CHAPTER XXVIII.

FINAL SCENES.

IMMEDIATELY after the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Army of the Potomac was concentrated by General Meade at Burkesville Junction. Sherman learning, on the 11th of April, of the surrender at Appomattox Court House, made a truce with Johnston, who surrendered on the 26th. As soon as certain preliminaries, growing out of the repudiation by the United States of the terms which Sherman had made with the enemy, were adjusted, his army marched northward and encamped near Richmond. Sheridan, first despatched with his cavalry and the Sixth Corps, to join Sherman, returned at once through the removal of that necessity by the surrender of Johnston. He was then sent with troops to Texas, where some show of armed force still remained, but soon surrendered; and after that, to Texas again, in observation of the French occupation of Mexico, which ended in 1867 with the execution of Maximilian of Austria. Long before many of these events had had time to take place, and indeed within a few days, came a national calamity well calculated to shatter the faith of those who believe in a special providence rather than in God's working by larger and more inclusive law. The joybells had scarcely ceased ringing throughout the land, when, on the 14th of April, the man of all men best fitted for restoring harmony among the dismembered States and mutual love among their citizens in a reunited people was stricken down by a madman whose degenerate brain saw glory for himself and salvation for the Southern cause in

an act which was the heaviest misfortune it experienced and one which met the universal execration of mankind. The President, the Vice-President, the officers of the Cabinet were by the plot to be assassinated, and Grant, too, might have been included in its attempted execution, but for the chance that he was absent from the play to which he had been invited to accompany the President. The plot failed with all but the loftiest mark that drew the lightning. Lincoln, the wretched man whose wayworn path had had for the last four years no pleasant turning but in occasional indulgence in the quaint humor with which he had relieved his gloom, whose wan face and bent form had touched every generous heart, whose whole soul was more than ever bent on charity and love for all men, now, in one of the brief moments which a hard fate had decreed, seated peacefully at a play, in the relaxation which he so sorely needed, in the plenitude of his goodness, of wisdom born in him and ripened by experience, of his enormous power for good for a whole people, was done to death by the hands of an assassin. It is almost too pitiful to contemplate, this ending of a life so noble, at such a time, by such a hand, a country dwarfed in an instant by one caitiff stroke.

The dark catafalque took its way through the cities through which Lincoln had passed to his inauguration as President of the United States, bearing his remains to Springfield, Illinois, pausing a few hours in each place, where they lay in state, if that can be so called which brought a mourning people to pay its tribute of affection at his bier. No fête day celebrated the victory of which he had paid the penalty in death. The people little recked of victory but as swallowed up in peace, and now saddened, withdrawn into themselves in grief, took in the terrible lesson of national life, of which what they witnessed was the last seal and covenant with which it remained with them for

the future to abide. Through Philadelphia, where in the early morning of Washington's Birthday, the 22d of February, 1861, Lincoln had with his own hands raised the national flag on Independence Hall, saying in his address delivered there, in the shadow of sudden death which even then brooded over him, that he would rather be assassinated than prove false to his duty to the country, towards the same spot, sanctified as the birthplace of the Republic, his remains now passed to lie in state on their way to their final home.

The reins had fallen from Lincoln's nerveless grasp into the hands of one in whom few felt entire confidence, and, as time was to prove, one who deserved the least. Passionately partisan, he seemed to be little fitted for leadership in the political regeneration of the nation. His conduct of affairs at first recognized only the North as having national rights; nothing was too severe for the South in zeal to make treason odious. When, however, through place and power, he came to know that he could shift his position for personal advantage, his stalwart virtue vanished as by the touch of an enchanter's wand. It may well be believed that the political pendulum thus hanging and swinging made the varying time of world-history presented ill accord with the view of correctness of the sober common sense of the people. Congress then made its mistake by impeaching the President, and as the people foresaw the action came to naught. But all this erratic conduct of affairs was fraught with serious consequences to the country in the disorders engendered in the South, enduring through the first term of the following Administration. Evils had grown apace, through the immutable law that wrong multiplies wrong in ever-increasing ratio, and strange, apart from mere mob impulse, were some of the products of those times, now happily almost buried in the ocean of oblivion.

Not until the 24th and 25th of May did the armies of Meade and Sherman, marching on two successive days through the streets of Washington, in the grand final review, present to the nation in that pageant, and in their marvellously quiet return to the arts of peace, the last visible token that the war was over and abiding peace had begun to reign. The war ended, General Meade virtually disappeared from public affairs, save in so far as his able civil and military administration of the departments committed to his care are concerned, and the occasional discussion of his nomination for the Presidency of the United States. He had no political affiliations, however; he never had had any. It was not in his nature or in his training to care aught for these, to seek by extraneous means to buttress or to increase his fortunes. The measure with which justice had been meted out to him was different from that with which it had been meted out to many others. Sherman imprisoned a correspondent of "The New York Herald" on a boat in the Mississippi, that paper declared him insane, and there the matter ended. General Meade punished a correspondent of "The Philadelphia Inquirer," and a number of papers made a compact never to mention his name favorably in their despatches, and this for an act which Grant himself approved. Grant concedes in his memoirs that he, with his headquarters at City Point, had shut General Meade off from the full recognition which he would otherwise have received from the country as the commander of the Army of the Potomac. Remaining at City Point, and thus overshadowing General Meade, he was also absent from the place where, by his own confession, he should have been as commander of all of the armies of the United States, and yet under these conditions where, if ever, noblesse oblige, he sent many a despatch from City Point in which the actual commander of the Army of the Potomac received not the

slightest mention. General Meade knew something of Spanish, and may have met the proverb, "Uno tiene la fama, y otro carda la lana.”* At any rate he thoroughly knew life and its grim teachings. He pursued the even tenor of his way, bending to no power but obedience to his superiors in authority and to his conscience. Devoted to his military tasks in every rank, wise in his civil administration of affairs, happy in his domestic relations, cheerful in his social ones, silent in the face of the indignity put upon him by the appointment of another to the rank which he should have held, he repined at nothing, sought no favor, inspired by the noblest of all convictions, that he had always done his duty, and perhaps, let us trust, harbored the thought that, when he had passed away, due credit might in the distant future be accorded him by the people whom he had loyally served for the longest time, and victoriously, as the commander of the noble Army of the Potomac.

*

'One gets the credit, while another cards the wool."