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rumblings of wagons, occasional shots indicated what the rising sun might reveal. Then came the heavy thunders of a storm. Nature was breaking the long drought. The gentle rain began to fall upon the just and the unjust alike. It turned to torrents. The streets became little rivers; all the long roads across Fairfax County, clogged with wagons and weary men, would be a foot deep in sticky clay. Next morning the bedraggled hordes, drenched with rain, the floods still unabated, were spiritless. Confederate sympathizers could not perform a coup d'état on such a day. He had been spared firing the first shot on Fort Sumter; a second time fate had intervened. The dreary Monday passed. Next day the Union sympathizers took the initiative; they hung an effigy of Jefferson Davis and poured shots into it, vain and impotent child's play; but better that than Confederates jeering at the effigy of the president of the United States.

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The sun came bright again into the sky. The river was there; the Rebels did not appear; Arlington watched majestic over the scene. The president and the secretary of war took their precautions. Underofficers coaxed the spiritless remnants of the army together. Lincoln and Seward went out to McDowell's headquarters, poor McDowell ready to take his undeserved medicine. The Confederates still did not come over the hills; the great forests were clear, the forts and defenses still manned, a certain William Tecumseh Sherman there putting the spirit of order into disordered heads. After all, Washington had not been taken,

thanks to the floods of rain. But McDowell was dismissed. The country would require that. Congress would set up an investigation: Wade, Trumbull, Stevens, and the rest demanding to know why Richmond was not taken, when they really were praising God that they were not themselves prisoners of Jefferson Davis. Lincoln, looking about, bethought him of the dapper George McClellan, hero of western Virginia, friend of Douglas, the man who had killed General Garnett and laid the foundations for a second Virginia to supplant the ancient Dominion. McClellan came into the presidential presence, not forgetful of the great debates and the special trains for Douglas, private citizen passage for Lincoln, that far-off year of 1858; the little man was in shiny boots that incased half his thighs, uniform and epaulets not unbecoming to General Scott himself, his broad if low forehead lifted at the proper angle of self-respect-the "Little Napoleon," men had already begun to say. He was ready to take take McDowell's place. Lincoln made him commander of all the forces in the East. It was a godsend: a Democratic leader who knew the art of war, who had seen the great armies of the European allies in the Crimea, thirty-five years old and a wife from the great Marcy family of New York. Relieved, buoyant again, Lincoln gave the young Napoleon plenary powers and called him "George."

McClellan went about his work, organizing the hundred thousand men that poured into Washington, Beauregard still as death behind the lines now pushed forward to Fairfax

Court-House. The weather was beautiful, the roads became hard, the early autumn leaves suggesting a long winter of idleness for all the hundred thousand new-clad soldiers. The country began to be restless. Out in Missouri John C. Frémont, fierce and impotent, not averse to "the recompense of the reward," issued an emancipation proclamation, since Lincoln would not issue one. All the slaves in his district were free.

Wade and Chandler, "Xantippe in boots," wanted to know why Frémont was not in McClellan's place. Lincoln evaded the query, but annulled Frémont's decree. Wade and Chandler and Trumbull visited the army, talked bluntly, as became senators, to the commander about marching while the weather was good to Richmond. McClellan trained his men, limbered and unlimbered his great new guns, and cut down the beautiful forests about his camp. Lincoln told McClellan to suit himself, take no more Bull Run risks.

The Senate replied with a Committee on the Conduct of the War, bluff Ben Wade at its head. They sent for commanders and underofficers, took testimony, showed how war ought to be waged, and sniffed their big noses at "the Louis XVI of our day." The autumn passed. There was no second march on Richmond; Lincoln reviewed the great Army of the Potomac there on the wonderful hills about Lee's old home; McClellan, on his high horse, the pommel of his saddle almost to his chin, a huge sword at his side, gilt spurs tickling and teasing his nervous steed, rode at the president's sidethe president in tall silk hat and long

black broadcloth. It was the second Napoleon and "the old Tycoon," according to the clever John Hay, making ready for the second march upon Richmond, all the world waiting-waiting till the bottomless roads of Virginia were ready, May, 1862, the cost of it all a million dollars a day!

The country could hardly have stood the strain except for the work of a certain stoopy, unlucky, ill used little man from Galena, “little Ulys Grant," commander of an Illinois regiment that nobody else would have, in debt for his horse and his outfit, discharged from the army in former times by Jefferson Davis, admitting the charge of habitual drunkenness-Ulys Grant, disowned by tanner Grant, his father, and disliked by father-in-law Dent of Missouri, now slowly making his way to higher command in western Kentucky, in the first new suit of clothes he had had for years, his old overcoat thrown aside, his new boots none too clean, a slouchy, easy-going, stocky man of some hundred and twenty pounds weight, poor wife and children praying for unlucky father. And Grant, a little before Washington's birthday, upon his own initiative, captured the two great forts, Cumberland and Donelson, inside the great State of Tennessee, and twenty thousand roistering, belligerent Confederates, the great Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston promptly abandoning a third of Andrew Jackson's StateUlysses Grant, his wife the owner of slaves in Missouri!

Wade could not help rejoicing, strange as it all seemed to him. There was something to show. Lin

coln, unpopular and unloved, jeered by the editors and snubbed on occasion by the second Napoleon, was making headway, even before the roads permitted. But Grant moved south too fast. He put his army in a dangerous position between the Tennessee River and a murky sluggish creek, the waters swollen out of their banks, far to the south, at Shiloh Church. Albert Sidney Johnston fell upon him, was on the verge of driving his whole army into the great river, and killed a third of his men. The bravery of the successful Confederate leader led him too far; he fell mortally wounded, his army fell into disorder, and Grant saved himself from total annihilation. Intervention of Providence. Grant did not lose; and Lincoln could rejoice. Jefferson Davis trembled there in Richmond as he read the dark signs, the winter and spring of 1862; Lincoln knew of Davis's distress, Mrs. Davis about to run off with the children to North Carolina.

McClellan was at last approaching Richmond, approaching by the Peninsula, as big-nosed Butler had urged a year before. In front of Richmond there was an army of forty or fifty thousand men, standing upon the ridges to the eastward of the sevenhilled Confederate capital, the chimes of the churches ringing out the hours behind them, the people, even the president, praying as they had never prayed before. McClellan made ready his hundred and twenty thousand men scattered about the swamps, moving upon the narrow roads, fighting the mosquitoes and driving droves of fat beeves to safe places, made ready late in May, the weather hot and sticky.

He struck and was halted with heavy losses. Joseph E. Johnston fell badly wounded. Robert E. Lee took the vacant place. McClellan struck again in June, struck now at one place, now at another, all along the line from Hanover Court-House to the terrible White Oak Swamp. He was beaten or lamed or confused, his men losing themselves in the difficult country, the dry leaves on fire, the bushes in his way, clouds of smoke blinding his men as they stumbled about, fought, and died. Lee proved a terror those seven days, Lee whom McClellan feared. Great guns could not be used; they were stuck in the swamps; horses lay dead everywhere; rifles and ammunition were scattered, half his army killed or wounded or missing, escaping through the charred undergrowth— it was war, the waste of war. July 12 a last stand gave McClellan the semblance of victory at Malvern Hill, but he withdrew to the gunboats on the James River, balked, stunned, cowed; it was worse than Bull Run

On

the North despondent and angry. Again Lincoln heard the tale of disaster. He went to the Peninsula, looked upon the half-buried remains of his devoted men, saw the black birds of the Southern air crouching upon the carcasses of dead horses and caught the whiffs of the carrionladen winds those hot July days when he wept and wondered whether men had ever dreamed of such war when they talked of bloodletting, Abraham Lincoln, kindly, gentle, and unwarlike as a Carmelite priest. He took the remnants of McClellan's army from him, hurried it toward Washington, ordered other troops gathering in northern Virginia to march

upon Richmond by the old Bull Run route, eighty thousand of them those anxious August days, John Pope, hero of skirmishes on the Mississippi, in command. The second Napoleon, no longer "George," was left to find his way back to Washington, risk a street attack, and encounter the scowls of Edwin M. Stanton, now the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, the "divine Carnot" who a year before had taught Washington to sneer and snub the "incompetent" president. It was war.

Robert E. Lee hastened Jackson and twenty thousand men to the west of Pope, gained control of the gaps in the Blue Ridge, fell upon Pope's communications with Washington, burned vast parks of war supplies, and hid himself in the woods under the very nose of the new commander. Pope, uneasy, nonplussed, begged for help and received many regiments from the army that had been ruined in the Peninsula, moved unwittingly toward the very ground where McDowell had lost a year before, dead men's bones protruding from the earth and skeletons of horses strewn about the ground. There on the twenty-eighth of August Lee attacked Pope, Jackson joining him on the field of battle. A second time a great Union army was beaten, routed, driven pell-mell over the Long Bridge into Washington. Would the tide never turn?

Ben Wade and his committee hounded the president. The members of the cabinet quarreled, intrigued, and attacked; attacked the president, demanding the trial of McClellan till the news of the defeat of their favorite, Pope, came; urged

the abandonment of the city, the papers of the government ready packed, a train waiting to take the leaders of the country out of danger's way-Stanton most uneasy of all, wondering what his friend Jefferson Davis might think or do. Benjamin F. Wade wrote as Congress was about to adjourn, "The country was on the way to hell, the scenes of the French revolution were nothing to what we shall see here." Trumbull declared that no one could imagine the hatred of the Republican Congress for its president.

There was no relief in view anywhere, the cabinet, Sumner, the fussy Halleck, new generalissimo, all nonplussed, half ready to abandon the government itself the president, worn, haggard, despondent, meditative; nor was the country in a better state of mind, preachers visiting Lincoln, abolitionists complaining, Emerson, the philosopher, declaring, "If the Union is incapable of universal freedom, its disruption were as the breaking-up of a frogpond." And a second time the Confederate army did not march into Washington. Instead Robert E. Lee set his regiments, fifty thousand strong, upon the roads to Harper's Ferry and Frederick, there to march across Maryland, release Baltimore and the East from the grip of the United States army, and move into Pennsylvania, his barefooted, ragged men singing the stirring song, "Maryland, My Maryland." In this day of depression and woe, Lincoln sought out the humbled McClellan and gave him again the command of all the armies of the East! "Lifting the burdens from the shoulders of all men."

("Lincoln or Lee" in the April number)

Yon

THE YUKONERS And the Spell They Cast

T. MORRIS LONGSTRETH

UKON Territory began for me, on that April evening, at the dock in Vancouver. The first boat of the season was about to pull out. It was filled with old-timers who had wintered "outside," but whose nostrils had sniffed the breath of memory. Three young Mounties, as glorious if not as wise as Solomon, rolled cigarettes at the bow rail. Veteran river-captains, pilots, cooks, collegiate stewards, and master mechanics were bound north to inaugurate the complicated services of the summer Yukon. Prospectors Prospectors and miners called to friends on the dock, where some hundreds of exYukoners, whose scars ached with the opening of navigation, had wistfully assembled. At my elbow a pinched-off little man was explaining to me why he was nervous: his partner, a stranger with whom he proposed to go gold-hunting for two years, had been enchanted, on the way to the boat, by a beer-parlor. A fifteen-hundred-dollar grub-stake hung on his reappearance. Another stranger had helpfully gone to find and disenchant him, the pinched-off man explained, while he stood by the duffle. The situation so staggered my ideas of what was sensible that I had no consolations to offer, not a platitude. Two years with a stran

ger in a wilderness, bearing a ton of provision along in the hope of finding gold! Could gambling take on a direr form? Five minutes before we started the partner rolled up the plank, a large able man, who I saw at once had had no intention of missing the boat. I felt sorrier than ever for the little one, if free will meant anything to him.

The trip, of inland ocean-voyaging and railway-mountaineering, was one from which every asperity had been removed, and for once the scenery was not transcended by the advertisements. But the color and contours were secondary in interest to my fellow-travelers, the returning Yukoners. I was impressed by their eagerness to get back to their isolation, for that is what the Territory is, a mountain-circled eddy of isolation, a compact comprehensible country organized about the head-waters of the Yukon River. Walled off by mountain ranges on the west and south and east, it becomes a lonely if not inaccessible unit of land whose innumerable streams all flow into the one home river. No other wilderness of two hundred thousand square miles is so much one, and none so conscious of its personality. The Yukoners seem all kin. They all know or know of each other. Their doors

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