they leaped to their feet, and shout after
shout shook the building. The orchestra was playing "Hail to the Chief!"
but nobody heard it. They saw the Chief! They were crying their own
welcome in music that came from the rhythmic beat of human hearts.
As the President walked along the aisle with Mrs. Lincoln, accompanied by
Senator Harris' daughter and Major Rathbone, cheer after cheer burst from
the crowd. He turned, his face beaming with pleasure, and bowed as he
passed.
The answer of the crowd shook the building to its foundations, and the
President paused. His dark face flashed with emotion as he looked over the
sea of cheering humanity. It was a moment of supreme exaltation. The
people had grown to know and love and trust him, and it was sweet. His
face, lit with the responsive fires of emotion, was transfigured. The soul
seemed to separate itself from its dreamy, rugged dwelling-place and flash
its inspiration from the spirit world.
As around this man's personality had gathered the agony and horror of war,
so now about his head glowed and gleamed in imagination the splendours of
victory.
Margaret impulsively put her hand on Phil's arm:
"Why, how Southern he looks! How tall and dark and typical his whole
figure!"
"Yes, and his traits of character even more typical," said Phil. "On the
surface, easy friendly ways and the tenderness of a woman--beneath, an
iron will and lion heart. I like him. And what always amazes me is his
universality. A Southerner finds in him the South, the Western man the
West, even Charles Sumner, from Boston, almost loves him. You know I think
he is the first great all-round American who ever lived in the White
House."
The President's party had now entered the box, and as Mr. Lincoln took the
armchair nearest the audience, in full view of every eye in the house,
again the cheers rent the air. In vain Withers' baton flew, and the
orchestra did its best. The music was drowned as in the roar of the sea.
Again he rose and bowed and smiled, his face radiant with pleasure. The
soul beneath those deep-cut lines had long pined for the sunlight. His
love of the theatre and the humorous story were the protest of his heart
against pain and tragedy. He stood there bowing to the people, the
grandest, gentlest figure of the fiercest war of human history--a man who
was always doing merciful things stealthily as others do crimes. Little
sunlight had come into his life, yet to-night he felt that the sun of a
new day in his history and the history of the people was already tingeing
the horizon with glory.
Back of those smiles what a story! Many a night he had paced back and
forth in the telegraph office of the War Department, read its awful news
of defeat, and alone sat down and cried over the list of the dead. Many a
black hour his soul had seen when the honours of earth were forgotten and
his great heart throbbed on his sleeve. His character had grown so evenly
and silently with the burdens he had borne, working mighty deeds with such
little friction, he could not know, nor could the crowd to whom he bowed,
how deep into the core of the people's life the love of him had grown.
As he looked again over the surging crowd his tall figure seemed to
straighten, erect and buoyant, with the new dignity of conscious
triumphant leadership. He knew that he had come unto his own at last, and
his brain was teeming with dreams of mercy and healing.
The President resumed his seat, the tumult died away, and the play began
amid a low hum of whispered comment directed at the flag-draped box. The
actors struggled in vain to hold the attention of the audience, until
finally Hawk, the actor playing Dundreary, determined to catch their ear,
paused and said:
"Now, that reminds me of a little story, as Mr. Lincoln says----"
Instantly the crowd burst into a storm of applause, the President laughed,
leaned over and spoke to his wife, and the electric connection was made
between the stage, the box, and the people.
After this the play ran its smooth course, and the audience settled into
its accustomed humour of sympathetic attention.
In spite of the novelty of this, her first view of a theatre, the
President fascinated Margaret. She watched the changing lights and shadows
of his sensitive face with untiring interest, and the wonder of his life
grew upon her imagination. This man who was the idol of the North and yet
to her so purely Southern, who had come out of the West and yet was
greater than the West or the North, and yet always supremely human--this
man who sprang to his feet from the chair of State and bowed to a
sorrowing woman with the deference of a knight, every man's friend,
good-natured, sensible, masterful and clear in intellect, strong, yet
modest, kind and gentle--yes, he was more interesting than all the drama
and romance of the stage!
He held her imagination in a spell. Elsie, divining her abstraction,
looked toward the President's box and saw approaching it along the balcony
aisle the figure of John Wilkes Booth.
"Look," she cried, touching Margaret's arm. "There's John Wilkes Booth,
the actor! Isn't he handsome? They say he's in love with my chum, a
senator's daughter whose father hates Mr. Lincoln with perfect fury."
"He is handsome," Margaret answered. "But I'd be afraid of him, with that
raven hair and eyes shining like something wild."
"They say he is wild and dissipated, yet half the silly girls in town are
in love with him. He's as vain as a peacock."
Booth, accustomed to free access to the theatre, paused near the entrance
to the box and looked deliberately over the great crowd, his magnetic face
flushed with deep emotion, while his fiery inspiring eyes glittered with
excitement.
Dressed in a suit of black broadcloth of faultless fit, from the crown of
his head to the soles of his feet he was physically without blemish. A
figure of perfect symmetry and proportion, his dark eyes flashing, his
marble forehead crowned with curling black hair, agility and grace stamped
on every line of his being--beyond a doubt he was the handsomest man in
America. A flutter of feminine excitement rippled the surface of the crowd
in the balcony as his well-known figure caught the wandering eyes of the
women.
He turned and entered the door leading to the President's box, and
Margaret once more gave her attention to the stage.
Hawk, as Dundreary, was speaking his lines and looking directly at the
President instead of at the audience:
"Society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old
woman, you darned old sockdologing man trap!"
Margaret winced at the coarse words, but the galleries burst into shouts
of laughter that lingered in ripples and murmurs and the shuffling of
feet.
The muffled crack of a pistol in the President's box hushed the laughter
for an instant.
No one realized what had happened, and when the assassin suddenly leaped
from the box, with a blood-marked knife flashing in his right hand, caught
his foot in the flags and fell to his knees on the stage, many thought it
a part of the programme, and a boy, leaning over the gallery rail,
giggled. When Booth turned his face of statuesque beauty lit by eyes
flashing with insane desperation and cried, "_Sic semper tyrannis_," they
were only confirmed in this impression.
A sudden, piercing scream from Mrs. Lincoln, quivering, soul harrowing!
Leaning far out of the box, from ashen cheeks and lips leaped the piteous
cry of appeal, her hand pointing to the retreating figure:
"The President is shot! He has killed the President!"
Every heart stood still for one awful moment. The brain refused to record
the message--and then the storm burst!
A wild roar of helpless fury and despair! Men hurled themselves over the
footlights in vain pursuit of the assassin. Already the clatter of his
horse's feet could be heard in the distance. A surgeon threw himself
against the door of the box, but it had been barred within by the cunning
hand. Another leaped on the stage, and the people lifted him up in their
arms and over the fatal railing.
Women began to faint, and strong men trampled down the weak in mad rushes
from side to side.
The stage in a moment was a seething mass of crazed men, among them the
actors and actresses in costumes and painted faces, their mortal terror
shining through the rouge. They passed water up to the box, and some tried
to climb up and enter it.
The two hundred soldiers of the President's guard suddenly burst in, and,
amid screams and groans of the weak and injured, stormed the house with
fixed bayonets, cursing, yelling, and shouting at the top of their
voices:
"Clear out! Clear out! You sons of hell!"
One of them suddenly bore down with fixed bayonet toward Phil.
Margaret shrank in terror close to his side and tremblingly held his arm.
Elsie sprang forward, her face aflame, her eyes flashing fire, her little
figure tense, erect, and quivering with rage:
"How dare you, idiot, brute!"
The soldier, brought to his senses, saw Phil in full captain's uniform
before him, and suddenly drew himself up, saluting. Phil ordered him to
guard Margaret and Elsie for a moment, drew his sword, leaped between the
crazed soldiers and their victims and stopped their insane rush.
Within the box the great head lay in the surgeon's arms, the blood slowly
dripping down, and the tiny death bubbles forming on the kindly lips. They
carried him tenderly out, and another group bore after him the unconscious
wife. The people tore the seats from their fastenings and heaped them in
piles to make way for the precious burdens.
As Phil pressed forward with Margaret and Elsie through the open door came
the roar of the mob without, shouting its cries:
"The President is shot!"
"Seward is murdered!"
"Where is Grant?"
"Where is Stanton?"
"To arms! To arms!"
The peal of signal guns could now be heard, the roll of drums and the
hurried tramp of soldiers' feet. They marched none too soon. The mob had
attacked the stockade holding ten thousand unarmed Confederate prisoners.
At the corner of the block in which the theatre stood they seized a man
who looked like a Southerner and hung him to the lamp-post. Two heroic
policemen fought their way to his side and rescued him.
If the temper of the people during the war had been convulsive, now it was
insane--with one mad impulse and one thought--vengeance! Horror, anger,
terror, uncertainty, each passion fanned the one animal instinct into
fury.
Through this awful night, with the lights still gleaming as if to mock the
celebration of victory, the crowds swayed in impotent rage through the
streets, while the telegraph bore on the wings of lightning the
awe-inspiring news. Men caught it from the wires, and stood in silent
groups weeping, and their wrath against the fallen South began to rise as
the moaning of the sea under a coming storm.
At dawn black clouds hung threatening on the eastern horizon. As the sun
rose, tingeing them for a moment with scarlet and purple glory, Abraham
Lincoln breathed his last.
Even grim Stanton, the iron-hearted, stood by his bedside and through
blinding tears exclaimed:
"Now he belongs to the ages!"
The deed was done. The wheel of things had moved. Vice-President Johnson
took the oath of office, and men hailed him Chief; but the seat of Empire
had moved from the White House to a little dark house on the Capitol hill,
where dwelt an old club-footed man, alone, attended by a strange brown
woman of sinister animal beauty and the restless eyes of a leopardess.
CHAPTER VII
THE FRENZY OF A NATION
Phil hurried through the excited crowds with Margaret and Elsie, left them
at the hospital door, and ran to the War Department to report for duty.
Already the tramp of regiments echoed down every great avenue.
Even as he ran, his heart beat with a strange new stroke when he recalled
the look of appeal in Margaret's dark eyes as she nestled close to his
side and clung to his arm for protection. He remembered with a smile the
almost resistless impulse of the moment to slip his arm around her and
assure her of safety. If he had only dared!
Elsie begged Mrs. Cameron and Margaret to go home with her until the city
was quiet.
"No," said the mother. "I am not afraid. Death has no terrors for me any
longer. We will not leave Ben a moment now, day or night. My soul is sick
with dread for what this awful tragedy will mean for the South! I can't
think of my own safety. Can any one undo this pardon now?" she asked
anxiously.
"I am sure they cannot. The name on that paper should be mightier dead
than living."
"Ah, but will it be? Do you know Mr. Johnson? Can he control Stanton? He
seemed to be more powerful than the President himself. What will that man
do now with those who fall into his hands."
"He can do nothing with your son, rest assured."
"I wish I knew it," said the mother wistfully.
* * * * *
A few moments after the President died on Saturday morning, the rain began
to pour in torrents. The flags that flew from a thousand gilt-tipped peaks
in celebration of victory drooped to half-mast and hung weeping around
their staffs. The litter of burnt fireworks, limp and crumbling, strewed
the streets, and the tri-coloured lanterns and balloons, hanging
pathetically from their wires, began to fall to pieces.
Never in all the history of man had such a conjunction of events befallen
a nation. From the heights of heaven's rejoicing to be suddenly hurled to
the depths of hell in piteous helpless grief! Noon to midnight without a
moment between. A pall of voiceless horror spread its shadows over the
land. Nothing short of an earthquake or the sound of the archangel's
trumpet could have produced the sense of helpless consternation, the black
and speechless despair. The people read their papers in tears. The morning
meal was untouched. By no other single feat could death have carried such
peculiar horror to every home. Around this giant figure the heartstrings
of the people had been unconsciously knit. Even his political enemies had
come to love him.
Above all, in just this moment he was the incarnation of the Triumphant
Union on the altar of whose life every house had laid the offering of its
first-born. The tragedy was stupefying--it was unthinkable--it was the
mockery of Fate!
Men walked the streets of the cities, dazed with the sense of blind grief.
Every note of music and rejoicing became a dirge. All business ceased.
Every wheel in every mill stopped. The roar of the great city was hushed,
and Greed for a moment forgot his cunning.
The army only moved with swifter spring, tightening its mighty grip on the
throat of the bleeding prostrate South.
As the day wore on its gloomy hours, and men began to find speech, they
spoke to each other at first in low tones of Fate, of Life, of Death, of
Immortality, of God--and then as grief found words the measureless rage of
baffled strength grew slowly to madness.
On every breeze from the North came the deep-muttered curses.
Easter Sunday dawned after the storm, clear and beautiful in a flood of
glorious sunshine. The churches were thronged as never in their history.
All had been decorated for the double celebration of Easter and the
triumph of the Union. The preachers had prepared sermons pitched in the
highest anthem key of victory--victory over death and the grave of
Calvary, and victory for the Nation opening a future of boundless glory.
The churches were labyrinths of flowers, and around every pulpit and from
every Gothic arch hung the red, white, and blue flags of the Republic.
And now, as if to mock this gorgeous pageant, Death had in the night flung
a black mantle over every flag and wound a strangling web of crape round
every Easter flower.
When the preachers faced the silent crowds before them, looking into the
faces of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and lovers whose dear ones
had been slain in battle or died in prison pens, the tide of grief and
rage rose and swept them from their feet! The Easter sermon was laid
aside. Fifty thousand Christian ministers, stunned and crazed by insane
passion, standing before the altars of God, hurled into the broken hearts
before them the wildest cries of vengeance--cries incoherent, chaotic,
unreasoning, blind in their awful fury!
The pulpits of New York and Brooklyn led in the madness.
Next morning old Stoneman read his paper with a cold smile playing about
his big stern mouth, while his furrowed brow flushed with triumph, as
again and again he exclaimed: "At last! At last!"
Even Beecher, who had just spoken his generous words at Fort Sumter,
declared:
"Never while time lasts, while heaven lasts, while hell rocks and groans,
will it be forgotten that Slavery, by its minions, slew him, and slaying
him made manifest its whole nature. A man cannot be bred in its tainted
air. I shall find saints in hell sooner than I shall find true manhood
under its accursed influences. The breeding-ground of such monsters must
be utterly and forever destroyed."
Dr. Stephen Tyng said:
"The leaders of this rebellion deserve no pity from any human being. Now
let them go. Some other land must be their home. Their property is justly
forfeited to the Nation they have attempted to destroy!"
In big black-faced type stood Dr. Charles S. Robinson's bitter words:
"This is the earliest reply which chivalry makes to our forbearance. Talk
to me no more of the same race, of the same blood. He is no brother of
mine and of no race of mine who crowns the barbarism of treason with the
murder of an unarmed husband in the sight of his wife. On the villains who
led this rebellion let justice fall swift and relentless. Death to every
traitor of the South! Pursue them one by one! Let every door be closed
upon them and judgment follow swift and implacable as death!"
Dr. Theodore Cuyler exclaimed:
"This is no time to talk of leniency and conciliation! I say before God,
make no terms with rebellion short of extinction. Booth wielding the
assassin's weapon is but the embodiment of the bowie-knife barbarism of a
slaveholding oligarchy."
Dr. J. P. Thompson said:
"Blot every Southern State from the map. Strip every rebel of property and
citizenship, and send them into exile beggared and infamous outcasts."
Bishop Littlejohn, in his impassioned appeal, declared:
"The deed is worthy of the Southern cause which was conceived in sin,
brought forth in iniquity, and consummated in crime. This murderous hand
is the same hand which lashed the slave's bared back, struck down New
England's senator for daring to speak, lifted the torch of rebellion,
slaughtered in cold blood its thousands, and starved our helpless
prisoners. Its end is not martyrdom, but dishonour."
Bishop Simpson said:
"Let every man who was a member of Congress and aided this rebellion be
brought to speedy punishment. Let every officer educated at public
expense, who turned his sword against his country, be doomed to a
traitor's death!"
With the last note of this wild music lingering in the old Commoner's
soul, he sat as if dreaming, laughed cynically, turned to the brown woman
and said:
"My speeches have not been lost after all. Prepare dinner for six. My
cabinet will meet here to-night."
While the press was reechoing these sermons, gathering strength as they
were caught and repeated in every town, village, and hamlet in the North,
the funeral procession started westward. It passed in grandeur through the
great cities on its journey of one thousand six hundred miles to the tomb.
By day, by night, by dawn, by sunlight, by twilight, and lit by solemn
torches, millions of silent men and women looked on his dead face. Around
the person of this tall, lonely man, rugged, yet full of sombre dignity
and spiritual beauty, the thoughts, hopes, dreams, and ideals of the
people had gathered in four years of agony and death, until they had come
to feel their own hearts beat in his breast and their own life throb in
his life. The assassin's bullet had crashed into their own brains, and
torn their souls and bodies asunder.
The masses were swept from their moorings, and reason destroyed. All
historic perspective was lost. Our first assassination, there was no
precedent for comparison. It had been over two hundred years in the
world's history since the last murder of a great ruler, when William of
Orange fell.
On the day set for the public funeral twenty million people bowed at the
same hour.
When the procession reached New York the streets were lined with a million
people. Not a sound could be heard save the tramp of soldiers' feet and
the muffled cry of the dirge. Though on every foot of earth stood a human
being, the silence of the desert and of death! The Nation's living heroes
rode in that procession, and passed without a sign from the people.
Four years ago he drove down Broadway as President-elect, unnoticed and
with soldiers in disguise attending him lest the mob should stone him.
To-day, at the mention of his name in the churches, the preachers' voices
in prayer wavered and broke into silence while strong men among the crowd
burst into sobs. Flags flew at half-mast from their steeples, and their
bells tolled in grief.
Every house that flew but yesterday its banner of victory was shrouded in
mourning. The flags and pennants of a thousand ships in the harbour
drooped at half-mast, and from every staff in the city streamed across the
sky the black mists of crape like strange meteors in the troubled
heavens.
For three days every theatre, school, court, bank, shop, and mill was
closed.
And with muttered curses men looked Southward.
Across Broadway the cortege passed under a huge transparency on which
appeared the words:
"A Nation bowed in grief
Will rise in might to exterminate
The leaders of this accursed Rebellion."
Farther along swung the black-draped banner:
"Justice to Traitors
is
Mercy to the People."
Another flapped its grim message:
"The Barbarism of Slavery.
Can Barbarism go Further?"
Across the Ninth Regiment Armoury, in gigantic letters, were the words:
"Time for Weeping
But Vengeance is not Sleeping!"
When the procession reached Buffalo, the house of Millard Fillmore was
mobbed because the ex-President, stricken on a bed of illness, had
neglected to drape his house in mourning. The procession passed to
Springfield through miles of bowed heads dumb with grief. The plough
stopped in the furrow, the smith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his
plane, the merchant closed his door, the clink of coin ceased, and over
all hung brooding silence with low-muttered curses, fierce and
incoherent.
No man who walked the earth ever passed to his tomb through such a storm
of human tears. The pageants of Alexander, Caesar, and Wellington were
tinsel to this. Nor did the spirit of Napoleon, the Corsican Lieutenant of
Artillery who once presided over a congress of kings whom he had
conquered, look down on its like even in France.
And now that its pomp was done and its memory but bitterness and ashes,
but one man knew exactly what he wanted and what he meant to do. Others
were stunned by the blow. But the cold eyes of the Great Commoner, leader
of leaders, sparkled, and his grim lips smiled. From him not a word of
praise or fawning sorrow for the dead. Whatever he might be, he was not a
liar: when he hated, he hated.
The drooping flags, the city's black shrouds, processions, torches, silent
seas of faces and bared heads, the dirges and the bells, the dim-lit
churches, wailing organs, fierce invectives from the altar, and the
perfume of flowers piled in heaps by silent hearts--to all these was he
heir.
And more--the fierce unwritten, unspoken, and unspeakable horrors of the
war itself, its passions, its cruelties, its hideous crimes and
sufferings, the wailing of its women, the graves of its men--all these now
were his.
The new President bowed to the storm. In one breath he promised to fulfil
the plans of Lincoln. In the next he, too, breathed threats of vengeance.
The edict went forth for the arrest of General Lee.
Would Grant, the Commanding General of the Army, dare protest? There were
those who said that if Lee were arrested and Grant's plighted word at
Appomattox smirched, the silent soldier would not only protest, but draw
his sword, if need be, to defend his honour and the honour of the Nation.
Yet--would he dare? It remained to be seen.
The jails were now packed with Southern men, taken unarmed from their
homes. The old Capitol Prison was full, and every cell of every grated
building in the city, and they were filling the rooms of the Capitol
itself.
Margaret, hurrying from the market in the early morning with her flowers,
was startled to find her mother bowed in anguish over a paragraph in the
morning paper.
She rose and handed it to the daughter, who read:
"Dr. Richard Cameron, of South Carolina, arrived in Washington and was
placed in jail last night, charged with complicity in the murder of
President Lincoln. It was discovered that Jeff Davis spent the night
at his home in Piedmont, under the pretence of needing medical
attention. Beyond all doubt, Booth, the assassin, merely acted under
orders from the Arch Traitor. May the gallows have a rich and early
harvest!"
Margaret tremblingly wound her arms around her mother's neck. No words
broke the pitiful silence--only blinding tears and broken sobs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book II--The Revolution
CHAPTER I
THE FIRST LADY OF THE LAND
The little house on the Capitol hill now became the centre of fevered
activity. This house, selected by its grim master to become the executive
mansion of the Nation, was perhaps the most modest structure ever chosen
for such high uses.
It stood, a small, two-story brick building, in an unpretentious street.
Seven windows opened on the front with black solid-panelled shutters. The
front parlour was scantily furnished. A huge mirror covered one wall, and
on the other hung a life-size oil portrait of Stoneman, and between the
windows were a portrait of Washington Irving and a picture of a nun. Among
his many charities he had always given liberally to an orphanage conducted
by a Roman Catholic sisterhood.
The back parlour, whose single window looked out on a small garden, he had
fitted up as a library, with leather-upholstered furniture, a large desk
and table, and scattered on the mantel and about its walls were the
photographs of his personal friends and a few costly prints. This room he
used as his executive office, and no person was allowed to enter it
without first stating his business or presenting a petition to the tawny
brown woman with restless eyes who sat in state in the front parlour and
received his visitors. The books in their cases gave evidence of little
use for many years, although their character indicated the tastes of a man
of culture. His Pliny, Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus, Sophocles, and Homer had
evidently been read by a man who knew their beauties and loved them for
their own sake.
This house was now the Mecca of the party in power and the storm-centre of
the forces destined to shape the Nation's life. Senators, representatives,
politicians of low and high degree, artists, correspondents, foreign
ministers, and cabinet officers hurried to acknowledge their fealty to the
uncrowned king, and hail the strange brown woman who held the keys of his
house as the first lady of the land.
When Charles Sumner called, a curious thing happened. By a code agreed on
between them, Lydia Brown touched an electric signal which informed the
old Commoner of his appearance. Stoneman hobbled to the folding-doors and
watched through the slight opening the manner in which the icy senator
greeted the negress whom he was compelled to meet thus as his social
equal, though she was always particular to pose as the superior of all who
bowed the knee to the old man whose house she kept.
Sumner at this time was supposed to be the most powerful man in Congress.
It was a harmless fiction which pleased him, and at which Stoneman loved
to laugh.
The senator from Massachusetts had just made a speech in Boston expounding
the "Equality of Man," yet he could not endure personal contact with a
negro. He would go secretly miles out of the way to avoid it.
Stoneman watched him slowly and daintily approach this negress and touch
her jewelled hand gingerly with the tips of his classic fingers as if she
were a toad. Convulsed, he scrambled back to his desk and hugged himself
while he listened to the flow of Lydia's condescending patronage in the
next room.
"This world's too good a thing to lose!" he chuckled. "I think I'll live
always."
When Sumner left, the hour for dinner had arrived, and by special
invitation two men dined with him.
On his right sat an army officer who had been dismissed from the service,
a victim of the mania for gambling. His ruddy face, iron-gray hair, and
jovial mien indicated that he enjoyed life in spite of troubles.
There were no clubs in Washington at this time except the regular
gambling-houses, of which there were more than one hundred in full blast.
Stoneman was himself a gambler, and spent a part of almost every night at
Hall & Pemberton's Faro Palace on Pennsylvania Avenue, a place noted for
its famous restaurant. It was here that he met Colonel Howle and learned
to like him. He was a man of talent, cool and audacious, and a liar of
such singular fluency that he quite captivated the old Commoner's
imagination.
"Upon my soul, Howle," he declared soon after they met, "you made the
mistake of your life going into the army. You're a born politician. You're
what I call a natural liar, just as a horse is a pacer, a dog a setter.
You lie without effort, with an ease and grace that excels all art. Had
you gone into politics, you could easily have been Secretary of State, to
say nothing of the vice-presidency. I would say President but for the fact
that men of the highest genius never attain it."
From that moment Colonel Howle had become his charmed henchman. Stoneman
owned this man body and soul, not merely because he had befriended him
when he was in trouble and friendless, but because the colonel recognized
the power of the leader's daring spirit and revolutionary genius.
On his left sat a negro of perhaps forty years, a man of charming features
for a mulatto, who had evidently inherited the full physical
characteristics of the Aryan race, while his dark yellowish eyes beneath
his heavy brows glowed with the brightness of the African jungle. It was
impossible to look at his superb face, with its large, finely chiselled
lips and massive nose, his big neck and broad shoulders, and watch his
eyes gleam beneath the projecting forehead, without seeing pictures of the
primeval forest. "The head of a Caesar and the eyes of the jungle" was the
phrase coined by an artist who painted his portrait.
His hair was black and glossy and stood in dishevelled profusion on his
head between a kink and a curl. He was an orator of great power, and
stirred a negro audience as by magic.
Lydia Brown had called Stoneman's attention to this man, Silas Lynch, and
induced the statesman to send him to college. He had graduated with credit
and had entered the Methodist ministry. In his preaching to the freedmen
he had already become a marked man. No house could hold his audiences.
As he stepped briskly into the dining-room and passed the brown woman, a
close observer might have seen him suddenly press her hand and caught her
sly answering smile, but the old man waiting at the head of the table saw
nothing.
The woman took her seat opposite Stoneman and presided over this curious
group with the easy assurance of conscious power. Whatever her real
position, she knew how to play the role she had chosen to assume.
No more curious or sinister figure ever cast a shadow across the history
of a great nation than did this mulatto woman in the most corrupt hour of
American life. The grim old man who looked into her sleek tawny face and
followed her catlike eyes was steadily gripping the Nation by the throat.
Did he aim to make this woman the arbiter of its social life, and her
ethics the limit of its moral laws?
Even the white satellite who sat opposite Lynch flushed for a moment as
the thought flashed through his brain.
The old cynic, who alone knew his real purpose, was in his most genial
mood to-night, and the grim lines of his powerful face relaxed into
something like a smile as they ate and chatted and told good stories.
Lynch watched him with keen interest. He knew his history and character,
and had built on his genius a brilliant scheme of life.
This man who meant to become the dictator of the Republic had come from
the humblest early conditions. His father was a worthless character, from
whom he had learned the trade of a shoemaker, but his mother, a woman of
vigorous intellect and indomitable will, had succeeded in giving her lame
boy a college education. He had early sworn to be a man of wealth, and to
this purpose he had throttled the dreams and ideals of a wayward
imagination.
His hope of great wealth had not been realized. His iron mills in
Pennsylvania had been destroyed by Lee's army. He had developed the habit
of gambling, which brought its train of extravagant habits, tastes, and
inevitable debts. In his vigorous manhood, in spite of his lameness, he
had kept a pack of hounds and a stable of fine horses. He had used his
skill in shoemaking to construct a set of stirrups to fit his lame feet,
and had become an expert hunter to hounds.
One thing he never neglected--to be in his seat in the House of
Representatives and wear its royal crown of leadership, sick or well, day
or night. The love of power was the breath of his nostrils, and his
ambitions had at one time been boundless. His enormous power to-day was
due to the fact that he had given up all hope of office beyond the robes
of the king of his party. He had been offered a cabinet position by the
elder Harrison and for some reason it had been withdrawn. He had been
promised a place in Lincoln's cabinet, but some mysterious power had
snatched it away. He was the one great man who had now no ambition for
which to trim and fawn and lie, and for the very reason that he had
abolished himself he was the most powerful leader who ever walked the
halls of Congress.
His contempt for public opinion was boundless. Bold, original, scornful of
advice, of all the men who ever lived in our history he was the one man
born to rule in the chaos which followed the assassination of the chief
magistrate.
Audacity was stamped in every line of his magnificent head. His choicest
curses were for the cowards of his own party before whose blanched faces
he shouted out the hidden things until they sank back in helpless silence
and dismay. His speech was curt, his humour sardonic, his wit biting,
cruel, and coarse.
The incarnate soul of revolution, he despised convention and ridiculed
respectability.
There was but one weak spot in his armour--and the world never suspected
it: the consuming passion with which he loved his two children. This was
the side of his nature he had hidden from the eyes of man. A refined
egotism, this passion, perhaps--for he meant to live his own life over in
them--yet it was the one utterly human and lovable thing about him. And if
his public policy was one of stupendous avarice, this dream of millions of
confiscated wealth he meant to seize, it was not for himself but for his
children.
As he looked at Howle and Lynch seated in his library after dinner, with
his great plans seething in his brain, his eyes were flashing, intense,
and fiery, yet without colour--simply two centres of cold light.
"Gentlemen," he said at length. "I am going to ask you to undertake for
the Government, the Nation, and yourselves a dangerous and important
mission. I say yourselves, because, in spite of all our beautiful lies,
self is the centre of all human action. Mr. Lincoln has fortunately gone
to his reward--fortunately for him and for his country. His death was
necessary to save his life. He was a useful man living, more useful dead.
Our party has lost its first President, but gained a god--why mourn?"
"We will recover from our grief," said Howle.
The old man went on, ignoring the interruption:
"Things have somehow come my way. I am almost persuaded late in life that
the gods love me. The insane fury of the North against the South for a
crime which they were the last people on earth to dream of committing is,
of course, a power to be used--but with caution. The first execution of a
Southern leader on such an idiotic charge would produce a revolution of
sentiment. The people are an aggregation of hysterical fools."
"I thought you favoured the execution of the leaders of the rebellion?"
said Lynch with surprise.
"I did, but it is too late. Had they been tried by drum-head court-martial
and shot dead red-handed as they stood on the field in their uniforms, all
would have been well. Now sentiment is too strong. Grant showed his teeth
to Stanton and he backed down from Lee's arrest. Sherman refused to shake
hands with Stanton on the grandstand the day his army passed in review,
and it's a wonder he didn't knock him down. Sherman was denounced as a
renegade and traitor for giving Joseph E. Johnston the terms Lincoln
ordered him to give. Lincoln dead, his terms are treason! Yet had he
lived, we should have been called upon to applaud his mercy and
patriotism. How can a man live in this world and keep his face straight?"
"I believe God permitted Mr. Lincoln's death to give the great Commoner,
the Leader of Leaders, the right of way," cried Lynch with enthusiasm.
The old man smiled. With all his fierce spirit he was as susceptible to
flattery as a woman--far more so than the sleek brown woman who carried
the keys of his house.
"The man at the other end of the avenue, who pretends to be President, in
reality an alien of the conquered province of Tennessee, is pressing
Lincoln's plan of 'restoring' the Union. He has organized State
governments in the South, and their senators and representatives will
appear at the Capitol in December for admission to Congress. He thinks
they will enter----"
The old man broke into a low laugh and rubbed his hands.
"My full plans are not for discussion at this juncture. Suffice it to say,
I mean to secure the future of our party and the safety of this nation.
The one thing on which the success of my plan absolutely depends is the
confiscation of the millions of acres of land owned by the white people of
the South and its division among the negroes and those who fought and
suffered in this war----"
The old Commoner paused, pursed his lips, and fumbled his hands a moment,
the nostrils of his eagle-beaked nose breathing rapacity, sensuality
throbbing in his massive jaws, and despotism frowning from his heavy
brows.
"Stanton will probably add to the hilarity of nations, and amuse himself
by hanging a few rebels," he went on, "but we will address ourselves to
serious work. All men have their price, including the present company,
with due apologies to the speaker----"
Howle's eyes danced, and he licked his lips.
"If I haven't suffered in this war, who has?"
"Your reward will not be in accordance with your sufferings. It will be
based on the efficiency with which you obey my orders. Read that----"
He handed to him a piece of paper on which he had scrawled his secret
instructions.
Another he gave to Lynch.
"Hand them back to me when you read them, and I will burn them. These
instructions are not to pass the lips of any man until the time is
ripe--four bare walls are not to hear them whispered."
Both men handed to the leader the slips of paper simultaneously.
"Are we agreed, gentlemen?"
"Perfectly," answered Howle.
"Your word is law to me, sir," said Lynch.
"Then you will draw on me personally for your expenses, and leave for the
South within forty-eight hours. I wish your reports delivered to me two
weeks before the meeting of Congress."
As Lynch passed through the hall on his way to the door, the brown woman
bade him good-night and pressed into his hand a letter.
As his yellow fingers closed on the missive, his eyes flashed for a moment
with catlike humour.
The woman's face wore the mask of a sphinx.
CHAPTER II
SWEETHEARTS
When the first shock of horror at her husband's peril passed, it left a
strange new light in Mrs. Cameron's eyes.
The heritage of centuries of heroic blood from the martyrs of old Scotland
began to flash its inspiration from the past. Her heart beat with the
unconscious life of men and women who had stood in the stocks, and walked
in chains to the stake with songs on their lips.
The threat against the life of Doctor Cameron had not only stirred her
martyr blood: it had roused the latent heroism of a beautiful girlhood. To
her he had ever been the lover and the undimmed hero of her girlish
dreams. She spent whole hours locked in her room alone. Margaret knew that
she was on her knees. She always came forth with shining face and with
soft words on her lips.
She struggled for two months in vain efforts to obtain a single interview
with him, or to obtain a copy of the charges. Doctor Cameron had been
placed in the old Capitol Prison, already crowded to the utmost. He was in
delicate health, and so ill when she had left home he could not accompany
her to Richmond.
Not a written or spoken word was allowed to pass those prison doors. She
could communicate with him only through the officers in charge. Every
message from him was the same. "I love you always. Do not worry. Go home
the moment you can leave Ben. I fear the worst at Piedmont."
When he had sent this message, he would sit down and write the truth in a
little diary he kept:
"Another day of anguish. How long, O Lord? Just one touch of her hand, one
last pressure of her lips, and I am content. I have no desire to live--I
am tired."
The officers repeated the verbal messages, but they made no impression on
Mrs. Cameron. By a mental telepathy which had always linked her life with
his her soul had passed those prison bars. If he had written the pitiful
record with a dagger's point on her heart, she could not have felt it more
keenly.
At times overwhelmed, she lay prostrate and sobbed in half-articulate
cries. And then from the silence and mystery of the spirit world in which
she felt the beat of the heart of Eternal Love would come again the
strange peace that passeth understanding. She would rise and go forth to
her task with a smile.
In July she saw Mrs. Surratt taken from this old Capitol Prison to be hung
with Payne, Herold, and Atzerodt for complicity in the assassination. The
military commission before whom this farce of justice was enacted,
suspicious of the testimony of the perjured wretches who had sworn her
life away, had filed a memorandum with their verdict asking the President
for mercy.
President Johnson never saw this memorandum. It was secretly removed in
the War Department, and only replaced after he had signed the death
warrant.
In vain Annie Surratt, the weeping daughter, flung herself on the steps of
the White House on the fatal day, begging and praying to see the
President. She could not believe they would allow her mother to be
murdered in the face of a recommendation of mercy. The fatal hour struck
at last, and the girl left the White House with set eyes and blanched
face, muttering incoherent curses.
The Chief Magistrate sat within, unconscious of the hideous tragedy that
was being enacted in his name. When he discovered the infamy by which he
had been made the executioner of an innocent woman, he made his first
demand that Edwin M. Stanton resign from his cabinet as Secretary of War.
And for the first time in the history of America, a cabinet officer waived
the question of honour and refused to resign.
With a shudder and blush of shame, strong men saw that day the executioner
gather the ropes tightly three times around the dress of an innocent
American mother and bind her ankles with cords. She fainted and sank
backward upon the attendants, the poor limbs yielding at last to the
mortal terror of death. But they propped her up and sprung the fatal
trap.
A feeling of uncertainty and horror crept over the city and the Nation, as
rumours of the strange doings of the "Bureau of Military Justice," with
its secret factory of testimony and powers of tampering with verdicts,
began to find their way in whispered stories among the people.
Public opinion, however, had as yet no power of adjustment. It was an hour
of lapse to tribal insanity. Things had gone wrong. The demand for a
scapegoat, blind, savage, and unreasoning, had not spent itself. The
Government could do anything as yet, and the people would applaud.
Mrs. Cameron had tried in vain to gain a hearing before the President.
Each time she was directed to apply to Mr. Stanton. She refused to attempt
to see him, and again turned to Elsie for help. She had learned that the
same witnesses who had testified against Mrs. Surratt were being used to
convict Doctor Cameron, and her heart was sick with fear.
"Ask your father," she pleaded, "to write President Johnson a letter in my
behalf. Whatever his politics, he can't be _your_ father and not be good
at heart."
Elsie paled for a moment. It was the one request she had dreaded. She
thought of her father and Stanton with dread. How far he was supporting
the Secretary of War she could only vaguely guess. He rarely spoke of
politics to her, much as he loved her.
"I'll try, Mrs. Cameron," she faltered. "My father is in town to-day and
takes dinner with us before he leaves for Pennsylvania to-night. I'll go
at once."
With fear, and yet boldly, she went straight home to present her request.
She knew he was a man who never cherished small resentments, however cruel
and implacable might be his public policies. And yet she dreaded to put it
to the test.
"Father, I've a very important request to make of you," she said gravely.
"Very well, my child, you need not be so solemn. What is it?"
"I've some friends in great distress--Mrs. Cameron, of South Carolina, and
her daughter Margaret."
"Friends of yours?" he asked with an incredulous smile. "Where on earth
did you find them?"
"In the hospital, of course. Mrs. Cameron is not allowed to see her
husband, who has been here in jail for over two months. He cannot write to
her, nor can he receive a letter from her. He is on trial for his life, is
ill and helpless, and is not allowed to know the charges against him,
while hired witnesses and detectives have broken open his house, searched
his papers, and are ransacking heaven and earth to convict him of a crime
of which he never dreamed. It's a shame. You don't approve of such things,
I know?"
"What's the use of my expressing an opinion when you have already settled
it?" he answered good-humouredly.
"You _don't_ approve of such injustice?"
"Certainly not, my child. Stanton's frantic efforts to hang a lot of
prominent Southern men for complicity in Booth's crime is sheer insanity.
Nobody who has any sense believes them guilty. As a politician I use
popular clamour for my purposes, but I am not an idiot. When I go gunning,
I never use a popgun or hunt small game."
"Then you will write the President a letter asking that they be allowed to
see Doctor Cameron?"
The old man frowned.
"Think, father, if you were in jail and friendless, and I were trying to
see you----"
"Tut, tut, my dear, it's not that I am unwilling--I was only thinking of
the unconscious humour of _my_ making a request of the man who at present
accidentally occupies the White House. Of all the men on earth, this alien
from the province of Tennessee! But I'll do it for you. When did you ever
know me to deny my help to a weak man or woman in distress?"
"Never, father. I was sure you would do it," she answered warmly.
He wrote the letter at once and handed it to her.
She bent and kissed him.
"I can't tell you how glad I am to know that you have no part in such
injustice."
"You should not have believed me such a fool, but I'll forgive you for the
kiss. Run now with this letter to your rebel friends, you little traitor!
Wait a minute----"
He shuffled to his feet, placed his hand tenderly on her head, and stooped
and kissed the shining hair.
"I wonder if you know how I love you? How I've dreamed of your future? I
may not see you every day as I wish; I'm absorbed in great affairs. But
more and more I think of you and Phil. I'll have a big surprise for you
both some day."
"Your love is all I ask," she answered simply.
Within an hour, Mrs. Cameron found herself before the new President. The
letter had opened the door as by magic. She poured out her story with
impetuous eloquence while Mr. Johnson listened in uneasy silence. His
ruddy face, his hesitating manner, and restless eyes were in striking
contrast to the conscious power of the tall dark man who had listened so
tenderly and sympathetically to her story of Ben but a few weeks before.
The President asked:
"Have you seen Mr. Stanton?"
"I have seen him once," she cried with sudden passion. "It is enough. If
that man were God on His throne, I would swear allegiance to the devil and
fight him!"
The President lifted his eyebrows and his lips twitched with a smile:
"I shouldn't say that your spirits are exactly drooping! I'd like to be
near and hear you make that remark to the distinguished Secretary of
War."
"Will you grant my prayer?" she pleaded.
"I will consider the matter," he promised evasively.
Mrs. Cameron's heart sank.
"Mr. President," she cried bitterly, "I have felt sure that I had but to
see you face to face and you could not deny me. Surely it is but justice
that he have the right to see his loved ones, to consult with counsel, to
know the charges against him, and defend his life when attacked in his
poverty and ruin by all the power of a mighty government? He is feeble and
broken in health and suffering from wounds received carrying the flag of
the Union to victory in Mexico. Whatever his errors of judgment in this
war, it is a shame that a Nation for which he once bared his breast in
battle should treat him as an outlaw without a trial."
"You must remember, madam," interrupted the President, "that these are
extraordinary times, and that popular clamour, however unjust, will make
itself felt and must be heeded by those in power. I am sorry for you, and
I trust it may be possible for me to grant your request."
"But I wish it now," she urged. "He sends me word I must go home. I can't
leave without seeing him. I will die first."
She drew closer and continued in throbbing tones:
"Mr. President, you are a native Carolinian--you are of Scotch Covenanter
blood. You are of my own people of the great past, whose tears and
sufferings are our common glory and birthright. Come, you must hear me--I
will take no denial. Give me now the order to see my husband!"
The President hesitated, struggling with deep emotion, called his
secretary, and gave the order.
As she hurried away with Elsie, who insisted on accompanying her to the
jail door, the girl said:
"Mrs. Cameron, I fear you are without money. You must let me help you
until you can return it."
"You are the dearest little heart I've met in all the world, I think
sometimes," said the older woman, looking at her tenderly. "I wonder how I
can ever pay you for half you've done already."
"The doing of it has been its own reward," was the soft reply. "May I help
you?"
"If I need it, yes. But I trust it will not be necessary. I still have a
little store of gold Doctor Cameron was wise enough to hoard during the
war. I brought half of it with me when I left home, and we buried the
rest. I hope to find it on my return. And if we can save the twenty bales
of cotton we have hidden we shall be relieved of want."
"I'm ashamed of my country when I think of such ignoble methods as have
been used against Doctor Cameron. My father is indignant, too."
The last sentence Elsie spoke with eager girlish pride.
"I am very grateful to your father for his letter. I am sorry he has left
the city before I could meet and thank him personally. You must tell him
for me."
At the jail the order of the President was not honoured for three hours,
and Mrs. Cameron paced the street in angry impatience at first and then in
dull despair.
"Do you think that man Stanton would dare defy the President?" she asked
anxiously.
"No," said Elsie, "but he is delaying as long as possible as an act of
petty tyranny."
At last the messenger arrived from the War Department permitting an order
of the Chief Magistrate of the nation, the Commander-in-Chief of its Army
and Navy, to be executed.
The grated door swung on its heavy hinges, and the wife and mother lay
sobbing in the arms of the lover of her youth.
For two hours they poured into each other's hearts the story of their
sorrows and struggles during the six fateful months that had passed. When
she would return from every theme back to his danger, he would laugh her
fears to scorn.
"Nonsense, my dear, I'm as innocent as a babe. Mr. Davis was suffering
from erysipelas, and I kept him in my house that night to relieve his
pain. It will all blow over. I'm happy now that I have seen you. Ben will
be up in a few days. You must return at once. You have no idea of the wild
chaos at home. I left Jake in charge. I have implicit faith in him, but
there's no telling what may happen. I will not spend another moment in
peace until you go."
The proud old man spoke of his own danger with easy assurance. He was
absolutely certain, since the day of Mrs. Surratt's execution, that he
would be railroaded to the gallows by the same methods. He had long looked
on the end with indifference, and had ceased to desire to live except to
see his loved ones again.
In vain she warned him of danger.
"My peril is nothing, my love," he answered quietly. "At home, the horrors
of a servile reign of terror have become a reality. These prison walls do
not interest me. My heart is with our stricken people. You must go home.
Our neighbour, Mr. Lenoir, is slowly dying. His wife will always be a
child. Little Marion is older and more self-reliant. I feel as if they are
our own children. There are so many who need us. They have always looked
to me for guidance and help. You can do more for them than any one else.
My calling is to heal others. You have always helped me. Do now as I ask
you."
At last she consented to leave for Piedmont on the following day, and he
smiled.
"Kiss Ben and Margaret for me and tell them that I'll be with them soon,"
he said cheerily. He meant in the spirit, not the flesh. Not the faintest
hope of life even flickered in his mind.
In the last farewell embrace a faint tremor of the soul, half sigh, half
groan, escaped his lips, and he drew her again to his breast, whispering:
"Always my sweetheart, good, beautiful, brave, and true!"
CHAPTER III
THE JOY OF LIVING
Within two weeks after the departure of Mrs. Cameron and Margaret, the
wounded soldier had left the hospital with Elsie's hand resting on his arm
and her keen eyes watching his faltering steps. She had promised Margaret
to take her place until he was strong again. She was afraid to ask herself
the meaning of the songs that were welling up from the depth of her own
soul. She told herself again and again that she was fulfilling her ideal
of unselfish human service.
Ben's recovery was rapid, and he soon began to give evidence of his
boundless joy in the mere fact of life.
He utterly refused to believe his father in danger.
"What, my dad a conspirator, an assassin!" he cried, with a laugh. "Why,
he wouldn't kill a flea without apologising to it. And as for plots and
dark secrets, he never had a secret in his life and couldn't keep one if
he had it. My mother keeps all the family secrets. Crime couldn't stick to
him any more than dirty water to a duck's back!"
"But we must secure his release on parole, that he may defend himself."
"Of course. But we won't cross any bridges till we come to them. I never
saw things so bad they couldn't be worse. Just think what I've been
through. The war's over. Don't worry."
He looked at her tenderly.
"Get that banjo and play 'Get out of the Wilderness!'"
His spirit was contagious and his good humour resistless. Elsie spent the
days of his convalescence in an unconscious glow of pleasure in his
companionship. His handsome boyish face, his bearing, his whole
personality, invited frankness and intimacy. It was a divine gift, this
magnetism, the subtle meeting of quick intelligence, tact, and sympathy.
His voice was tender and penetrating, with soft caresses in its tones. His
vision of life was large and generous, with a splendid carelessness about
little things that didn't count. Each day Elsie saw new and striking
traits of his character which drew her.
"What will we do if Stanton arrests you one of these fine days?" she asked
him one day.
"Afraid they'll nab me for something?" he exclaimed. "Well, that is a
joke. Don't you worry. The Yankees know who to fool with. I licked 'em too
many times for them to bother me any more."
"I was under the impression that you got licked," Elsie observed.
"Don't you believe it. We wore ourselves out whipping the other fellows."
Elsie smiled, took up the banjo, and asked him to sing while she played.
She had no idea that he could sing, yet to her surprise he sang his camp
songs boldly, tenderly, and with deep, expressive feeling.
As the girl listened, the memory of the horrible hours of suspense she had
spent with his mother when his unconscious life hung on a thread came
trooping back into her heart and a tear dimmed her eyes.
And he began to look at her with a new wonder and joy slowly growing in
his soul.
CHAPTER IV
HIDDEN TREASURE
Ben had spent a month of vain effort to secure his father's release. He
had succeeded in obtaining for him a removal to more comfortable quarters,
books to read, and the privilege of a daily walk under guard and parole.
The doctor's genial temper, the wide range of his knowledge, the charm of
his personality, and his heroism in suffering had captivated the surgeons
who attended him and made friends of every jailer and guard.
Elsie was now using all her woman's wit to secure a copy of the charges
against him as formulated by the Judge Advocate General, who, in defiance
of civil law, still claimed control of these cases.
To the boy's sanguine temperament the whole proceeding had been a huge
farce from the beginning, and at the last interview with his father he had
literally laughed him into good humour.
"Look here, pa," he cried. "I believe you're trying to slip off and leave
us in this mess. It's not fair. It's easy to die."
"Who said I was going to die?"
"I heard you were trying to crawl out that way."
"Well, it's a mistake. I'm going to live just for the fun of disappointing
my enemies and to keep you company. But you'd better get hold of a copy of
these charges against me--if you don't want me to escape."
"It's a funny world if a man can be condemned to death without any
information on the subject."
"My son, we are now in the hands of the revolutionists, army sutlers,
contractors, and adventurers. The Nation will touch the lowest tide-mud of
its degradation within the next few years. No man can predict the end."
"Oh, go 'long!" said Ben. "You've got jail cobwebs in your eyes."
"I'm depending on you."
"I'll pull you through if you don't lie down on me and die to get out of
trouble. You know you _can_ die if you try hard enough."
"I promise you, my boy," he said with a laugh.
"Then I'll let you read this letter from home," Ben said, suddenly
thrusting it before him.
The doctor's hand trembled a little as he put on his glasses and read:
_My Dear Boy_: I cannot tell you how much good your bright letters
have done us. It's like opening the window and letting in the sunlight
while fresh breezes blow through one's soul.
Margaret and I have had stirring times. I send you enclosed an order
for the last dollar of money we have left. You must hoard it. Make it
last until your father is safe at home. I dare not leave it here.
Nothing is safe. Every piece of silver and everything that could be
carried has been stolen since we returned.
Uncle Aleck betrayed the place Jake had hidden our twenty precious
bales of cotton. The war is long since over, but the "Treasury Agent"
declared them confiscated, and then offered to relieve us of his order
if we gave him five bales, each worth three hundred dollars in gold. I
agreed, and within a week another thief came and declared the other
fifteen bales confiscated. They steal it, and the Government never
gets a cent. We dared not try to sell it in open market, as every bale
exposed for sale is "confiscated" at once.
No crop was planted this summer. The negroes are all drawing rations
at the Freedman's Bureau.
We have turned our house into a hotel, and our table has become
famous. Margaret is a treasure. She has learned to do everything. We
tried to raise a crop on the farm when we came home, but the negroes
stopped work. The Agent of the Bureau came to us and said he could
send them back for a fee of $50. We paid it, and they worked a week.
We found it easier to run a hotel. We hope to start the farm next
year.
Our new minister at the Presbyterian Church is young, handsome, and
eloquent--Rev. Hugh McAlpin.
Mr. Lenoir died last week--but his end was so beautiful, our tears
were half joy. He talked incessantly of your father and how the
country missed him. He seemed much better the day before the end came,
and we took him for a little drive to Lovers' Leap. It was there,
sixteen years ago, he made love to Jeannie. When we propped him up on
the rustic seat, and he looked out over the cliff and the river below,
I have never seen a face so transfigured with peace and joy.
"What a beautiful world it is, my dears!" he exclaimed, taking Jeannie
and Marion both by the hand.
They began to cry, and he said with a smile:
"Come now--do you love me?"
And they covered his hands with kisses.
"Well, then you must promise me two things faithfully here, with Mrs.
Cameron to witness!"
"We promise," they both said in a breath.
"That when I fall asleep, not one thread of black shall ever cloud the
sunlight of our little home, that you will never wear it, and that you
will show your love for me by making my flowers grow richer, that you
will keep my memory green by always being as beautiful as you are
to-day, and make this old world a sweeter place to live in. I wish
you, Jeannie, my mate, to keep on making the young people glad. Don't
let their joys be less even for a month because I have laid down to
rest. Let them sing and dance----"
"Oh, Papa!" cried Marion.
"Certainly, my little serious beauty--I'll not be far away, I'll be
near and breathe my songs into their hearts, and into yours--you both
promise?"
"Yes, yes!" they both cried.
As we drove back through the woods, he smiled tenderly and said to
me:
"My neighbour, Doctor Cameron, pays taxes on these woods, but I own
them! Their sighing boughs, stirred by the breezes, have played for me
oratorios grander than all the scores of human genius. I'll hear the
Choir Invisible play them when I sleep."
He died that night suddenly. With his last breath he sighed:
"Draw the curtains and let me see again the moonlit woods!"
They are trying to carry out his wishes. I found they had nothing to
eat, and that he had really died from insufficient nourishment--a
polite expression meaning starvation. I've divided half our little
store with them and send the rest to you. I think Marion more and more
the incarnate soul of her father. I feel as if they are both my
children.
My little grandchick, Hugh, is the sweetest youngster alive. He was a
wee thing when you left. Mrs. Lenoir kept him when they arrested your
father. He is so much like your brother Hugh I feel as if he has come
to life again. You should hear him say grace, so solemnly and
tenderly, we can't help crying. He made it up himself. This is what he
says at every meal:
"God, please give my grandpa something good to eat in jail, keep him
well, don't let the pains hurt him any more, and bring him home to me
quick, for Jesus' sake. Amen."
I never knew before how the people loved the doctor, nor how dependent
they were on him for help and guidance. Men, both white and coloured,
come here every day to ask about him. Some of them come from far up in
the mountains.
God alone knows how lonely our home and the world has seemed without
him. They say that those who love and live the close sweet home life
for years grow alike in soul and body, in tastes, ways, and habits. I
find it so. People have told me that your father and I are more alike
than brother and sister of the same blood. In spirit I'm sure it's
true. I know you love him and that you will leave nothing undone for
his health and safety. Tell him that my only cure for loneliness in
his absence is my fight to keep the wolf from the door, and save our
home against his coming.
Lovingly, your Mother.
When the doctor had finished the reading, he looked out the window of the
jail at the shining dome of the Capitol for a moment in silence.
"Do you know, my boy, that you have the heritage of royal blood? You are
the child of a wonderful mother. I'm ashamed when I think of the helpless
stupor under which I have given up, and then remember the deathless
courage with which she has braved it all--the loss of her boys, her
property, your troubles and mine. She has faced the world alone like a
wounded lioness standing over her cubs. And now she turns her home into a
hotel, and begins life in a strange new world without one doubt of her
success. The South is yet rich even in its ruin."
"Then you'll fight and go back to her with me?"
"Yes, never fear."
"Good! You see, we're so poor now, pa, you're lucky to be saving a board
bill here. I'd 'conspire' myself and come in with you but for the fact it
would hamper me a little in helping you."
CHAPTER V
ACROSS THE CHASM
When Ben had fully recovered and his father's case looked hopeful, Elsie
turned to her study of music, and the Southern boy suddenly waked to the
fact that the great mystery of life was upon him. He was in love at
last--genuinely, deeply, without one reservation. He had from habit
flirted in a harmless way with every girl he knew. He left home with
little Marion Lenoir's girlish kiss warm on his lips. He had made love to
many a pretty girl in old Virginia as the red tide of war had ebbed and
flowed around Stuart's magic camps.
But now the great hour of the soul had struck. No sooner had he dropped
the first tender words that might have their double meaning, feeling his
way cautiously toward her, than she had placed a gulf of dignity between
them, and attempted to cut every tie that bound her life to his.
It had been so sudden it took his breath away. Could he win her? The word
"fail" had never been in his vocabulary. It had never run in the speech of
his people.
Yes, he would win if it was the only thing he did in this world. And
forthwith he set about it. Life took on new meaning and new glory. What
mattered war or wounds, pain or poverty, jails and revolutions--it was the
dawn of life!
He sent her a flower every day and pinned one just like it on his coat.
And every night found him seated by her side. She greeted him cordially,
but the gulf yawned between them. His courtesy and self-control struck her
with surprise and admiration. In the face of her coldness he carried about
him an air of smiling deference and gallantry.
She finally told him of her determination to go to New York to pursue her
studies until Phil had finished the term of his enlistment in his
regiment, which had been ordered on permanent duty in the West.
He laughed with his eyes at this announcement, blinking the lashes rapidly
without moving his lips. It was a peculiar habit of his when deeply moved
by a sudden thought. It had flashed over him like lightning that she was
trying to get away from him. She would not do that unless she cared.
"When are you going?" he asked quietly.
"Day after to-morrow."
"Then you will give me one afternoon for a sail on the river to say
good-bye and thank you for what you have done for me and mine?"
She hesitated, laughed, and refused.
"To-morrow at four o'clock I'll call for you," he said firmly. "If there's
no wind, we can drift with the tide."
"I will not have time to go."
"Promptly at four," he repeated as he left.
Ben spent hours that night weighing the question of how far he should dare
to speak his love. It had been such an easy thing before. Now it seemed a
question of life and death. Twice the magic words had been on his lips,
and each time something in her manner chilled him into silence.
Was she cold and incapable of love? No; this manner of the North was on
the surface. He knew that deep down within her nature lay banked and
smouldering fires of passion for the one man whose breath could stir it
into flame. He felt this all the keener now that the spell of her
companionship and the sweet intimacy of her daily ministry to him had been
broken. The memory of little movements of her petite figure, the glance of
her warm amber eyes, and the touch of her hand--all had their tongues of
revelation to his eager spirit.
He found her ready at four o'clock.
"You see I decided to go after all," she said.
"Yes, I knew you would," he answered.
She was dressed in a simple suit of navy-blue cloth cut V-shaped at the
throat, showing the graceful lines of her exquisite neck as it melted into
the plump shoulders. She had scorned hoop skirts.
He admired her for this, and yet it made him uneasy. A woman who could
defy an edict of fashion was a new thing under the sun, and it scared
him.
They were seated in the little sailboat now, drifting out with the tide.
It was a perfect day in October, one of those matchless days of Indian
summer in the Virginia climate when an infinite peace and vast brooding
silence fill the earth and sky until one feels that words are a
sacrilege.
Neither of them spoke for minutes, and his heart grew bold in the
stillness. No girl could be still who was unmoved.
She was seated just in front of him on the left, with her hand idly
rippling the surface of the silvery waters, gazing at the wooded cliff on
the river banks clothed now in their gorgeous robes of yellow, purple,
scarlet, and gold.
The soft strains of distant music came from a band in the fort, and her
hand in the rippling water seemed its accompaniment.
Ben was conscious only of her presence. Every sight and sound of nature
seemed to be blended in her presence. Never in all his life had he seen
anything so delicately beautiful as the ripe rose colour of her cheeks,
and all the tints of autumn's glory seemed to melt into the gold of her
hair.
And those eyes he felt that God had never set in such a face before--rich
amber, warm and glowing, big and candid, courageous and truthful.
"Are you dead again?" she asked demurely.
"Well, as the Irishman said in answer to his mate's question when he fell
off the house, 'not dead--but spacheless.'"
He was quick to see the opening her question with its memories had made,
and took advantage of it.
"Look here, Miss Elsie, you're too honest, independent, and candid to play
hide-and-seek with me. I want to ask you a plain question. You've been
trying to pick a quarrel of late. What have I done?"
"Nothing. It has simply come to me that our lives are far apart. The gulf
between us is real and very deep. Your father was but yesterday a
slaveholder----"
Ben grinned:
"Yes, your slave-trading grandfather sold them to us the day before."
Elsie blushed and bristled for a fight.
"You won't mind if I give you a few lessons in history, will you?" Ben
asked softly.
"Not in the least. I didn't know that Southerners studied history," she
answered, with a toss of her head.
"We made a specialty of the history of slavery, at least. I had a dear old
teacher at home who fairly blazed with light on this subject. He is one of
the best-read men in America. He happens to be in jail just now. But I
haven't forgotten--I know it by heart."
"I am waiting for light," she interrupted cynically.
"The South is no more to blame for negro slavery than the North. Our
slaves were stolen from Africa by Yankee skippers. When a slaver arrived
at Boston, your pious Puritan clergyman offered public prayer of thanks
that 'A gracious and overruling Providence had been pleased to bring to
this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathen to enjoy the
blessings of a gospel dispensation----'"
She looked at him with angry incredulity and cried:
"Go on."
"Twenty-three times the Legislature of Virginia passed acts against the
importation of slaves, which the king vetoed on petition of the
Massachusetts slave traders. Jefferson made these acts of the king one of
the grievances of the Declaration of Independence, but a Massachusetts
member succeeded in striking it out. The Southern men in the convention
which framed the Constitution put into it a clause abolishing the slave
trade, but the Massachusetts men succeeded in adding a clause extending
the trade twenty years----"
He smiled and paused.
"Go on," she said, with impatience.
"In Colonial days a negro woman was publicly burned to death in Boston.
The first Abolition paper was published in Tennessee by Embree. Benjamin
Lundy, his successor, could not find a single Abolitionist in Boston. In
1828 over half the people of Tennessee favoured Abolition. At this time
there were one hundred and forty Abolition Societies in America--one
hundred and three in the South, and not one in Massachusetts. It was not
until 1836 that Massachusetts led in Abolition--not until all her own
slaves had been sold to us at a profit and the slave trade had been
destroyed----"
She looked at Ben with anger for a moment and met his tantalizing look of
good humour.
"Can you stand any more?"
"Certainly, I enjoy it."
"I'm just breaking down the barriers--so to speak," he said, with the
laughter still lurking in his eyes, as he looked steadily ahead.
"By all means go on," she said soberly. "I thought at first you were
trying to tease me. I see that you are in earnest."
"Never more so. This is about the only little path of history I'm at home
in--I love to show off in it. I heard a cheerful idiot say the other day
that your father meant to carry the civilization of Massachusetts to the
Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While
Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor,
founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the
right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the
home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New
England people worth less than one thousand dollars were prohibited by law
from wearing the garb of a gentleman, gold or silver lace, buttons on the
knees, or to walk in great boots, or their women to wear silk or scarfs,
while the Quakers, Maryland Catholics, Baptists, and Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians were everywhere in the South the heralds of man's equality
before the law."
"But barring our ancestors, I have some things against the men of this
generation."
"Have I, too, sinned and come short?" he asked with mock gravity.
"Our ideals of life are far apart," she firmly declared.
"What ails my ideal?"
"Your egotism, for one thing. The air with which you calmly select what
pleases your fancy. Northern men are bad enough--the insolence of a
Southerner is beyond words!"
[Illustration: LILLIAN GISH AS ELSIE, AND THE SENTINEL.]
"You don't say so!" cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. "Isn't your
aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?"
"Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman."
"Enlighten me further."
"I deny your heaven-born male kingship. The lord of creation is after all
a very inferior animal--nearer the brute creation, weaker in infancy,
shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting, and addicted
to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life--did you?"
"Come to think of it, I never did," acknowledged Ben with comic gravity.
"What else?"
"Isn't that enough?"
"It's nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is irrelevant. I'm
studying law, you know."
"I have a personality of my own. You and your kind assume the right to
absorb all lesser lights."
"Certainly, I'm a man."
"I don't care to be absorbed by a mere man."
"Don't wish to be protected, sheltered, and cared for?"
"I dream of a life that shall be larger than the four walls of a home. I
have never gone into hysterics over the idea of becoming a cook and
housekeeper without wages, and snuffing my life out while another grows,
expands, and claims the lordship of the world. I can sing. My voice is to
me what eloquence is to man. My ideal is an intellectual companion who
will inspire and lead me to develop all that I feel within to its highest
reach."
She paused a moment and looked defiantly into Ben's brown eyes, about
which a smile was constantly playing. He looked away, and again the river
echoed with his contagious laughter. She had to join in spite of herself.
He laughed with boyish gayety. It danced in his eyes, and gave spring to
every movement of his slender wiry body. She felt its contagion enfold
her.
His laughter melted into a song. In a voice vibrant with joy he sang, "If
you get there before I do, tell 'em I'm comin' too!"
As Elsie listened, her anger grew as she recalled the amazing folly that
had induced her to tell the secret feelings of her inmost soul to this man
almost a stranger. Whence came this miracle of influence about him, this
gift of intimacy? She felt a shock as if she had been immodest. She was in
an agony of doubt as to what he was thinking of her, and dreaded to meet
his gaze.
And yet, when he turned toward her, his whole being a smiling compound of
dark Southern blood and bone and fire, at the sound of his voice all doubt
and questioning melted.
"Do you know," he said earnestly, "that you are the funniest, most
charming girl I ever met?"
"Thanks. I've heard your experience has been large for one of your age."
Ben's eyes danced.
"Perhaps, yes. You appeal to things in me that I didn't know were
there--to all the senses of body and soul at once. Your strength of mind,
with its conceits, and your quick little temper seem so odd and out of
place, clothed in the gentleness of your beauty."
"I was never more serious in my life. There are other things more personal
about you that I do not like."
"What?"
"Your cavalier habits."
"Cavalier fiddlesticks. There are no Cavaliers in my country. We are all
Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy
loafing dreamers is a myth. I was raised on the catechism."
"You love to fish and hunt and frolic--you flirt with every girl you meet,
and you drink sometimes. I often feel that you are cruel and that I do not
know you."
Ben's face grew serious, and the red scar in the edge of his hair suddenly
became livid with the rush of blood.
"Perhaps I don't mean that you shall know all yet," he said slowly. "My
ideal of a man is one that leads, charms, dominates, and yet eludes. I
confess that I'm close kin to an angel and a devil, and that I await a
woman's hand to lead me into the ways of peace and life."
The spiritual earnestness of the girl was quick to catch the subtle appeal
of his last words. His broad, high forehead, straight, masterly nose, with
its mobile nostrils, seemed to her very manly at just that moment and very
appealing. A soft answer was on her lips.
He saw it, and leaned toward her in impulsive tenderness. A timid look on
her face caused him to sink back in silence.
They had now drifted near the city. The sun was slowly sinking in a
smother of fiery splendour that mirrored its changing hues in the still
water. The hush of the harvest fullness of autumn life was over all
nature. They passed a camp of soldiers and then a big hospital on the
banks above. A gun flashed from the hill, and the flag dropped from its
staff.
The girl's eyes lingered on the flower in his coat a moment and then on
the red scar in the edge of his dark hair, and somehow the difference
between them seemed to melt into the falling twilight. Only his nearness
was real. Again a strange joy held her.
He threw her a look of tenderness, and she began to tremble. A sea gull
poised a moment above them and broke into a laugh.
Bending nearer, he gently took her hand, and said:
"I love you!"
A sob caught her breath and she buried her face on her arm.
"I am for you, and you are for me. Why beat your wings against the thing
that is and must be? What else matters? With all my sins and faults my
land is yours--a land of sunshine, eternal harvests, and everlasting song,
old-fashioned and provincial perhaps, but kind and hospitable. Around its
humblest cottage song birds live and mate and nest and never leave. The
winged ones of your own cold fields have heard their call, and the sky
to-night will echo with their chatter as they hurry southward. Elsie, my
own, I too have called--come; I love you!"
She lifted her face to him full of tender spiritual charm, her eyes
burning their passionate answer.
He bent and kissed her.
"Say it! Say it!" he whispered.
"I love you!" she sighed.
CHAPTER VI
THE GAUGE OF BATTLE
The day of the first meeting of the National Congress after the war was
one of intense excitement. The galleries of the House were packed. Elsie
was there with Ben in a fever of secret anxiety lest the stirring drama
should cloud her own life. She watched her father limp to his seat with
every eye fixed on him.
The President had pursued with persistence the plan of Lincoln for the
immediate restoration of the Union. Would Congress follow the lead of the
President or challenge him to mortal combat?
Civil governments had been restored in all the Southern States, with men
of the highest ability chosen as governors and lawmakers. Their
legislatures had unanimously voted for the Thirteenth Amendment of the
Constitution abolishing slavery, and elected senators and representatives
to Congress. Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, had declared the new
amendment a part of the organic law of the Nation by the vote of these
States.
General Grant went to the South to report its condition and boldly
declared:
"I am satisfied that the mass of thinking people of the South accept the
situation in good faith. Slavery and secession they regard as settled
forever by the highest known tribunal, and consider this decision a
fortunate one for the whole country."
Would the Southerners be allowed to enter?
Amid breathless silence the clerk rose to call the roll of members-elect.
Every ear was bent to hear the name of the first Southern man. Not one was
called! The Master had spoken. His clerk knew how to play his part.
The next business of the House was to receive the message of the Chief
Magistrate of the Nation.
The message came, but not from the White House. It came from the seat of
the Great Commoner.
As the first thrill of excitement over the challenge to the President
slowly subsided, Stoneman rose, planted his big club foot in the middle of
the aisle, and delivered to Congress the word of its new master.
It was Ben's first view of the man of all the world just now of most
interest. From his position he could see his full face and figure.
He began speaking in a careless, desultory way. His tone was loud yet not
declamatory, at first in a grumbling, grandfatherly, half-humorous,
querulous accent that riveted every ear instantly. A sort of drollery of a
contagious kind haunted it. Here and there a member tittered in
expectation of a flash of wit.
His figure was taller than the average, slightly bent, with a dignity
which suggested reserve power and contempt for his audience. One knew
instinctively that back of the boldest word this man might say there was a
bolder unspoken word he had chosen not to speak.
His limbs were long, and their movements slow, yet nervous as from some
internal fiery force. His hands were big and ugly, and always in
ungraceful fumbling motion as though a separate soul dwelt within them.
The heaped-up curly profusion of his brown wig gave a weird impression to
the spread of his mobile features. His eagle-beaked nose had three
distinct lines and angles. His chin was broad and bold, and his brows
beetling and projecting. His mouth was wide, marked, and grim; when
opened, deep and cavernous; when closed, it seemed to snap so tightly that
the lower lip protruded.
Of all his make-up, his eye was the most fascinating, and it held Ben
spellbound. It could thrill to the deepest fibre of the soul that looked
into it, yet it did not gleam. It could dominate, awe, and confound, yet
it seemed to have no colour or fire. He could easily see it across the
vast hall from the galleries, yet it was not large. Two bold, colourless
dagger-points of light they seemed. As he grew excited, they darkened as
if passing under a cloud.
A sudden sweep of his huge apelike arm in an angular gesture, and the
drollery and carelessness of his voice were riven from it as by a bolt of
lightning.
He was driving home his message now in brutal frankness. Yet in the height
of his fiercest invective he never seemed to strengthen himself or call on
his resources. In its climax he was careless, conscious of power, and
contemptuous of results, as though as a gambler he had staked and lost all
and in the moment of losing suddenly become the master of those who had
beaten him.
His speech never once bent to persuade or convince. He meant to brain the
opposition with a single blow, and he did it. For he suddenly took the
breath from his foes by shouting in their faces the hidden motive of which
they were hoping to accuse him!
"Admit these Southern Representatives," he cried, "and with the Democrats
elected from the North, within one term they will have a majority in
Congress and the Electoral College. The supremacy of our party's life is
at stake. The man who dares palter with such a measure is a rebel, a
traitor to his party and his people."
A cheer burst from his henchmen, and his foes sat in dazed stupor at his
audacity. He moved the appointment of a "Committee on Reconstruction" to
whom the entire government of the "conquered provinces of the South"
should be committed, and to whom all credentials of their pretended
representatives should be referred.
He sat down as the Speaker put his motion, declared it carried, and
quickly announced the names of this Imperial Committee with the Hon.
Austin Stoneman as its chairman.
He then permitted the message of the President of the United States to be
read by his clerk.
"Well, upon my soul," said Ben, taking a deep breath and looking at Elsie,
"he's the whole thing, isn't he?"
The girl smiled with pride.
"Yes; he is a genius. He was born to command and yet never could resist
the cry of a child or the plea of a woman. He hates, but he hates ideas
and systems. He makes threats, yet when he meets the man who stands for
all he hates he falls in love with his enemy."
"Then there's hope for me?"
"Yes, but I must be the judge of the time to speak."
"Well, if he looks at me as he did once to-day, you may have to do the
speaking also."
"You will like him when you know him. He is one of the greatest men in
America."
"At least he's the father of the greatest girl in the world, which is far
more important."
"I wonder if you know how important?" she asked seriously. "He is the
apple of my eye. His bitter words, his cynicism and sarcasm, are all on
the surface--masks that hide a great sensitive spirit. You can't know with
what brooding tenderness I have always loved and worshipped him. I will
never marry against his wishes."
"I hope he and I will always be good friends," said Ben doubtfully.
"You must," she replied, eagerly pressing his hand.
CHAPTER VII
A WOMAN LAUGHS
Each day the conflict waxed warmer between the President and the
Commoner.
The first bill sent to the White House to Africanize the "conquered
provinces" the President vetoed in a message of such logic, dignity, and
power, the old leader found to his amazement it was impossible to rally
the two-thirds majority to pass it over his head.
At first, all had gone as planned. Lynch and Howle brought to him a report
on "Southern Atrocities," secured through the councils of the secret
oath-bound Union League, which had destroyed the impression of General
Grant's words and prepared his followers for blind submission to his
Committee.
Yet the rally of a group of men in defence of the Constitution had given
the President unexpected strength.
Stoneman saw that he must hold his hand on the throat of the South and
fight another campaign. Howle and Lynch furnished the publication
committee of the Union League the matter, and they printed four million
five hundred thousand pamphlets on "Southern Atrocities."
The Northern States were hostile to negro suffrage, the first step of his
revolutionary programme, and not a dozen men in Congress had yet dared to
favour it. Ohio, Michigan, New York, and Kansas had rejected it by
overwhelming majorities. But he could appeal to their passions and
prejudices against the "Barbarism" of the South. It would work like magic.
When he had the South where he wanted it, he would turn and ram negro
suffrage and negro equality down the throats of the reluctant North.
His energies were now bent to prevent any effective legislation in
Congress until his strength should be omnipotent.
A cloud disturbed the sky for a moment in the Senate. John Sherman, of
Ohio, began to loom on the horizon as a constructive statesman, and
without consulting him was quietly forcing over Sumner's classic oratory a
Reconstruction Bill restoring the Southern States to the Union on the
basis of Lincoln's plan, with no provision for interference with the
suffrage. It had gone to its last reading, and the final vote was
pending.
The house was in session at 3 a. m., waiting in feverish anxiety the
outcome of this struggle in the Senate.
Old Stoneman was in his seat, fast asleep from the exhaustion of an
unbroken session of forty hours. His meals he had sent to his desk from
the Capitol restaurant. He was seventy-four years old and not in good
health, yet his energy was tireless, his resources inexhaustible, and his
audacity matchless.
Sunset Cox, the wag of the House, an opponent but personal friend of the
old Commoner, passing his seat and seeing the great head sunk on his
breast in sleep, laughed softly and said:
"Mr. Speaker!"
The presiding officer recognized the young Democrat with a nod of
answering humour and responded:
"The gentleman from New York."
"I move you, sir," said Cox, "that, in view of the advanced age and
eminent services of the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania, the
Sergeant-at-Arms be instructed to furnish him with enough poker chips to
last till morning!"
The scattered members who were awake roared with laughter, the Speaker
pounded furiously with his gavel, the sleepy little pages jumped up,
rubbing their eyes, and ran here and there answering imaginary calls, and
the whole House waked to its usual noise and confusion.
The old man raised his massive head and looked to the door leading toward
the Senate just as Sumner rushed through. He had slept for a moment, but
his keen intellect had taken up the fight at precisely the point at which
he left it.
Sumner approached his desk rapidly, leaned over, and reported his defeat
and Sherman's triumph.
"For God's sake throttle this measure in the House or we are ruined!" he
exclaimed.
"Don't be alarmed," replied the cynic. "I'll be here with stronger weapons
than articulated wind."
"You have not a moment to lose. The bill is on its way to the Speaker's
desk, and Sherman's men are going to force its passage to-night."
The Senator returned to the other end of the Capitol wrapped in the mantle
of his outraged dignity, and in thirty minutes the bill was defeated, and
the House adjourned.
As the old Commoner hobbled through the door, his crooked cane thumping
the marble floor, Sumner seized and pressed his hand:
"How did you do it?"
Stoneman's huge jaws snapped together and his lower lip protruded:
"I sent for Cox and summoned the leader of the Democrats. I told them if
they would join with me and defeat this bill, I'd give them a better one
the next session. And I will--negro suffrage! The gudgeons swallowed it
whole!"
Sumner lifted his eyebrows and wrapped his cloak a little closer.
The Great Commoner laughed as he departed:
"He is yet too good for this world, but he'll forget it before we're done
this fight."
On the steps a beggar asked him for a night's lodging, and he tossed him a
gold eagle.
* * * * *
The North, which had rejected negro suffrage for itself with scorn,
answered Stoneman's fierce appeal to their passions against the South, and
sent him a delegation of radicals eager to do his will.
So fierce had waxed the combat between the President and Congress that the
very existence of Stanton's prisoners languishing in jail was forgotten,
and the Secretary of War himself became a football to be kicked back and
forth in this conflict of giants. The fact that Andrew Johnson was from
Tennessee, and had been an old-line Democrat before his election as a
Unionist with Lincoln, was now a fatal weakness in his position. Under
Stoneman's assaults he became at once an executive without a party, and
every word of amnesty and pardon he proclaimed for the South in accordance
with Lincoln's plan was denounced as the act of a renegade courting favour
of traitors and rebels.
Stanton remained in his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him,
and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation
could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of
the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant
to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties
were so fixed that its violation would give specific ground for his trial,
impeachment, and removal from office.
Again Stoneman passed his first act to reduce the "conquered provinces" of
the South to negro rule.
President Johnson vetoed it with a message of such logic in defence of the
constitutional rights of the States that it failed by one vote to find the
two-thirds majority needed to become a law without his approval.
The old Commoner's eyes froze into two dagger-points of icy light when
this vote was announced.
With fury he cursed the President, but above all he cursed the men of his
own party who had faltered.
As he fumbled his big hands nervously, he growled:
"If I only had five men of genuine courage in Congress, I'd hang the man
at the other end of the avenue from the porch of the White House! But I
haven't got them--cowards, dastards, dolts, and snivelling fools----"
His decision was instantly made. He would expel enough Democrats from the
Senate and the House to place his two-thirds majority beyond question. The
name of the President never passed his lips. He referred to him always,
even in public debate, as "the man at the other end of the avenue," or
"the former Governor of Tennessee who once threatened rebels--the late
lamented Andrew Johnson, of blessed memory."
He ordered the expulsion of the new member of the House from Indiana,
Daniel W. Voorhees, and the new Senator from New Jersey, John P. Stockton.
This would give him a majority of two thirds composed of men who would
obey his word without a question.
Voorhees heard of the edict with indignant wrath. He had met Stoneman in
the lobbies, where he was often the centre of admiring groups of friends.
His wit and audacity, and, above all, his brutal frankness, had won the
admiration of the "Tall Sycamore of the Wabash." He could not believe such
a man would be a party to a palpable fraud. He appealed to him
personally:
"Look here, Stoneman," the young orator cried with wrath, "I appeal to
your sense of honour and decency. My credentials have been accepted by
your own committee, and my seat been awarded me. My majority is
unquestioned. This is a high-handed outrage. You cannot permit this
crime."
The old man thrust his deformed foot out before him, struck it
meditatively with his cane, and looking Voorhees straight in the eye,
boldly said:
"There's nothing the matter with your majority, young man. I've no doubt
it's all right. Unfortunately, you are a Democrat, and happen to be the
odd man in the way of the two-thirds majority on which the supremacy of my
party depends. You will have to go. Come back some other time." And he
did.
In the Senate there was a hitch. When the vote was taken on the expulsion
of Stockton, to the amazement of the leader it was a tie.
He hobbled into the Senate Chamber, with the steel point of his cane
ringing on the marble flags as though he were thrusting it through the
vitals of the weakling who had sneaked and hedged and trimmed at the
crucial moment.
He met Howle at the door.
"What's the matter in there?" he asked.
"They're trying to compromise."
"Compromise--the Devil of American politics," he muttered. "But how did
the vote fail--it was all fixed before the roll-call?"
"Roman, of Maine, has trouble with his conscience! He is paired not to
vote on this question with Stockton's colleague, who is sick in Trenton.
His 'honour' is involved, and he refuses to break his word."
"I see," said Stoneman, pulling his bristling brows down until his eyes
were two beads of white gleaming through them. "Tell Wade to summon every
member of the party in his room immediately and hold the Senate in
session."
When the group of Senators crowded into the Vice-president's room the old
man faced them leaning on his cane and delivered an address of five
minutes they never forgot.
His speech had a nameless fascination. The man himself with his elemental
passions was a wonder. He left on public record no speech worth reading,
and yet these powerful men shrank under his glance. As the nostrils of his
big three-angled nose dilated, the scream of an eagle rang in his voice,
his huge ugly hand held the crook of his cane with the clutch of a tiger,
his tongue flew with the hiss of an adder, and his big deformed foot
seemed to grip the floor as the claw of a beast.
"The life of a political party, gentlemen," he growled in conclusion, "is
maintained by a scheme of subterfuges in which the moral law cuts no
figure. As your leader, I know but one law--success. The world is full of
fools who must have toys with which to play. A belief in politics is the
favourite delusion of shallow American minds. But you and I have no
delusions. Your life depends on this vote. If any man thinks the
abstraction called 'honour' is involved, let him choose between his honour
and his life! I call no names. This issue must be settled now before the
Senate adjourns. There can be no to-morrow. It is life or death. Let the
roll be called again immediately."
The grave Senators resumed their seats, and Wade, the acting
Vice-president, again put the question to Stockton's expulsion.
The member from New England sat pale and trembling, in his soul the
anguish of the mortal combat between his Puritan conscience, the iron
heritage of centuries, and the order of his captain.
When the Clerk of the Senate called his name, still the battle raged. He
sat in silence, the whiteness of death about his lips, while the clerk at
a signal from the Chair paused.
And then a scene the like of which was never known in American history!
August Senators crowded around his desk, begging, shouting, imploring, and
demanding that a fellow Senator break his solemn word of honour!
For a moment pandemonium reigned.
"Vote! Vote! Call his name again!" they shouted.
High above all rang the voice of Charles Sumner, leading the wild chorus,
crying:
"Vote! Vote! Vote!"
The galleries hissed and cheered--the cheers at last drowning every hiss.
Stoneman pushed his way among the mob which surrounded the badgered
Puritan as he attempted to retreat into the cloakroom.
"Will you vote?" he hissed, his eyes flashing poison.
"My conscience will not permit it," he faltered.
"To hell with your conscience!" the old leader thundered. "Go back to your
seat, ask the clerk to call your name, and vote, or by the living God I'll
read you out of the party to-night and brand you a snivelling coward, a
copperhead, a renegade, and traitor!"
Trembling from head to foot, he staggered back to his seat, the cold sweat
standing in beads on his forehead, and gasped:
"Call my name!"
The shrill voice of the clerk rang out in the stillness like the peal of a
trumpet:
"Mr. Roman!"
And the deed was done.
A cheer burst from his colleagues, and the roll-call proceeded.
When Stockton's name was reached he sprang to his feet, voted for himself,
and made a second tie!
With blank faces they turned to the leader, who ordered Charles Sumner to
move that the Senator from New Jersey be not allowed to answer his name on
an issue involving his own seat.
It was carried. Again the roll was called, and Stockton expelled by a
majority of one.
In the moment of ominous silence which followed, a yellow woman of sleek
animal beauty leaned far over the gallery rail and laughed aloud.
The passage of each act of the Revolutionary programme over the veto of
the President was now but a matter of form. The act to degrade his office
by forcing him to keep a cabinet officer who daily insulted him, the Civil
Rights Bill, and the Freedman's Bureau Bill followed in rapid succession.
Stoneman's crowning Reconstruction Act was passed, two years after the war
had closed, shattering the Union again into fragments, blotting the names
of ten great Southern States from its roll, and dividing their territory
into five Military Districts under the control of belted satraps.
When this measure was vetoed by the President, it came accompanied by a
message whose words will be forever etched in fire on the darkest page of
the Nation's life.
Amid hisses, curses, jeers, and cat-calls, the Clerk of the House read its
burning words:
"_The power thus given to the commanding officer over the people of each
district is that of an absolute monarch. His mere will is to take the
place of law. He may make a criminal code of his own; he can make it as
bloody as any recorded in history, or he can reserve the privilege of
acting on the impulse of his private passions in each case that arises._
"_Here is a bill of attainer against nine millions of people at once. It
is based upon an accusation so vague as to be scarcely intelligible, and
found to be true upon no credible evidence. Not one of the nine millions
was heard in his own defence. The representatives even of the doomed
parties were excluded from all participation in the trial. The conviction
is to be followed by the most ignominious punishment ever inflicted on
large masses of men. It disfranchises them by hundreds of thousands and
degrades them all--even those who are admitted to be guiltless--from the
rank of freemen to the condition of slaves._
"_Such power has not been wielded by any monarch in England for more than
five hundred years, and in all that time no people who speak the English
tongue have borne such servitude._"
When the last jeering cat-call which greeted this message of the Chief
Magistrate had died away on the floor and in the galleries, old Stoneman
rose, with a smile playing about his grim mouth, and introduced his bill
to impeach the President of the United States and remove him from office.
CHAPTER VIII
A DREAM
Elsie spent weeks of happiness in an abandonment of joy to the spell of
her lover. His charm was resistless. His gift of delicate intimacy, the
eloquence with which he expressed his love, and yet the manly dignity with
which he did it, threw a spell no woman could resist.
Each day's working hours were given to his father's case and to the study
of law. If there was work to do, he did it, and then struck the word care
from his life, giving himself body and soul to his love. Great events were
moving. The shock of the battle between Congress and the President began
to shake the Republic to its foundations. He heard nothing, felt nothing,
save the music of Elsie's voice.
And she knew it. She had only played with lovers before. She had never
seen one of Ben's kind, and he took her by storm. His creed was simple.
The chief end of life is to glorify the girl you love. Other things could
wait. And he let them wait. He ignored their existence.
But one cloud cast its shadow over the girl's heart during these
red-letter days of life--the fear of what her father would do to her
lover's people. Ben had asked her whether he must speak to him. When she
said "No, not yet," he forgot that such a man lived. As for his politics,
he knew nothing and cared less.
But the girl knew and thought with sickening dread, until she forgot her
fears in the joy of his laughter. Ben laughed so heartily, so
insinuatingly, the contagion of his fun could not be resisted.
He would sit for hours and confess to her the secrets of his boyish dreams
of glory in war, recount his thrilling adventures and daring deeds with
such enthusiasm that his cause seemed her own, and the pity and the
anguish of the ruin of his people hurt her with the keen sense of personal
pain. His love for his native State was so genuine, his pride in the
bravery and goodness of its people so chivalrous, she began to see for the
first time how the cords which bound the Southerner to his soil were of
the heart's red blood.
She began to understand why the war, which had seemed to her a wicked,
cruel, and causeless rebellion, was the one inevitable thing in our growth
from a loose group of sovereign States to a United Nation. Love had given
her his point of view.
Secret grief over her father's course began to grow into conscious fear.
With unerring instinct she felt the fatal day drawing nearer when these
two men, now of her inmost life, must clash in mortal enmity.
She saw little of her father. He was absorbed with fevered activity and
deadly hate in his struggle with the President.
Brooding over her fears one night, she had tried to interest Ben in
politics. To her surprise she found that he knew nothing of her father's
real position or power as leader of his party. The stunning tragedy of the
war had for the time crushed out of his consciousness all political ideas,
as it had for most young Southerners. He took her hand while a dreamy look
overspread his swarthy face:
"Don't cross a bridge till you come to it. I learned that in the war.
Politics are a mess. Let me tell you something that counts----"
He felt her hand's soft pressure and reverently kissed it. "Listen," he
whispered. "I was dreaming last night after I left you of the home we'll
build. Just back of our place, on the hill overlooking the river, my
father and mother planted trees in exact duplicate of the ones they placed
around our house when they were married. They set these trees in honour of
the first-born of their love, that he should make his nest there when
grown. But it was not for him. He had pitched his tent on higher ground,
and the others with him. This place will be mine. There are forty
varieties of trees, all grown--elm, maple, oak, holly, pine, cedar,
magnolia, and every fruit and flowering stem that grows in our friendly
soil. A little house, built near the vacant space reserved for the
homestead, is nicely kept by a farmer, and birds have learned to build in
every shrub and tree. All the year their music rings its chorus--one long
overture awaiting the coming of my bride----"
Elsie sighed.
"Listen, dear," he went on eagerly. "Last night I dreamed the South had
risen from her ruins. I saw you there. I saw our home standing amid a
bower of roses your hands had planted. The full moon wrapped it in soft
light, while you and I walked hand in hand in silence beneath our trees.
But fairer and brighter than the moon was the face of her I loved, and
sweeter than all the songs of birds the music of her voice!"
A tear dimmed the girl's warm eyes, and a deeper flush mantled her cheeks,
as she lifted her face and whispered:
"Kiss me."
CHAPTER IX
THE KING AMUSES HIMSELF
With savage energy the Great Commoner pressed to trial the first
impeachment of a President of the United States for high crimes and
misdemeanours.
His bill to confiscate the property of the Southern people was already
pending on the calendar of the House. This bill was the most remarkable
ever written in the English language or introduced into a legislative body
of the Aryan race. It provided for the confiscation of ninety per cent. of
the land of ten great States of the American Union. To each negro in the
South was allotted forty acres from the estate of his former master, and
the remaining millions of acres were to be divided among the "loyal who
had suffered by reason of the Rebellion."
The execution of this, the most stupendous crime ever conceived by an
English lawmaker, involving the exile and ruin of millions of innocent
men, women, and children, could not be intrusted to Andrew Johnson.
No such measure could be enforced so long as any man was President and
Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy who claimed his title under the
Constitution. Hence the absolute necessity of his removal.
The conditions of society were ripe for this daring enterprise.
Not only was the Ship of State in the hands of revolutionists who had
boarded her in the storm stress of a civic convulsion, but among them
swarmed the pirate captains of the boldest criminals who ever figured in
the story of a nation.
The first great Railroad Lobby, with continental empires at stake,
thronged the Capitol with its lawyers, agents, barkers, and hired
courtesans.
The Cotton Thieves, who operated through a ring of Treasury agents, had
confiscated unlawfully three million bales of cotton hidden in the South
during the war and at its close, the last resource of a ruined people. The
Treasury had received a paltry twenty thousand bales for the use of its
name with which to seize alleged "property of the Confederate Government."
The value of this cotton, stolen from the widows and orphans, the maimed
and crippled, of the South was over $700,000,000 in gold--a capital
sufficient to have started an impoverished people again on the road to
prosperity. The agents of this ring surrounded the halls of legislation,
guarding their booty from envious eyes, and demanding the enactment of
vaster schemes of legal confiscation.
The Whiskey Ring had just been formed, and began its system of gigantic
frauds by which it scuttled the Treasury.
Above them all towered the figure of Oakes Ames, whose master mind had
organized the _Credit Mobilier_ steal. This vast infamy had already eaten
its way into the heart of Congress and dug the graves of many illustrious
men.
So open had become the shame that Stoneman was compelled to increase his
committees in the morning, when a corrupt majority had been bought the
night before.
He arose one day, and looking at the distinguished Speaker, who was
himself the secret associate of Oakes Ames, said:
"Mr. Speaker: while the House slept, the enemy has sown tares among our
wheat. The corporations of this country, having neither bodies to be
kicked nor souls to be lost, have, _perhaps_ by the power of argument
alone, beguiled from the majority of my Committee the member from
Connecticut. The enemy have now a majority of one. I move to increase the
Committee to twelve."
Speaker Colfax, soon to be hurled from the Vice-president's chair for his
part with those thieves, increased his Committee.
Everybody knew that "the power of argument alone" meant ten thousand
dollars cash for the gentleman from Connecticut, who did not appear on the
floor for a week, fearing the scorpion tongue of the old Commoner.
A Congress which found it could make and unmake laws in defiance of the
Executive went mad. Taxation soared to undreamed heights, while the
currency was depreciated and subject to the wildest fluctuations.
The statute books were loaded with laws that shackled chains of monopoly
on generations yet unborn. Public lands wide as the reach of empires were
voted as gifts to private corporations, and subsidies of untold millions
fixed as a charge upon the people and their children's children.
The demoralization incident to a great war, the waste of unheard-of sums
of money, the giving of contracts involving millions by which fortunes
were made in a night, the riot of speculation and debauchery by those who
tried to get rich suddenly without labour, had created a new Capital of
the Nation. The vulture army of the base, venal, unpatriotic, and corrupt,
which had swept down, a black cloud, in wartime to take advantage of the
misfortunes of the Nation, had settled in Washington and gave new tone to
its life.
Prior to the Civil War the Capital was ruled, and the standards of its
social and political life fixed, by an aristocracy founded on brains,
culture, and blood. Power was with few exceptions intrusted to an
honourable body of high-spirited public officials. Now a negro electorate
controlled the city government, and gangs of drunken negroes, its
sovereign citizens, paraded the streets at night firing their muskets
unchallenged and unmolested.
A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour,
became the symbol of American Democracy.
A new order of society sprouted in this corruption. The old high-bred
ways, tastes, and enthusiasms were driven into the hiding-places of a few
families and cherished as relics of the past.
Washington, choked with scrofulous wealth, bowed the knee to the Almighty
Dollar. The new altar was covered with a black mould of human blood--but
no questions were asked.
A mulatto woman kept the house of the foremost man of the Nation and
received his guests with condescension.
In this atmosphere of festering vice and gangrene passions, the struggle
between the Great Commoner and the President on which hung the fate of the
South approached its climax.
The whole Nation was swept into the whirlpool, and business was paralyzed.
Two years after the close of a victorious war the credit of the Republic
dropped until its six per cent. bonds sold in the open market for
seventy-three cents on the dollar.
The revolutionary junta in control of the Capital was within a single step
of the subversion of the Government and the establishment of a Dictator in
the White House.
A convention was called in Philadelphia to restore fraternal feeling, heal
the wounds of war, preserve the Constitution, and restore the Union of the
fathers. It was a grand assemblage representing the heart and brain of the
Nation. Members of Lincoln's first Cabinet, protesting Senators and
Congressmen, editors of great Republican and Democratic newspapers, heroes
of both armies, long estranged, met for a common purpose. When a group of
famous negro worshippers from Boston suddenly entered the hall, arm in arm
with ex-slaveholders from South Carolina, the great meeting rose and walls
and roof rang with thunder peals of applause.
Their committee, headed by a famous editor, journeyed to Washington to
appeal to the Master at the Capitol. They sought him not in the White
House, but in the little Black House in an obscure street on the hill.
The brown woman received them with haughty dignity, and said:
"Mr. Stoneman cannot be seen at this hour. It is after nine o'clock. I
will submit to him your request for an audience to-morrow morning."
"We must see him to-night," replied the editor, with rising anger.
"The king is amusing himself," said the yellow woman, with a touch of
malice.
"Where is he?"
Her catlike eyes rolled from side to side, and a smile played about her
full lips as she said:
"You will find him at Hall & Pemberton's gambling hell--you've lived in
Washington. You know the way."
With a muttered oath the editor turned on his heel and led his two
companions to the old Commoner's favourite haunt. There could be no better
time or place to approach him than seated at one of its tables laden with
rare wines and savoury dishes.
On reaching the well-known number of Hall & Pemberton's place, the editor
entered the unlocked door, passed with his friends along the soft-carpeted
hall, and ascended the stairs. Here the door was locked. A sudden pull of
the bell, and a pair of bright eyes peeped through a small grating in the
centre of the door revealed by the sliding of its panel.
The keen eyes glanced at the proffered card, the door flew open, and a
well-dressed mulatto invited them with cordial welcome to enter.
Passing along another hall, they were ushered into a palatial suite of
rooms furnished in princely state. The floors were covered with the
richest and softest carpets--so soft and yielding that the tramp of a
thousand feet could not make the faintest echo. The walls and ceilings
were frescoed by the brush of a great master, and hung with works of art
worth a king's ransom. Heavy curtains, in colours of exquisite taste,
masked each window, excluding all sound from within or without.
The rooms blazed with light from gorgeous chandeliers of trembling
crystals, shimmering and flashing from the ceilings like bouquets of
diamonds.
Negro servants, faultlessly dressed, attended the slightest want of every
guest with the quiet grace and courtesy of the lost splendours of the old
South.
The proprietor, with courtly manners, extended his hand:
"Welcome, gentlemen; you are my guests. The tables and the wines are at
your service without price. Eat, drink, and be merry--play or not, as you
please."
A smile lighted his dark eyes, but faded out near his mouth--cold and
rigid.
At the farther end of the last room hung the huge painting of a leopard,
so vivid and real its black and tawny colours, so furtive and wild its
restless eyes, it seemed alive and moving behind invisible bars.
Just under it, gorgeously set in its jewel-studded frame, stood the magic
green table on which men staked their gold and lost their souls.
The rooms were crowded with Congressmen, Government officials, officers of
the Army and Navy, clerks, contractors, paymasters, lobbyists, and
professional gamblers.
The centre of an admiring group was a Congressman who had during the last
session of the House broken the "bank" in a single night, winning more
than a hundred thousand dollars. He had lost it all and more in two weeks,
and the courteous proprietor now held orders for the lion's share of the
total pay and mileage of nearly every member of the House of
Representatives.
Over that table thousands of dollars of the people's money had been staked
and lost during the war by quartermasters, paymasters, and agents in
charge of public funds. Many a man had approached that green table with a
stainless name and left it a perjured thief. Some had been carried out by
those handsomely dressed waiters, and the man with the cold mouth could
point out, if he would, more than one stain on the soft carpet which
marked the end of a tragedy deeper than the pen of romancer has ever
sounded.
Stoneman at the moment was playing. He was rarely a heavy player, but he
had just staked a twenty-dollar gold piece and won fourteen hundred
dollars.
Howle, always at his elbow ready for a "sleeper" or a stake, said:
"Put a stack on the ace."
He did so, lost, and repeated it twice.
"Do it again," urged Howle. "I'll stake my reputation that the ace wins
this time."
With a doubting glance at Howle, old Stoneman shoved a stack of blue
chips, worth fifty dollars, over the ace, playing it to win on Howle's
judgment and reputation. It lost.
Without the ghost of a smile, the old statesman said: "Howle, you owe me
five cents."
As he turned abruptly on his club foot from the table, he encountered the
editor and his friends, a Western manufacturer and a Wall Street banker.
They were soon seated at a table in a private room, over a dinner of
choice oysters, diamond-back terrapin, canvas-back duck, and champagne.
They presented their plea for a truce in his fight until popular passion
had subsided.
He heard them in silence. His answer was characteristic:
"The will of the people, gentlemen, is supreme," he said with a sneer. "We
are the people. 'The man at the other end of the avenue' has dared to defy
the will of Congress. He must go. If the Supreme Court lifts a finger in
this fight, it will reduce that tribunal to one man or increase it to
twenty at our pleasure."
"But the Constitution----" broke in the chairman.
"There are higher laws than paper compacts. We are conquerors treading
conquered soil. Our will alone is the source of law. The drunken boor who
claims to be President is in reality an alien of a conquered province."
"We protest," exclaimed the man of money, "against the use of such
epithets in referring to the Chief Magistrate of the Republic!"
"And why, pray?" sneered the Commoner.
"In the name of common decency, law, and order. The President is a man of
inherent power, even if he did learn to read after his marriage. Like many
other Americans, he is a self-made man----"
"Glad to hear it," snapped Stoneman. "It relieves Almighty God of a
fearful responsibility."
They left him in disgust and dismay.
CHAPTER X
TOSSED BY THE STORM
As the storm of passion raised by the clash between her father and the
President rose steadily to the sweep of a cyclone, Elsie felt her own life
but a leaf driven before its fury.
Her only comfort she found in Phil, whose letters to her were full of love
for Margaret. He asked Elsie a thousand foolish questions about what she
thought of his chances.
To her own confessions he was all sympathy.
"Of father's wild scheme of vengeance against the South," he wrote, "I am
heartsick. I hate it on principle, to say nothing of a girl I know. I am
with General Grant for peace and reconciliation. What does your lover
think of it all? I can feel your anguish. The bill to rob the Southern
people of their land, which I hear is pending, would send your sweetheart
and mine, our enemies, into beggared exile. What will happen in the South?
Riot and bloodshed, of course--perhaps a guerilla war of such fierce and
terrible cruelty humanity sickens at the thought. I fear the Rebellion
unhinged our father's reason on some things. He was too old to go to the
front; the cannon's breath would have cleared the air and sweetened his
temper. But its healing was denied. I believe the tawny leopardess who
keeps his house influences him in this cruel madness. I could wring her
neck with exquisite pleasure. Why he allows her to stay and cloud his life
with her she-devil temper and fog his name with vulgar gossip is beyond
me."
Seated in the park on the Capitol hill the day after her father had
introduced his Confiscation Bill in the House, pending the impeachment of
the President, she again attempted to draw Ben out as to his feelings on
politics.
She waited in sickening fear and bristling pride for the first burst of
his anger which would mean their separation.
"How do I feel?" he asked. "Don't feel at all. The surrender of General
Lee was an event so stunning, my mind has not yet staggered past it.
Nothing much can happen after that, so it don't matter."
"Negro suffrage don't matter?"
"No. We can manage the negro," he said calmly.
"With thousands of your own people disfranchised?"
"The negroes will vote with us, as they worked for us during the war. If
they give them the ballot, they'll wish they hadn't."
Ben looked at her tenderly, bent near, and whispered:
"Don't waste your sweet breath talking about such things. My politics is
bounded on the North by a pair of amber eyes, on the South by a dimpled
little chin, on the East and West by a rosy cheek. Words do not frame its
speech. Its language is a mere sign, a pressure of the lips--yet it
thrills body and soul beyond all words."
Elsie leaned closer, and looking at the Capitol, said wistfully:
"I don't believe you know anything that goes on in that big marble
building."
"Yes, I do."
"What happened there yesterday?"
"You honoured it by putting your beautiful feet on its steps. I saw the
whole huge pile of cold marble suddenly glow with warm sunlight and flash
with beauty as you entered it."
The girl nestled still closer to his side, feeling her utter helplessness
in the rapids of the Niagara through which they were being whirled by
blind and merciless forces. For the moment she forgot all fears in his
nearness and the sweet pressure of his hand.
CHAPTER XI
THE SUPREME TEST
It is the glory of the American Republic that every man who has filled the
office of President has grown in stature when clothed with its power and
has proved himself worthy of its solemn trust. It is our highest claim to
the respect of the world and the vindication of man's capacity to govern
himself.
The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson would mark either the lowest
tide-mud of degradation to which the Republic could sink, or its end. In
this trial our system would be put to its severest strain. If a partisan
majority in Congress could remove the Executive and defy the Supreme
Court, stability to civic institutions was at an end, and the breath of a
mob would become the sole standard of law.
Congress had thrown to the winds the last shreds of decency in its
treatment of the Chief Magistrate. Stoneman led this campaign of insult,
not merely from feelings of personal hate, but because he saw that thus
the President's conviction before the Senate would become all but
inevitable.
When his messages arrived from the White House they were thrown into the
waste-basket without being read, amid jeers, hisses, curses, and ribald
laughter.
In lieu of their reading, Stoneman would send to the Clerk's desk an
obscene tirade from a party newspaper, and the Clerk of the House would
read it amid the mocking groans, laughter, and applause of the floor and
galleries.
A favourite clipping described the President as "an insolent drunken
brute, in comparison with whom Caligula's horse was respectable."
In the Senate, whose members were to sit as sworn judges to decide the
question of impeachment, Charles Sumner used language so vulgar that he
was called to order. Sustained by the Chair and the Senate, he repeated it
with increased violence, concluding with cold venom:
"Andrew Johnson has become the successor of Jefferson Davis. In holding
him up to judgment I do not dwell on his beastly intoxication the day he
took the oath as Vice-president, nor do I dwell on his maudlin speeches by
which he has degraded the country, nor hearken to the reports of pardons
sold, or of personal corruption. These things are bad. But he has usurped
the powers of Congress."
Conover, the perjured wretch, in prison for his crimes as a professional
witness in the assassination trial, now circulated the rumour that he
could give evidence that President Johnson was the assassin of Lincoln.
Without a moment's hesitation, Stoneman's henchmen sent a petition to the
President for the pardon of this villain that he might turn against the
man who had pardoned him and swear his life away! This scoundrel was borne
in triumph from prison to the Capitol and placed before the Impeachment
Committee, to whom he poured out his wondrous tale.
The sewers and prisons were dragged for every scrap of testimony to be
found, and the day for the trial approached.
As it drew nearer, excitement grew intense. Swarms of adventurers
expecting the overthrow of the Government crowded into Washington. Dreams
of honours, profits, and division of spoils held riot. Gamblers thronged
the saloons and gaming-houses, betting their gold on the President's
head.
Stoneman found the business more serious than even his daring spirit had
dreamed. His health suddenly gave way under the strain, and he was put to
bed by his physician with the warning that the least excitement would be
instantly fatal.
Elsie entered the little Black House on the hill for the first time since
her trip at the age of twelve, some eight years before. She installed an
army nurse, took charge of the place, and ignored the existence of the
brown woman, refusing to speak to her or permit her to enter her father's
room.
His illness made it necessary to choose an assistant to conduct the case
before the High Court. There was but one member of the House whose
character and ability fitted him for the place--General Benj. F. Butler,
of Massachusetts, whose name was enough to start a riot in any assembly in
America.
His selection precipitated a storm at the Capitol. A member leaped to his
feet on the floor of the House and shouted:
"If I were to characterize all that is pusillanimous in war, inhuman in
peace, forbidden in morals, and corrupt in politics, I could name it in
one word--Butlerism!"
For this speech he was ordered to apologize, and when he refused with
scorn they voted that the Speaker publicly censure him. The Speaker did
so, but winked at the offender while uttering the censure.
John A. Bingham, of Ohio, who had been chosen for his powers of oratory to
make the principal speech against the President, rose in the House and
indignantly refused to serve on the Board of Impeachment with such a man.
General Butler replied with crushing insolence:
"It is true, Mr. Speaker, that I may have made an error of judgment in
trying to blow up Fort Fisher with a powder ship at sea. I did the best I
could with the talents God gave me. An angel could have done no more. At
least I bared my own breast in my country's defence--a thing the
distinguished gentleman who insults me has not ventured to do--his only
claim to greatness being that, behind prison walls, on perjured testimony,
his fervid eloquence sent an innocent American mother screaming to the
gallows."
The fight was ended only by an order from the old Commoner's bed to
Bingham to shut his mouth and work with Butler. When the President had
been crushed, then they could settle Kilkenny-cat issues. Bingham obeyed.
When the august tribunal assembled in the Senate Chamber, fifty-five
Senators, presided over by Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court, constituted the tribunal. They took their seats in a semicircle in
front of the Vice-president's desk at which the Chief Justice sat. Behind
them crowded the one hundred and ninety members of the House of
Representatives, the accusers of the ruler of the mightiest Republic in
human history. Every inch of space in the galleries was crowded with
brilliantly dressed men and women, army officers in gorgeous uniforms, and
the pomp and splendour of the ministers of every foreign court of the
world. In spectacular grandeur no such scene was ever before witnessed in
the annals of justice.
The peculiar personal appearance of General Butler, whose bald head shone
with insolence while his eye seemed to be winking over his record as a
warrior and making fun of his fellow-manager Bingham, added a touch of
humour to the solemn scene.
The magnificent head of the Chief Justice suggested strange thoughts to
the beholder. He had been summoned but the day before to try Jefferson
Davis for the treason of declaring the Southern States out of the Union.
To-day he sat down to try the President of the United States for declaring
them to be in the Union! He had protested with warmth that he could not
conduct both these trials at once.
The Chief Justice took oath to "do impartial justice according to the
Constitution and the laws," and to the chagrin of Sumner administered this
oath to each Senator in turn. When Benjamin F. Wade's name was called,
Hendricks, of Indiana, objected to his sitting as judge. He could succeed
temporarily to the Presidency, as the presiding officer of the Senate, and
his own vote might decide the fate of the accused and determine his own
succession. The law forbids the Vice-president to sit on such trials. It
should apply with more vigour in his case. Besides, he had without a
hearing already pronounced the President guilty.
Sumner, forgetting his motion to prevent Stockton's voting against his own
expulsion, flew to the defence of Wade. Hendricks smilingly withdrew his
objection, and "Bluff Ben Wade" took the oath and sat down to judge his
own cause with unruffled front.
When the case was complete, the whole bill of indictment stood forth a
tissue of stupid malignity without a shred of evidence to support its
charges.
On the last day of the trial, when the closing speeches were being made,
there was a stir at the door. The throng of men, packing every inch of
floor space, were pushed rudely aside. The crowd craned their necks,
Senators turned and looked behind them to see what the disturbance meant,
and the Chief Justice rapped for order.
Suddenly through the dense mass appeared the forms of two gigantic negroes
carrying an old man. His grim face, white and rigid, and his big club foot
hanging pathetically from those black arms, could not be mistaken. A
thrill of excitement swept the floor and galleries, and a faint cheer
rippled the surface, quickly suppressed by the gavel.
The negroes placed him in an armchair facing the semicircle of Senators,
and crouched down on their haunches beside him. Their kinky heads, black
skin, thick lips, white teeth, and flat noses made for the moment a
curious symbolic frame for the chalk-white passion of the old Commoner's
face.
No sculptor ever dreamed a more sinister emblem of the corruption of a
race of empire builders than this group. Its black figures, wrapped in the
night of four thousand years of barbarism, squatted there the "equal" of
their master, grinning at his forms of justice, the evolution of forty
centuries of Aryan genius. To their brute strength the white fanatic in
the madness of his hate had appealed, and for their hire he had bartered
the birthright of a mighty race of freemen.
The speaker hurried to his conclusion that the half-fainting master might
deliver his message. In the meanwhile his eyes, cold and thrilling, sought
the secrets of the souls of the judges before him.
He had not come to plead or persuade. He had eluded the vigilance of his
daughter and nurse, escaped with the aid of the brown woman and her black
allies, and at the peril of his life had come to command. Every energy of
his indomitable will he was using now to keep from fainting. He felt that
if he could but look those men in the face they would not dare to defy his
word.
He shambled painfully to his feet amid a silence that was awful. Again the
sheer wonder of the man's personality held the imagination of the
audience. His audacity, his fanaticism, and the strange contradictions of
his character stirred the mind of friend and foe alike--this man who
tottered there before them, holding off Death with his big ugly left hand,
while with his right he clutched at the throat of his foe! Honest and
dishonest, cruel and tender, great and mean, a party leader who scorned
public opinion, a man of conviction, yet the most unscrupulous politician,
a philosopher who preached the equality of man, yet a tyrant who hated the
world and despised all men!
His very presence before them an open defiance of love and life and death,
would not his word ring omnipotent when the verdict was rendered? Every
man in the great courtroom believed it as he looked on the rows of
Senators hanging on his lips.
He spoke at first with unnatural vigour, a faint flush of fever lighting
his white face, his voice quivering yet penetrating.
"Upon that man among you who shall dare to acquit the President," he
boldly threatened, "I hurl the everlasting curse of a Nation--an infamy
that shall rive and blast his children's children until they shrink from
their own name as from the touch of pollution!"
He gasped for breath, his restless hands fumbled at his throat, he
staggered and would have fallen had not his black guards caught him. He
revived, pushed them back on their haunches, and sat down. And then, with
his big club foot thrust straight in front of him, his gnarled hands
gripping the arms of his chair, the massive head shaking back and forth
like a wounded lion, he continued his speech, which grew in fierce
intensity with each laboured breath.
The effect was electrical. Every Senator leaned forward to catch the
lowest whisper, and so awful was the suspense in the galleries the
listeners grew faint.
When this last mad challenge was hurled into the teeth of the judges, the
dazed crowd paused for breath and the galleries burst into a storm of
applause.
In vain the Chief Justice rose, his lionlike face livid with anger,
pounded for order, and commanded the galleries to be cleared.
They laughed at him. Roar after roar was the answer. The Chief Justice in
loud angry tones ordered the Sergeant-at-Arms to clear the galleries.
Men leaned over the rail and shouted in his face:
"He can't do it!"
"He hasn't got men enough!"
"Let him try if he dares!"
The doorkeepers attempted to enforce order by announcing it in the name of
the peace and dignity and sovereign power of the Senate over its sacred
chamber. The crowd had now become a howling mob which jeered them.
Senator Grimes, of Iowa, rose and demanded the reason why the Senate was
thus insulted and the order had not been enforced.
A volley of hisses greeted his question.
The Chief Justice, evidently quite nervous, declared the order would be
enforced.
Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, moved that the offenders be arrested.
In reply the crowd yelled:
"We'd like to see you do it!"
At length the mob began to slowly leave the galleries under the impression
that the High Court had adjourned.
Suddenly a man cried out:
"Hold on! They ain't going to adjourn. Let's see it out!"
Hundreds took their seats again. In the corridors a crowd began to sing in
wild chorus:
"Old Grimes is dead, that poor old man." The women joined with glee.
Between the verses the leader would curse the Iowa Senator as a traitor
and copperhead. The singing could be distinctly heard by the Court as its
roar floated through the open doors.
When the Senate Chamber had been cleared and the most disgraceful scene
that ever occurred within its portals had closed, the High Court
Impeachment went into secret session to consider the evidence and its
verdict.
Within an hour from its adjournment it was known to the Managers that
seven Republican Senators were doubtful, and that they formed a group
under the leadership of two great constitutional lawyers who still
believed in the sanctity of a judge's oath--Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois,
and William Pitt Fessenden, of Maine. Around them had gathered Senators
Grimes, of Iowa, Van Winkle, of West Virginia, Fowler, of Tennessee,
Henderson, of Missouri, and Ross, of Kansas. The Managers were in a panic.
If these men dared to hold together with the twelve Democrats, the
President would be acquitted by one vote--they could count thirty-four
certain for conviction.
The Revolutionists threw to the winds the last scruple of decency, went
into caucus and organized a conspiracy for forcing, within the few days
which must pass before the verdict, these judges to submit to their
decree.
Fessenden and Trumbull were threatened with impeachment and expulsion from
the Senate and bombarded by the most furious assaults from the press,
which denounced them as infamous traitors, "as mean, repulsive, and
noxious as hedgehogs in the cages of a travelling menagerie."
A mass meeting was held in Washington which said:
"Resolved, that we impeach Fessenden, Trumbull, and Grimes at the bar of
justice and humanity, as traitors before whose guilt the infamy of
Benedict Arnold becomes respectability and decency."
The Managers sent out a circular telegram to every State from which came a
doubtful judge:
"Great danger to the peace of the country if impeachment fails. Send your
Senators public opinion by resolutions, letters, and delegates."
The man who excited most wrath was Ross, of Kansas. That Kansas of all
States should send a "traitor" was more than the spirits of the
Revolutionists could bear.
A mass meeting in Leavenworth accordingly sent him the telegram:
"Kansas has heard the evidence and demands the conviction of the
President.
"D. R. Anthony and 1,000 others."
To this Ross replied:
"I have taken an oath to do impartial justice. I trust I shall have the
courage and honesty to vote according to the dictates of my judgment and
for the highest good of my country."
He got his answer:
"Your motives are Indian contracts and greenbacks. Kansas repudiates you
as she does all perjurers and skunks."
The Managers organized an inquisition for the purpose of torturing and
badgering Ross into submission. His one vote was all they lacked.
They laid siege to little Vinnie Ream, the sculptress, to whom Congress
had awarded a contract for the statue of Lincoln. Her studio was in the
crypt of the Capitol. They threatened her with the wrath of Congress, the
loss of her contract, and ruin of her career unless she found a way to
induce Senator Ross, whom she knew, to vote against the President.
Such an attempt to gain by fraud the verdict of a common court of law
would have sent its promoters to prison for felony. Yet the Managers of
this case, before the highest tribunal of the world, not only did it
without a blush of shame, but cursed as a traitor every man who dared to
question their motives.
As the day approached for the Court to vote, Senator Ross remained to
friend and foe a sealed mystery. Reporters swarmed about him, the target
of a thousand eyes. His rooms were besieged by his radical constituents
who had been imported from Kansas in droves to browbeat him into a promise
to convict. His movements day and night, his breakfast, his dinner, his
supper, the clothes he wore, the colour of his cravat, his friends and
companions, were chronicled in hourly bulletins and flashed over the wires
from the delirious Capital.
Chief Justice Chase called the High Court of Impeachment to order, to
render its verdict. Old Stoneman had again been carried to his chair in
the arms of two negroes, and sat with his cold eyes searching the faces of
the judges.
The excitement had reached the highest pitch of intensity. A sense of
choking solemnity brooded over the scene. The feeling grew that the hour
had struck which would test the capacity of man to establish an enduring
Republic.
The Clerk read the Eleventh Article, drawn by the Great Commoner as the
supreme test.
As its last words died away the Chief Justice rose amid a silence that was
agony, placed his hands on the sides of the desk as if to steady himself,
and said:
"Call the roll."
Each Senator answered "Guilty" or "Not Guilty," exactly as they had been
counted by the Managers, until Fessenden's name was called.
A moment of stillness and the great lawyer's voice rang high, cold, clear,
and resonant as a Puritan church bell on Sunday morning:
"Not Guilty!"
A murmur, half groan and sigh, half cheer and cry, rippled the great
hall.
The other votes were discounted now save that of Edmund G. Ross, of
Kansas. No human being on earth knew what this man would do save the
silent invisible man within his soul.
Over the solemn trembling silence the voice of the Chief Justice rang:
"Senator Ross, how say you? Is the respondent, Andrew Johnson, guilty or
not guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this article?"
The great Judge bent forward; his brow furrowed as Ross arose.
His fellow Senators watched him spellbound. A thousand men and women,
hanging from the galleries, focused their eyes on him. Old Stoneman drew
his bristling brows down, watching him like an adder ready to strike, his
lower lip protruding, his jaws clinched as a vise, his hands fumbling the
arms of his chair.
Every breath is held, every ear strained, as the answer falls from the
sturdy Scotchman like the peal of a trumpet:
"Not Guilty!"
The crowd breathes--a pause, a murmur, the shuffle of a thousand feet----
The President is acquitted, and the Republic lives!
The House assembled and received the report of the verdict. Old Stoneman
pulled himself half erect, holding to his desk, addressed the Speaker,
introduced his second bill for the impeachment of the President, and fell
fainting in the arms of his black attendants.
CHAPTER XII
TRIUMPH IN DEFEAT
Upon the failure to convict the President, Edwin M. Stanton resigned, sank
into despair and died, and a soldier Secretary of War opened the prison
doors.
Ben Cameron and his father hurried Southward to a home and land passing
under a cloud darker than the dust and smoke of blood-soaked
battlefields--the Black Plague of Reconstruction.
For two weeks the old Commoner wrestled in silence with Death. When at
last he spoke, it was to the stalwart negroes who had called to see him
and were standing by his bedside.
Turning his deep-sunken eyes on them a moment, he said slowly:
"I wonder whom I'll get to carry me when you boys die!"
Elsie hurried to his side and kissed him tenderly. For a week his mind
hovered in the twilight that lies between time and eternity. He seemed to
forget the passions and fury of his fierce career and live over the
memories of his youth, recalling pathetically its bitter poverty and its
fair dreams. He would lie for hours and hold Elsie's hand, pressing it
gently.
In one of his lucid moments he said:
"How beautiful you are, my child! You shall be a queen. I've dreamed of
boundless wealth for you and my boy. My plans are Napoleonic--and I shall
not fail--never fear--aye, beyond the dreams of avarice!"
"I wish no wealth save the heart treasure of those I love, father," was
the soft answer.
"Of course, little day-dreamer. But the old cynic who has outlived himself
and knows the mockery of time and things will be wisdom for your
foolishness. You shall keep your toys. What pleases you shall please me.
Yet I will be wise for us both."
She laid her hand upon his lips, and he kissed the warm little fingers.
In these days of soul-nearness the iron heart softened as never before in
love toward his children. Phil had hurried home from the West and secured
his release from the remaining weeks of his term of service.
As the father lay watching them move about the room, the cold light in his
deep-set wonderful eyes would melt into a soft glow.
As he grew stronger, the old fierce spirit of the unconquered leader began
to assert itself. He would take up the fight where he left it off and
carry it to victory.
Elsie and Phil sent the doctor to tell him the truth and beg him to quit
politics.
"Your work is done; you have but three months to live unless you go South
and find new life," was the verdict.
"In either event I go to a warmer climate, eh, doctor?" said the cynic.
"Perhaps," was the laughing reply.
"Good. It suits me better. I've had the move in mind. I can do more
effective work in the South for the next two years. Your decision is fate.
I'll go at once."
The doctor was taken aback.
"Come now," he said persuasively. "Let a disinterested Englishman give you
some advice. You've never taken any before. I give it as medicine, and I
won't put it on your bill. Slow down on politics. Your recent defeat
should teach you a lesson in conservatism."
The old Commoner's powerful mouth became rigid, and the lower lip bulged:
"Conservatism--fossil putrefaction!"
"But defeat?"
"Defeat?" cried the old man. "Who said I was defeated? The South lies in
ashes at my feet--the very names of her proud States blotted from history.
The Supreme Court awaits my nod. True, there's a man boarding in the White
House, and I vote to pay his bills; but the page who answers my beck and
call has more power. Every measure on which I've set my heart is law, save
one--my Confiscation Act--and this but waits the fulness of time."
The doctor, who was walking back and forth with his hands folded behind
him, paused and said:
"I marvel that a man of your personal integrity could conceive such a
measure; you, who refused to accept the legal release of your debts until
the last farthing was paid--you, whose cruelty of the lip is hideous, and
yet beneath it so gentle a personality, I've seen the pages in the House
stand at your back and mimic you while speaking, secure in the smile with
which you turned to greet their fun. And yet you press this crime upon a
brave and generous foe?"
"A wrong can have no rights," said Stoneman calmly. "Slavery will not be
dead until the landed aristocracy on which it rested is destroyed. I am
not cruel or unjust. I am but fulfilling the largest vision of universal
democracy that ever stirred the soul of man--a democracy that shall know
neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, white nor black. If I use the wild
pulse-beat of the rage of millions, it is only a means to an end--this
grander vision of the soul."
"Then why not begin at home this vision, and give the stricken South a
moment to rise?"
"No. The North is impervious to change, rich, proud, and unscathed by war.
The South is in chaos and cannot resist. It is but the justice and wisdom
of Heaven that the negro shall rule the land of his bondage. It is the
only solution of the race problem. Lincoln's contention that we could not
live half white and half black is sound at the core. When we proclaim
equality, social, political, and economic for the negro, we mean always to
enforce it in the South. The negro will never be treated as an equal in
the North. We are simply a set of cold-blooded liars on that subject, and
always have been. To the Yankee the very physical touch of a negro is
pollution."
"Then you don't believe this twaddle about equality?" asked the doctor.
"Yes and no. Mankind in the large is a herd of mercenary gudgeons or
fools. As a lawyer in Pennsylvania I have defended fifty murderers on
trial for their lives. Forty-nine of them were guilty. All these I
succeeded in acquitting. One of them was innocent. This one they hung. Can
a man keep his face straight in such a world? Could negro blood degrade
such stock? Might not an ape improve it? I preach equality as a poet and
seer who sees a vision beyond the rim of the horizon of to-day."
The old man's eyes shone with the set stare of a fanatic.
"And you think the South is ready for this wild vision?"
"Not ready, but helpless to resist. As a cold-blooded, scientific
experiment, I mean to give the Black Man one turn at the Wheel of Life. It
is an act of just retribution. Besides, in my plans I need his vote; and
that settles it."
"But will your plans work? Your own reports show serious trouble in the
South already."
Stoneman laughed.
"I never read my own reports. They are printed in molasses to catch flies.
The Southern legislatures played into my hands by copying the laws of New
England relating to Servants, Masters, Apprentices, and Vagrants. But even
these were repealed at the first breath of criticism. Neither the
Freedman's Bureau nor the army has ever loosed its grip on the throat of
the South for a moment. These disturbances and 'atrocities' are dangerous
only when printed on campaign fly-paper."
"And how will you master and control these ten great Southern States?"
"Through my Reconstruction Acts by means of the Union League. As a secret
between us, I am the soul of this order. I organized it in 1863 to secure
my plan of confiscation. We pressed it on Lincoln. He repudiated it. We
nominated Fremont at Cleveland against Lincoln in '64, and tried to split
the party or force Lincoln to retire. Fremont, a conceited ass, went back
on this plank in our platform, and we dropped him and helped elect Lincoln
again."
"I thought the Union League a patriotic and social organization?" said the
doctor in surprise.
"It has these features, but its sole aim as a secret order is to
confiscate the property of the South. I will perfect this mighty
organization until every negro stands drilled in serried line beneath its
banners, send a solid delegation here to do my bidding, and return at the
end of two years with a majority so overwhelming that my word will be law.
I will pass my Confiscation Bill. If Ulysses S. Grant, the coming idol,
falters, my second bill of Impeachment will only need the change of a
name."
The doctor shook his head.
"Give up this madness. Your life is hanging by a thread. The Southern
people even in their despair will never drink this black broth you are
pressing to their lips."
"They've got to drink it."
"Your decision is unalterable?"
"Absolutely. It's the breath I breathe. As my physician you may select the
place to which I shall be banished. It must be reached by rail and wire. I
care not its name or size. I'll make it the capital of the Nation.
There'll be poetic justice in setting up my establishment in a fallen
slaveholder's mansion."
The doctor looked intently at the old man:
"The study of men has become a sort of passion with me, but you are the
deepest mystery I've yet encountered in this land of surprises."
"And why?" asked the cynic.
"Because the secret of personality resides in motives, and I can't find
yours either in your actions or words."
Stoneman glanced at him sharply from beneath his wrinkled brows and
snapped.
"Keep on guessing."
"I will. In the meantime I'm going to send you to the village of Piedmont,
South Carolina. Your son and daughter both seem enthusiastic over this
spot."
"Good; that settles it. And now that mine own have been conspiring against
me," said Stoneman confidentially, "a little guile on my part. Not a word
of what has passed between us to my children. Tell them I agree with your
plans and give up my work. I'll give the same story to the press--I wish
nothing to mar their happiness while in the South. My secret burdens need
not cloud their young lives."
Dr. Barnes took the old man by the hand:
"I promise. My assistant has agreed to go with you. I'll say good-bye.
It's an inspiration to look into a face like yours, lit by the splendour
of an unconquerable will! But I want to say something to you before you
set out on this journey."
"Out with it," said the Commoner.
"The breed to which the Southern white man belongs has conquered every
foot of soil on this earth their feet have pressed for a thousand years. A
handful of them hold in subjection three hundred millions in India. Place
a dozen of them in the heart of Africa, and they will rule the continent
unless you kill them----"
"Wait," cried Stoneman, "until I put a ballot in the hand of every negro
and a bayonet at the breast of every white man from the James to the Rio
Grande!"
"I'll tell you a little story," said the doctor with a smile. "I once had
a half-grown eagle in a cage in my yard. The door was left open one day,
and a meddlesome rooster hopped in to pick a fight. The eagle had been
sick a week and seemed an easy mark. I watched. The rooster jumped and
wheeled and spurred and picked pieces out of his topknot. The young eagle
didn't know at first what he meant. He walked around dazed, with a hurt
expression. When at last it dawned on him what the chicken was about, he
simply reached out one claw, took the rooster by the neck, planted the
other claw in his breast, and snatched his head off."
The old man snapped his massive jaws together and grunted contemptuously.
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Book III--The Reign of Terror
CHAPTER I
A FALLEN SLAVEHOLDER'S MANSION
Piedmont, South Carolina, which Elsie and Phil had selected for reasons
best known to themselves as the place of retreat for their father, was a
favourite summer resort of Charleston people before the war.
Ulster county, of which this village was the capital, bordered on the
North Carolina line, lying alongside the ancient shore of York. It was
settled by the Scotch folk who came from the North of Ireland in the great
migrations which gave America three hundred thousand people of Covenanter
martyr blood, the largest and most important addition to our population,
larger in number than either the Puritans of New England or the so-called
Cavaliers of Virginia and Eastern Carolina; and far more important than
either, in the growth of American nationality.
To a man they had hated Great Britain. Not a Tory was found among them.
The cries of their martyred dead were still ringing in their souls when
George III started on his career of oppression. The fiery words of Patrick
Henry, their spokesman in the valley of Virginia, had swept the
aristocracy of the Old Dominion into rebellion against the King and on
into triumphant Democracy. They had made North Carolina the first home of
freedom in the New World, issued the first Declaration of Independence in
Mecklenburg, and lifted the first banner of rebellion against the tyranny
of the Crown.
They grew to the soil wherever they stopped, always home lovers and home
builders, loyal to their own people, instinctive clan leaders and clan
followers. A sturdy, honest, covenant-keeping, God-fearing, fighting
people, above all things they hated sham and pretence. They never boasted
of their families, though some of them might have quartered the royal arms
of Scotland on their shields.
To these sturdy qualities had been added a strain of Huguenot tenderness
and vivacity.
The culture of cotton as the sole industry had fixed African slavery as
their economic system. With the heritage of the Old World had been blended
forces inherent in the earth and air of the new Southland, something of
the breath of its unbroken forests, the freedom of its untrod mountains,
the temper of its sun, and the sweetness of its tropic perfumes.
When Mrs. Cameron received Elsie's letter, asking her to secure for them
six good rooms at the "Palmetto" hotel, she laughed. The big rambling
hostelry had been burned by roving negroes, pigs were wallowing in the
sulphur springs, and along its walks, where lovers of olden days had
strolled, the cows were browsing on the shrubbery.
But she laughed for a more important reason. They had asked for a six-room
cottage if accommodations could not be had in the hotel.
She could put them in the Lenoir place. The cotton crop from their farm
had been stolen from the gin--the cotton tax of $200 could not be paid,
and a mortgage was about to be foreclosed on both their farm and home. She
had been brooding over their troubles in despair. The Stonemans' coming
was a godsend.
Mrs. Cameron was helping them set the house in order to receive the new
tenants.
"I declare," said Mrs. Lenoir gratefully. "It seems too good to be true.
Just as I was about to give up--the first time in my life--here came those
rich Yankees and with enough rent to pay the interest on the mortgages and
our board at the hotel. I'll teach Margaret to paint, and she can give
Marion lessons on the piano. The darkest hour's just before day. And last
week I cried when they told me I must lose the farm."
"I was heartsick over it for you."
"You know, the farm was my dowry with the dozen slaves Papa gave us on our
wedding-day. The negroes did as they pleased, yet we managed to live and
were very happy."
Marion entered and placed a bouquet of roses on the table, touching them
daintily until she stood each flower apart in careless splendour. Their
perfume, the girl's wistful dreamy blue eyes and shy elusive beauty, all
seemed a part of the warm sweet air of the June morning. Mrs. Lenoir
watched her lovingly.
"Mamma, I'm going to put flowers in every room. I'm sure they haven't such
lovely ones in Washington," said Marion eagerly, as she skipped out.
The two women moved to the open window, through which came the drone of
bees and the distant music of the river falls.
"Marion's greatest charm," whispered her mother, "is in her way of doing
things easily and gently without a trace of effort. Watch her bend over to
get that rose. Did you ever see anything like the grace and symmetry of
her figure--she seems a living flower!"
"Jeannie, you're making an idol of her----"
"Why not? With all our troubles and poverty, I'm rich in her! She's
fifteen years old, her head teeming with romance. You know, I was married
at fifteen. There'll be a half dozen boys to see her to-night in our new
home--all of them head over heels in love with her."
"Oh, Jeannie, you must not be so silly! We should worship God only."
"Isn't she God's message to me and to the world?"
"But if anything should happen to her----"
The young mother laughed. "I never think of it. Some things are fixed. Her
happiness and beauty are to me the sign of God's presence."
"Well, I'm glad you're coming to live with us in the heart of town. This
place is a cosey nest, just such a one as a poet lover would build here in
the edge of these deep woods, but it is too far out for you to be alone.
Dr. Cameron has been worrying about you ever since he came home."
"I'm not afraid of the negroes. I don't know one of them who wouldn't go
out of his way to do me a favour. Old Aleck is the only rascal I know
among them, and he's too busy with politics now even to steal a chicken."
"And Gus, the young scamp we used to own; you haven't forgotten him? He is
back here, a member of the company of negro troops, and parades before the
house every day to show off his uniform. Dr. Cameron told him yesterday
he'd thrash him if he caught him hanging around the place again. He
frightened Margaret nearly to death when she went to the barn to feed her
horse."
"I've never known the meaning of fear. We used to roam the woods and
fields together all hours of the day and night: my lover, Marion, and I.
This panic seems absurd to me."
"Well, I'll be glad to get you two children under my wing. I was afraid
I'd find you in tears over moving from your nest."
"No, where Marion is I'm at home, and I'll feel I've a mother when I get
with you."
"Will you come to the hotel before they arrive?"
"No; I'll welcome and tell them how glad I am they have brought me good
luck."
"I'm delighted, Jeannie. I wished you to do this, but I couldn't ask it. I
can never do enough for this old man's daughter. We must make their stay
happy. They say he's a terrible old Radical politician, but I suppose he's
no meaner than the others. He's very ill, and she loves him devotedly. He
is coming here to find health, and not to insult us. Besides, he was kind
to me. He wrote a letter to the President. Nothing that I have will be too
good for him or for his. It's very brave and sweet of you to stay and meet
them."
"I'm doing it to please Marion. She suggested it last night, sitting out
on the porch in the twilight. She slipped her arm around me and said:
"'Mamma, we must welcome them and make them feel at home. He is very ill.
They will be tired and homesick. Suppose it were you and I, and we were
taking my Papa to a strange place.'"
* * * * *
When the Stonemans arrived, the old man was too ill and nervous from the
fatigue of the long journey to notice his surroundings or to be conscious
of the restful beauty of the cottage into which they carried him. His room
looked out over the valley of the river for miles, and the glimpse he got
of its broad fertile acres only confirmed his ideas of the "slaveholding
oligarchy" it was his life-purpose to crush. Over the mantel hung a steel
engraving of Calhoun. He fell asleep with his deep, sunken eyes resting on
it and a cynical smile playing about his grim mouth.
Margaret and Mrs. Cameron had met the Stonemans and their physician at the
train, and taken Elsie and her father in the old weather-beaten family
carriage to the Lenoir cottage, apologising for Ben's absence.
"He has gone to Nashville on some important legal business, and the doctor
is ailing, but as the head of the clan Cameron he told me to welcome your
father to the hospitality of the county, and beg him to let us know if he
could be of help."
The old man, who sat in a stupor of exhaustion, made no response, and
Elsie hastened to say:
"We appreciate your kindness more than I can tell you, Mrs. Cameron. I
trust father will be better in a day or two, when he will thank you. The
trip has been more than he could bear."
"I am expecting Ben home this week," the mother whispered. "I need not
tell you that he will be delighted at your coming."
Elsie smiled and blushed.
"And I'll expect Captain Stoneman to see me very soon," said Margaret
softly. "You will not forget to tell him for me?"
"He's a very retiring young man," said Elsie, "and pretends to be busy
about our baggage just now. I'm sure he will find the way."
Elsie fell in love at sight with Marion and her mother. Their easy genial
manners, the genuineness of their welcome, and the simple kindness with
which they sought to make her feel at home put her heart into a warm
glow.
Mrs. Lenoir explained the conveniences of the place and apologized for its
defects, the results of the war.
"I am sorry about the window curtains--we have used them all for dresses.
Marion is a genius with a needle, and we took the last pair out of the
parlour to make a dress for a birthday party. The year before, we used the
ones in my room for a costume at a starvation party in a benefit for our
rector--you know we're Episcopalians--strayed up here for our health from
Charleston among these good Scotch Presbyterians."
"We will soon place curtains at the windows," said Elsie cheerfully.
"The carpets were sent to the soldiers for blankets during the war. It was
all we could do for our poor boys, except to cut my hair and sell it. You
see my hair hasn't grown out yet. I sent it to Richmond the last year of
the war. I felt I must do something when my neighbours were giving so
much. You know Mrs. Cameron lost four boys."
"I prefer the floors bare," Elsie replied. "We will get a few rugs."
She looked at the girlish hair hanging in ringlets about Mrs. Lenoir's
handsome face, smiled pathetically, and asked:
"Did you really make such sacrifices for your cause?"
"Yes, indeed. I was glad when the war was ended for some things. We
certainly needed a few pins, needles, and buttons, to say nothing of a cup
of coffee or tea."
"I trust you will never lack for anything again," said Elsie kindly.
"You will bring us good luck," Mrs. Lenoir responded. "Your coming is so
fortunate. The cotton tax Congress levied was so heavy this year we were
going to lose everything. Such a tax when we are all about to starve! Dr.
Cameron says it was an act of stupid vengeance on the South, and that no
other farmers in America have their crops taxed by the National
Government. I am so glad your father has come. He is not hunting for an
office. He can help us, maybe."
"I am sure he will," answered Elsie thoughtfully.
Marion ran up the steps lightly, her hair dishevelled and face flushed.
"Now, Mamma, it's almost sundown; you get ready to go. I want her awhile
to show her about my things."
She took Elsie shyly by the hand and led her into the lawn, while her
mother paid a visit to each room, and made up the last bundle of odds and
ends she meant to carry to the hotel.
"I hope you will love the place as we do," said the girl simply.
"I think it very beautiful and restful," Elsie replied. "This wilderness
of flowers looks like fairyland. You have roses running on the porch
around the whole length of the house."
"Yes, Papa was crazy over the trailing roses, and kept planting them until
the house seems just a frame built to hold them, with a roof on it. But
you can see the river through the arches from three sides. Ben Cameron
helped me set that big beauty on the south corner the day he ran away to
the war----"
"The view is glorious!" Elsie exclaimed, looking in rapture over the river
valley.
The village of Piedmont crowned an immense hill on the banks of the Broad
River, just where it dashes over the last stone barrier in a series of
beautiful falls and spreads out in peaceful glory through the plains
toward Columbia and the distant sea. The muffled roar of these falls,
rising softly through the trees on its wooded cliff, held the daily life
of the people in the spell of distant music. In fair weather it soothed
and charmed, and in storm and freshet rose to the deep solemn growl of
thunder.
The river made a sharp bend as it emerged from the hills and flowed
westward for six miles before it turned south again. Beyond this six-mile
sweep of its broad channel loomed the three ranges of the Blue Ridge
Mountains, the first one dark, rich, distinct, clothed in eternal green,
the last one melting in dim lines into the clouds and soft azure of the
sky.
As the sun began to sink now behind these distant peaks, each cloud that
hung about them burst into a blazing riot of colour. The silver mirror of
the river caught their shadows, and the water glowed in sympathy.
As Elsie drank the beauty of the scene, the music of the falls ringing its
soft accompaniment, her heart went out in a throb of love and pity for the
land and its people.
"Can you blame us for loving such a spot?" said Marion. "It's far more
beautiful from the cliff at Lover's Leap. I'll take you there some day. My
father used to tell me that this world was Heaven, and that the spirits
would all come back to live here when sin and shame and strife were
gone."
"Are your father's poems published?" asked Elsie.
"Only in the papers. We have them clipped and pasted in a scrapbook. I'll
show you the one about Ben Cameron some day. You met him in Washington,
didn't you?"
"Yes," said Elsie quietly.
"Then I know he made love to you."
"Why?"
"You're so pretty. He couldn't help it."
"Does he make love to every pretty girl?"
"Always. It's his religion. But he does it so beautifully you can't help
believing it, until you compare notes with the other girls."
"Did he make love to you?"
"He broke my heart when he ran away. I cried a whole week. But I got over
it. He seemed so big and grown when he came home this last time. I was
afraid to let him kiss me."
"Did he dare to try?"
"No, and it hurt my feelings. You see, I'm not quite old enough to be
serious with the big boys, and he looked so brave and handsome with that
ugly scar on the edge of his forehead, and everybody was so proud of him.
I was just dying to kiss him, and I thought it downright mean in him not
to offer it."
"Would you have let him?"
"I expected him to try."
"He is very popular in Piedmont?"
"Every girl in town is in love with him."
"And he in love with all?"
"He pretends to be--but between us, he's a great flirt. He's gone to
Nashville now on some pretended business. Goodness only knows where he got
the money to go. I believe there's a girl there."
"Why?"
"Because he was so mysterious about his trip. I'll keep an eye on him at
the hotel. You know Margaret, too, don't you?"
"Yes; we met her in Washington."
"Well, she's the slyest flirt in town--it runs in the blood--has a
half-dozen beaux to see her every day. She plays the organ in the
Presbyterian Sunday school, and the young minister is dead in love with
her. They say they are engaged. I don't believe it. I think it's another
one. But I must hurry, I've so much to show and tell you. Come here to the
honeysuckle----"
Marion drew the vines apart from the top of the fence and revealed a
mocking-bird on her nest.
"She's setting. Don't let anything hurt her. I'd push her off and show you
her speckled eggs, but it's so late."
"Oh, I wouldn't hurt her for the world!" cried Elsie with delight.
"And right here," said Marion, bending gracefully over a tall bunch of
grass, "is a pee-wee's nest, four darling little eggs; look out for
that."
Elsie bent and saw the pretty nest perched on stems of grass, and over it
the taller leaves drawn to a point.
"Isn't it cute!" she murmured.
"Yes; I've six of these and three mocking-bird nests. I'll show them to
you. But the most particular one of all is the wren's nest in the fork of
the cedar, close to the house."
She led Elsie to the tree, and about two feet from the ground, in the
forks of the trunk, was a tiny hole from which peeped the eyes of a wren.
"Whatever you do, don't let anything hurt her. Her mate sings
'_Free-nigger! Free-nigger! Free-nigger!_' every morning in this cedar."
"And you think we will specially enjoy that?" asked Elsie, laughing.
"Now, really," cried Marion, taking Elsie's hand, "you know I couldn't
think of such a mean joke. I forgot you were from the North. You seem so
sweet and homelike. He really does sing that way. You will hear him in the
morning, bright and early, '_Free-nigger! Free-nigger! Free-nigger!_' just
as plain as I'm saying it."
"And did you learn to find all these birds' nests by yourself?"
"Papa taught me. I've got some jay-birds and some cat-birds so gentle they
hop right down at my feet. Some people hate jay-birds. But I like them,
they seem to be having such a fine time and enjoy life so. You don't mind
jay-birds, do you?"
"I love every bird that flies."
"Except hawks and owls and buzzards----"
"Well, I've seen so few I can't say I've anything particular against
them."
"Yes, they eat chickens--except the buzzards, and they're so ugly and
filthy. Now, I've a chicken to show you--please don't let Aunt
Cindy--she's to be your cook--please don't let her kill him--he's
crippled--has something the matter with his foot. He was born that way.
Everybody wanted to kill him, but I wouldn't let them. I've had an awful
time raising him, but he's all right now."
Marion lifted a box and showed her the lame pet, softly clucking his
protest against the disturbance of his rest.
"I'll take good care of _him_, never fear," said Elsie, with a tremor in
her voice.
"And I have a queer little black cat I wanted to show you, but he's gone
off somewhere. I'd take him with me--only it's bad luck to move cats. He's
awful wild--won't let anybody pet him but me. Mamma says he's an imp of
Satan--but I love him. He runs up a tree when anybody else tries to get
him. But he climbs right up on my shoulder. I never loved any cat quite as
well as this silly, half-wild one. You don't mind black cats, do you?"
"No, dear; I like cats."
"Then I know you'll be good to him."
"Is that all?" asked Elsie, with amused interest.
"No, I've the funniest yellow dog that comes here at night to pick up the
scraps and things. He isn't my dog--just a little personal friend of
mine--but I like him very much, and always give him something. He's very
cute. I think he's a nigger dog."
"A nigger dog? What's that?"
"He belongs to some coloured people, who don't give turn enough to eat. I
love him because he's so faithful to his own folks. He comes to see me at
night and pretends to love me, but as soon as I feed him he trots back
home. When he first came, I laughed till I cried at his antics over a
carpet--we had a carpet then. He never saw one before, and barked at the
colours and the figures in the pattern. Then he'd lie down and rub his
back on it and growl. You won't let anybody hurt him?"
"No. Are there any others?"
"Yes, I 'most forgot. If Sam Ross comes--Sam's an idiot who lives at the
poorhouse--if he comes, he'll expect a dinner--my, my, I'm afraid he'll
cry when he finds we're not here! But you can send him to the hotel to me.
Don't let Aunt Cindy speak rough to him. Aunt Cindy's awfully good to me,
but she can't bear Sam. She thinks he brings bad luck."
"How on earth did you meet him?"
"His father was rich. He was a good friend of my Papa's. We came near
losing our farm once, because a bank failed. Mr. Ross sent Papa a signed
check on his own bank, and told him to write the amount he needed on it,
and pay him when he was able. Papa cried over it, and wouldn't use it, and
wrote a poem on the back of the check--one of the sweetest of all, I
think. In the war Mr. Ross lost his two younger sons, both killed at
Gettysburg. His wife died heartbroken, and he only lived a year afterward.
He sold his farm for Confederate money and everything was lost. Sam was
sent to the poorhouse. He found out somehow that we loved him and comes to
see us. He's as harmless as a kitten, and works in the garden
beautifully."
"I'll remember," Elsie promised.
"And one thing more," she said hesitatingly. "Mamma asked me to speak to
you of this--that's why she slipped away. There one little room we have
locked. It was Papa's study just as he left it, with his papers scattered
on the desk, the books and pictures that he loved--you won't mind?"
Elsie slipped her arm about Marion, looked into the blue eyes, dim with
tears, drew her close and said:
"It shall be sacred, my child. You must come every day if possible, and
help me."
"I will. I've so many beautiful places to show you in the woods--places he
loved, and taught us to see and love. They won't let me go in the woods
any more alone. But you have a big brother. That must be very sweet."
Mrs. Lenoir hurried to Elsie.
"Come, Marion, we must be going now."
"I am very sorry to see you leave the home you love so dearly, Mrs.
Lenoir," said the Northern girl, taking her extended hand. "I hope you can
soon find a way to have it back."
"Thank you," replied the mother cheerily. "The longer you stay, the better
for us. You don't know how happy I am over your coming. It has lifted a
load from our hearts. In the liberal rent you pay us you are our
benefactors. We are very grateful and happy."
Elsie watched them walk across the lawn to the street, the daughter
leaning on the mother's arm. She followed slowly and stopped behind one of
the arbor-vitae bushes beside the gate. The full moon had risen as the
twilight fell and flooded the scene with soft white light. A whippoorwill
struck his first plaintive note, his weird song seeming to come from all
directions and yet to be under her feet. She heard the rustle of dresses
returning along the walk, and Marion and her mother stood at the gate.
They looked long and tenderly at the house. Mrs. Lenoir uttered a broken
sob, Marion slipped an arm around her, brushed the short curling hair back
from her forehead, and softly said:
"Mamma, dear, you know it's best. I don't mind. Everybody in town loves
us. Every boy and girl in Piedmont worships you. We will be just as happy
at the hotel."
In the pauses between the strange bird's cry, Elsie caught the sound of
another sob, and then a soothing murmur as of a mother bending over a
cradle, and they were gone.