THE REIGN OF THE KLAN

“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
régime.

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
375
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.

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:
4

“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
5
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.
6

“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!”

“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.
8

“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
9
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
10
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
11
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.
12

“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.
13

“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?”
14

“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?”
15

“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
16
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,
17
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.
18
“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.

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
20
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,
reëntering 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.
21

“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.”
22

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!
23

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.”
24

“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
25
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
26
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.
27

“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,
28
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.”
29
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.”
30
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.”
31
“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.”
32
“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.

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
34
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
35
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
36
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:
37

“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.

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?”
39

“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.
40

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.
41

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?”
42

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
43
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?”
44

“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
45
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
46
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,
47
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
48
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
49
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
50
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
51
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
52
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:
53

“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
54
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
55
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.

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
57
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
58
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.
59
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
60
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.

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,
62
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
63
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
64
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
65
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.
66

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:
67

“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
68
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.”
69

“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!
70

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.

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
72
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
73
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
74
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.”
75

“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.
76

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
77
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
78
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
79
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.

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?
81
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
82
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
83
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:
84

“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
85
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 reëchoing 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
86
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.
87

And with muttered curses men looked Southward.

Across Broadway the cortège passed under a huge
transparency on which appeared the words:

Farther along swung the black-draped banner:

Another flapped its grim message:

Across the Ninth Regiment Armoury, in gigantic letters,
were the words:

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.
88

No man who walked the earth ever passed to his tomb
through such a storm of human tears. The pageants of
Alexander, Cæsar, 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
89
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:

Margaret tremblingly wound her arms around her
mother’s neck. No words broke the pitiful silence—only
blinding tears and broken sobs.
90

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
91
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, Cæsar,
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
92
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
93
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 Cæsar 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
94
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
95
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
96
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
97
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.
98
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
99
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
100
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.

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
102
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
103
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.
104
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.
105

“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——”
106

“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
107
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
108
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
109
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.
110
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
111
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!”

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
113
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.
114

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.

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.
116
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:

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.”

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
121
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.
122

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
123
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
124
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
125
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
126
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!”

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.
128
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.”
129

“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.
130
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.

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
132
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
133
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
134
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?”
135

“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.

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,
137
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!”
138

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
139
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
140
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
141
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,
142
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.”
143

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.
144

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!”
145

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
146
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.”
147

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.

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
149
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
150
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
151
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.”

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.
153

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 Crédit Mobilier
steal. This vast infamy had already eaten its way into
154
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
155
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
156
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
157
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.
158

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,
159
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.
160

“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.”
161

“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.

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
163
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:
164

“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.

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.
166

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
167
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
168
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
169
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,
170
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
171
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
172
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.
173

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:
174

“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.
175

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
176
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
177
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
178
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.

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.
180

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.
181

“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
182
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.
183

“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?”
184

“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 Frémont at Cleveland against Lincoln
in ’64, and tried to split the party or force Lincoln
to retire. Frémont, 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
185
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.”
186

“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.
187

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,
188
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
189
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
190
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.”
191

“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,
192
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
193
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
194
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
195
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
196
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?”
197

“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?”
198

“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.
199

“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.”
200

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?”
201

“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?”
202

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-vitæ 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,
203
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.

Elsie stood dreaming for a moment in the shadow
of the arbor-vitæ, breathing the sensuous perfumed
air and listening to the distant music of
the falls, her heart quivering in pity for the anguish of
which she had been a witness. Again the spectral cry
of the whippoorwill rang near-by, and she noted for the
first time the curious cluck with which the bird punctuated
each call. A sense of dim foreboding oppressed her.

She wondered if the chatter of Marion about the girl
in Nashville were only a child’s guess or more. She
laughed softly at the absurdity of the idea. Never since
she had first looked into Ben Cameron’s face did she feel
surer of the honesty and earnestness of his love than to-day
in this quiet home of his native village. It must be
the queer call of the bird which appealed to superstitions
she did not know were hidden within her being.

Still dreaming under its spell, she was startled at the
tread of two men approaching the gate.

The taller, more powerful-looking man put his hand
on the latch and paused.

“Allow no white man to order you around. Remember
you are a freeman and as good as any pale-face who walks
this earth.”
205

She recognized the voice of Silas Lynch.

“Ben Cameron dare me to come about de house,” said
the other voice.

“What did he say?”

“He say, wid his eyes batten’ des like lightnen’, ‘Ef I
ketch you hangin’ ’roun’ dis place agin’, Gus, I’ll jump
on you en stomp de life outen ye.’”

“Well, you tell him that your name is Augustus, not
‘Gus,’ and that the United States troops quartered in this
town will be with him soon after the stomping begins.
You wear its uniform. Give the white trash in this town
to understand that they are not even citizens of the
nation. As a sovereign voter, you, once their slave, are
not only their equal—you are their master.”

“Dat I will!” was the firm answer.

The negro to whom Lynch spoke disappeared in the
direction taken by Marion and her mother, and the figure
of the handsome mulatto passed rapidly up the walk,
ascended the steps and knocked at the door.

Elsie followed him.

“My father is too much fatigued with his journey to be
seen now; you must call to-morrow,” she said.

The negro lifted his hat and bowed:

“Ah, we are delighted to welcome you, Miss Stoneman,
to our land! Your father asked me to call immediately on
his arrival. I have but obeyed his orders.”

Elsie shrank from the familiarity of his manner and
the tones of authority and patronage with which he
spoke.

“He cannot be seen at this hour,” she answered shortly.
206

“Perhaps you will present my card, then—say that I
am at his service, and let him appoint the time at which
I shall return?”

She did not invite him in, but with easy assurance he
took his seat on the joggle-board beside the door and
awaited her return.

Against her urgent protest, Stoneman ordered Lynch to
be shown at once to his bedroom.

When the door was closed, the old Commoner, without
turning to greet his visitor or moving his position in bed,
asked:

“Are you following my instructions?”

“To the letter, sir.”

“You are initiating the negroes into the League and
teaching them the new catechism?”

“With remarkable success. Its secrecy and ritual
appeal to them. Within six months we shall have the
whole race under our control almost to a man.”

“Almost to a man?”

“We find some so attached to their former masters that
reason is impossible with them. Even threats and the
promise of forty acres of land have no influence.”

The old man snorted with contempt.

“If anything could reconcile me to the Satanic Institution
it is the character of the wretches who submit to it
and kiss the hand that strikes. After all, a slave deserves
to be a slave. The man who is mean enough to wear
chains ought to wear them. You must teach, teach,
TEACH these black hounds to know they are men, not
brutes!”
207

The old man paused a moment, and his restless hands
fumbled the cover.

“Your first task, as I told you in the beginning, is to
teach every negro to stand erect in the presence of his
former master and assert his manhood. Unless he does
this, the South will bristle with bayonets in vain. The
man who believes he is a dog, is one. The man who believes
himself a king, may become one. Stop this snivelling
and sneaking round the back doors. I can do nothing,
God Almighty can do nothing, for a coward. Fix this as
the first law of your own life. Lift up your head! The
world is yours. Take it. Beat this into the skulls of
your people, if you do it with an axe. Teach them the
military drill at once. I’ll see that Washington sends
the guns. The state, when under your control, can
furnish the powder.”

“It will surprise you to know the thoroughness with
which this has been done already by the League,” said
Lynch. “The white master believed he could vote the
negro as he worked him in the fields during the war. The
League, with its blue flaming altar, under the shadows
of night, has wrought a miracle. The negro is the enemy
of his former master and will be for all time.”

“For the present,” said the old man meditatively,
“not a word to a living soul as to my connection with this
work. When the time is ripe, I’ll show my hand.”

Elsie entered, protesting against her father’s talking
longer, and showed Lynch to the door.

He paused on the moonlit porch and tried to engage her
in familiar talk.
208

She cut him short, and he left reluctantly.

As he bowed his thick neck in pompous courtesy, she
caught with a shiver the odour of pomade on his black half-kinked
hair. He stopped on the lower step, looked back
with smiling insolence, and gazed intently at her beauty.
The girl shrank from the gleam of the jungle in his eyes
and hurried within.

She found her father sunk in a stupor. Her cry brought
the young surgeon hurrying into the room, and at the end
of an hour he said to Elsie and Phil:

“He has had a stroke of paralysis. He may lie in
mental darkness for months and then recover. His heart
action is perfect. Patience, care, and love will save him.
There is no cause for immediate alarm.”

Phil early found the home of the Camerons the
most charming spot in town. As he sat in the
old-fashioned parlour beside Margaret, his brain
seethed with plans for building a hotel on a large scale on
the other side of the Square and restoring her home intact.

The Cameron homestead was a large brick building
with an ample porch looking out directly on the Court
House Square, standing in the middle of a lawn full of
trees, flowers, shrubbery, and a wilderness of evergreen
boxwood planted fifty years before. It was located on the
farm from which it had always derived its support. The
farm extended up into the village itself, with the great
barn easily seen from the street.

Phil was charmed with the doctor’s genial personality.
He often found the father a decidedly easier person to get
along with than his handsome daughter. The Rev.
Hugh McAlpin was a daily caller, and Margaret had a
tantalizing way of showing her deference to his opinions.

Phil hated this preacher from the moment he laid eyes
on him. His pugnacious piety he might have endured
but for the fact that he was good-looking and eloquent.
When he rose in the pulpit in all his sacred dignity, fixed
his eyes on Margaret, and began in tenderly modulated
210
voice to tell about the love of God, Phil clinched his fist.
He didn’t care to join the Presbyterian church, but he
quietly made up his mind that, if it came to the worst
and she asked him, he would join anything. What made
him furious was the air of assurance with which the young
divine carried himself about Margaret, as if he had but to
say the word and it would be fixed as by a decree issued
from before the foundations of the world.

He was pleased and surprised to find that his being a
Yankee made no difference in his standing or welcome.
The people seemed unconscious of the part his father
played at Washington. Stoneman’s Confiscation Bill
had not yet been discussed in Congress, and the promise
of land to the negroes was universally regarded as a hoax
of the League to win their followers. The old Commoner
was not an orator. Hence his name was scarcely known
in the South. The Southern people could not conceive of
a great leader except one who expressed his power through
the megaphone of oratory. They held Charles Sumner
chiefly responsible for Reconstruction.

The fact that Phil was a Yankee who had no axe to
grind in the South caused the people to appeal to him in
a pathetic way that touched his heart. He had not been
in town two weeks before he was on good terms with
every youngster, had the entrée to every home, and Ben
had taken him, protesting vehemently, to see every pretty
girl there. He found that, in spite of war and poverty,
troubles present and troubles to come, the young Southern
woman was the divinity that claimed and received
the chief worship of man.
211

The tremendous earnestness with which these youngsters
pursued the work of courting, all of them so poor
they scarcely had enough to eat, amazed and alarmed
him beyond measure. He found in several cases as many
as four making a dead set for one girl, as if heaven and
earth depended on the outcome, while the girl seemed to
receive it all as a matter of course—her just tribute.

Every instinct of his quiet reserved nature revolted at
any such attempt to rush his cause with Margaret, and
yet it made the cold chills run down his spine to see that
Presbyterian preacher drive his buggy up to the hotel,
take her to ride, and stay three hours. He knew where
they had gone—to Lover’s Leap and along the beautiful
road which led to the North Carolina line. He knew the
way—Margaret had showed him. This road was the Way
of Romance. Every farmhouse, cabin, and shady nook
along its beaten track could tell its tale of lovers fleeing
from the North to find happiness in the haven of matrimony
across the line in South Carolina. Everything
seemed to favour marriage in this climate. The state
required no license. A legal marriage could be celebrated,
anywhere, at any time, by a minister in the presence of
two witnesses, with or without the consent of parent or
guardian. Marriage was the easiest thing in the state—divorce
the one thing impossible. Death alone could
grant divorce.

He was now past all reason in love. He followed the
movement of Margaret’s queenly figure with pathetic
abandonment. Beneath her beautiful manners he swore
with a shiver that she was laughing at him. Now and
212
then he caught a funny expression about her eyes, as
if she were consumed with a sly sense of humour in her
love affairs.

What he felt to be his manliest traits, his reserve, dignity,
and moral earnestness, she must think cold and slow
beside the dash, fire, and assurance of these Southerners.
He could tell by the way she encouraged the preacher
before his eyes that she was criticizing and daring him
to let go for once. Instead of doing it, he sank back
appalled at the prospect and let the preacher carry
her off again.

He sought solace in Dr. Cameron, who was utterly
oblivious of his daughter’s love affairs.

Phil was constantly amazed at the variety of his knowledge,
the genuineness of his culture, his modesty, and the
note of youth and cheer with which he still pursued the
study of medicine.

His company was refreshing for its own sake. The
slender graceful figure, ruddy face, with piercing, dark-brown
eyes in startling contrast to his snow-white hair
and beard, had for Phil a perpetual charm. He never
tired listening to his talk, and noting the peculiar grace
and dignity with which he carried himself, unconscious
of the commanding look of his brilliant eyes.

“I hear that you have used hypnotism in your
practice, Doctor,” Phil said to him one day, as he
watched with fascination the changing play of his mobile
features.

“Oh, yes! used it for years. Southern doctors have
always been pioneers in the science of medicine. Dr.
213
Crawford Long, of Georgia, you know, was the first practitioner
in America to apply anesthesia to surgery.”

“But where did you run up against hypnotism? I
thought this a new thing under the sun?”

The doctor laughed.

“It’s not a home industry, exactly. I became interested
in it in Edinburgh while a medical student, and
pursued it with increased interest in Paris.”

“Did you study medicine abroad?” Phil asked in
surprise.

“Yes; I was poor, but I managed to raise and to borrow
enough to take three years on the other side. I put
all I had and all my credit in it. I’ve never regretted the
sacrifice. The more I saw of the great world, the better
I liked my own world. I’ve given these farmers and their
families the best God gave to me.”

“Do you find much use for your powers of hypnosis?”
Phil asked.

“Only in an experimental way. Naturally I am
endowed with this gift—especially over certain classes
who are easily the subjects of extreme fear. I owned a
rascally slave named Gus whom I used to watch stealing.
Suddenly confronting him, I’ve thrown him into unconsciousness
with a steady gaze of the eye, until he would
drop on his face, trembling like a leaf, unable to speak
until I allowed him.”

“How do you account for such powers?”

“I don’t account for them at all. They belong to the
world of spiritual phenomena of which we know so little
and yet which touch our material lives at a thousand
214
points every day. How do we account for sleep and
dreams, or second sight, or the day dreams which we call
visions?”

Phil was silent, and the doctor went on dreamily:

“The day my boy Richard was killed at Gettysburg, I
saw him lying dead in a field near a house. I saw some
soldiers bury him in the corner of that field, and then an
old man go to the grave, dig up his body, cart it away into
the woods, and throw it into a ditch. I saw it before I
heard of the battle or knew that he was in it. He was
reported killed, and his body has never been found. It is
the one unspeakable horror of the war to me. I’ll never
get over it.”

“How very strange!” exclaimed Phil.

“And yet the war was nothing, my boy, to the horrors
I feel clutching the throat of the South to-day. I’m glad
you and your father are down here. Your disinterested
view of things may help us at Washington when we need
it most. The South seems to have no friend at court.”

“Your younger men, I find, are hopeful, Doctor,” said
Phil.

“Yes, the young never see danger until it’s time to die.
I’m not a pessimist, but I was happier in jail. Scores of
my old friends have given up in despair and died. Delicate
and cultured women are living on cowpeas, corn
bread, and molasses—and of such quality they would not
have fed it to a slave. Children go to bed hungry.
Droves of brutal negroes roam at large, stealing, murdering,
and threatening blacker crimes. We are under
the heel of petty military tyrants, few of whom ever
smelled gunpowder in a battle. At the approaching
election, not a decent white man in this country can take
the infamous test oath. I am disfranchised because I
gave a cup of water to the lips of one of my dying boys on
the battlefield. My slaves are all voters. There will be
a negro majority of more than one hundred thousand in
this state. Desperadoes are here teaching these negroes
insolence and crime in their secret societies. The future
is a nightmare.”

HENRY WALTHALL AS BEN CAMERON.

“You have my sympathy, sir,” said Phil warmly, extending
his hand. “These Reconstruction Acts, conceived
in sin and brought forth in iniquity, can bring only
shame and disgrace until the last trace of them is wiped
from our laws. I hope it will not be necessary to do it in
blood.”

The doctor was deeply touched. He could not be mistaken
in the genuineness of any man’s feeling. He never
dreamed this earnest straightforward Yankee youngster
was in love with Margaret, and it would have made no
difference in the accuracy of his judgment.

“Your sentiments do you honour, sir,” he said with
grave courtesy. “And you honour us and our town with
your presence and friendship.”

As Phil hurried home in a warm glow of sympathy for
the people whose hospitality had made him their friend
and champion, he encountered a negro trooper standing
on the corner, watching the Cameron house with furtive
glance.

Instinctively he stopped, surveyed the man from head
to foot and asked:
216

“What’s the trouble?”

“None er yo’ business,” the negro answered, slouching
across to the opposite side of the street.

Phil watched him with disgust. He had the short,
heavy-set neck of the lower order of animals. His skin
was coal black, his lips so thick they curled both ways up
and down with crooked blood marks across them. His
nose was flat, and its enormous nostrils seemed in perpetual
dilation. The sinister bead eyes, with brown
splotches in their whites, were set wide apart and gleamed
apelike under his scant brows. His enormous cheekbones
and jaws seemed to protrude beyond the ears
and almost hide them.

“That we should send such soldiers here to flaunt our
uniform in the faces of these people!” he exclaimed, with
bitterness.

He met Ben hurrying home from a visit to Elsie. The
two young soldiers whose prejudices had melted in the
white heat of battle had become fast friends.

Phil laughed and winked:

“I’ll meet you to-night around the family altar!”

When he reached home, Ben saw, slouching in front of
the house, walking back and forth and glancing furtively
behind him, the negro trooper whom his friend had
passed.

He walked quickly in front of him, and blinking his
eyes rapidly, said:

“Didn’t I tell you, Gus, not to let me catch you hanging
around this house again?”

The negro drew himself up, pulling his blue uniform
217
into position as his body stretched out of its habitual
slouch, and answered:

“My name ain’t ‘Gus.’”

Ben gave a quick little chuckle and leaned back against
the palings, his hand resting on one that was loose. He
glanced at the negro carelessly and said:

“Well, Augustus Cæsar, I give your majesty thirty
seconds to move off the block.”

Gus’ first impulse was to run, but remembering himself
he threw back his shoulders and said:

“I reckon de streets free——”

“Yes, and so is kindling wood!”

Quick as a flash of lightning the paling suddenly left
the fence and broke three times in such bewildering rapidity
on the negro’s head he forgot everything he ever knew
or thought he knew save one thing—the way to run. He
didn’t fly, but he made remarkable use of the facilities
with which he had been endowed.

Ben watched him disappear toward the camp.

He picked up the pieces of paling, pulled a strand of
black wool from a splinter, looked at it curiously and said:

“A sprig of his majesty’s hair—I’ll doubtless remember
him without it!”

Within an hour from Ben’s encounter he was
arrested without warrant by the military
commandant, handcuffed, and placed on the
train for Columbia, more than a hundred miles distant.
The first purpose of sending him in charge of a negro guard
was abandoned for fear of a riot. A squad of white troops
accompanied him.

Elsie was waiting at the gate, watching for his coming,
her heart aglow with happiness.

When Marion and little Hugh ran to tell the exciting
news, she thought it a joke and refused to believe it.

“Come, dear, don’t tease me; you know it’s not true!”

“I wish I may die if ’tain’t so!” Hugh solemnly declared.
“He run Gus away ’cause he scared Aunt Margaret
so. They come and put handcuffs on him and took
him to Columbia. I tell you Grandpa and Grandma and
Aunt Margaret are mad!”

Elsie called Phil and begged him to see what had happened.

When Phil reported Ben’s arrest without a warrant, and
the indignity to which he had been subjected on the
amazing charge of resisting military authority, Elsie hurried
with Marion and Hugh to the hotel to express her
219
indignation, and sent Phil to Columbia on the next train
to fight for his release.

By the use of a bribe Phil discovered that a special inquisition
had been hastily organized to procure perjured
testimony against Ben on the charge of complicity in the
murder of a carpet-bag adventurer named Ashburn, who
had been killed at Columbia in a row in a disreputable
resort. This murder had occurred the week Ben
Cameron was in Nashville. The enormous reward of
$25,000 had been offered for the conviction of any man
who could be implicated in the killing. Scores of venal
wretches, eager for this blood money, were using
every device of military tyranny to secure evidence on
which to convict—no matter who the man might be.
Within six hours of his arrival they had pounced on
Ben.

They arrested as a witness an old negro named John
Stapler, noted for his loyalty to the Camerons. The
doctor had saved his life once in a dangerous illness.
They were going to put him to torture and force him to
swear that Ben Cameron had tried to bribe him to kill
Ashburn. General Howle, the Commandant of the Columbia
district, was in Charleston on a visit to headquarters.

Phil resorted to the ruse of pretending, as a Yankee, the
deepest sympathy for Ashburn, and by the payment of a
fee of twenty dollars to the Captain, was admitted to the
fort to witness the torture.

They led the old man trembling into the presence of the
Captain, who sat on an improvised throne in full uniform.
220

“Have you ordered a barber to shave this man’s head?”
sternly asked the judge.

“Please, Marster, fer de Lawd’s sake, I ain’ done
nuttin‘—doan’ shave my head. Dat ha’r been wropped
lak dat fur ten year! I die sho’ ef I lose my ha’r.”

“Bring the barber, and take him back until he comes,”
was the order. In an hour they led him again into the
room blindfolded, and placed him in a chair.

“Have you let him see a preacher before putting
him through?” the Captain asked. “I have an order
from the General in Charleston to put him through to-day.”

“For Gawd’s sake, Marster, doan’ put me froo—I ain’t
done nuttin’ en I doan’ know nuttin’!”

The old negro slipped to his knees, trembling from head
to foot.

The guards caught him by the shoulders and threw him
back into the chair. The bandage was removed, and just
in front of him stood a brass cannon pointed at his head,
a soldier beside it holding the string ready to pull. John
threw himself backward, yelling:

“Goddermighty!”

When he scrambled to his feet and started to run, another
cannon swung on him from the rear. He dropped
to his knees and began to pray.

“Yas, Lawd, I’se er comin’. I hain’t ready—but,
Lawd, I got ter come! Save me!”

“Shave him!” the Captain ordered.

While the old man sat moaning, they lathered his head
with two scrubbing-brushes and shaved it clean.
221

“Now stand him up by the wall and measure him for
his coffin,” was the order.

They snatched him from the chair, pushed him against
the wall, and measured him. While they were taking his
measure, the man next to him whispered:

“Now’s the time to save your hide—tell all about Ben
Cameron trying to hire you to kill Ashburn.”

“Give him a few minutes,” said the Captain, “and
maybe we can hear what Mr. Cameron said about Ashburn.”

“I doan’ know nuttin’, General,” pleaded the old
darkey. “I ain’t heard nuttin’—I ain’t seed Marse Ben
fer two monts.”

“You needn’t lie to us. The rebels have been posting
you. But it’s no use. We’ll get it out of you.”

“‘Fo’ Gawd, Marster, I’se telling de truf!”

“Put him in the dark cell and keep him there the balance
of his life unless he tells,” was the order.

At the end of four days, Phil was summoned again to
witness the show.

John was carried to another part of the fort and shown
the sweat-box.

“Now tell all you know or in you go!” said his tormentor.

The negro looked at the engine of torture in abject terror—a
closet in the walls of the fort just big enough to
admit the body, with an adjustable top to press down too
low for the head to be held erect. The door closed tight
against the breast of the victim. The only air admitted
was through an auger-hole in the door.
222

The old man’s lips moved in prayer.

“Will you tell?” growled the Captain.

“I cain’t tell ye nuttin’ ‘cept’n’ a lie!” he moaned.

They thrust him in, slammed the door, and in a loud
voice the Captain said:

“Keep him there for thirty days unless he tells.”

He was left in the agony of the sweat-box for thirty-three
hours and taken out. His limbs were swollen and
when he attempted to walk he tottered and fell.

The guard jerked him to his feet, and the Captain said:

“I’m afraid we’ve taken him out too soon, but if he
don’t tell he can go back and finish the month out.”

The poor old negro dropped in a faint, and they carried
him back to his cell.

Phil determined to spare no means, fair or foul, to
secure Ben’s release from the clutches of these devils. He
had as yet been unable to locate his place of confinement.

He continued his ruse of friendly curiosity, kept in
touch with the Captain, and the Captain in touch with
his pocketbook.

Summoned to witness another interesting ceremony, he
hurried to the fort.

The officer winked at him confidentially, and took him
out to a row of dungeons built of logs and ceiled inside
with heavy boards. A single pane of glass about eight
inches square admitted light ten feet from the ground.

There was a commotion inside, curses, groans, and cries
for mercy mingling in rapid succession.

“What is it?” asked Phil.

“Hell’s goin’ on in there!” laughed the officer.
223

“Evidently.”

A heavy crash, as though a ton weight had struck the
floor, and then all was still.

“By George, it’s too bad we can’t see it all!” exclaimed
the officer.

“What does it mean?” urged Phil.

Again the Captain laughed immoderately.

“I’ve got a blue-blood in there taking the bluin’ out of
his system. He gave me some impudence. I’m teaching
him who’s running this country!”

“What are you doing to him?” Phil asked with a
sudden suspicion.

“Oh, just having a little fun! I put two big white
drunks in there with him—half-fighting drunks, you
know—and told them to work on his teeth and manicure
his face a little to initiate him into the ranks of the common
people, so to speak!”

Again he laughed.

Phil, listening at the keyhole, held up his hand:

“Hush, they’re talking——”

He could hear Ben Cameron’s voice in the softest drawl:

“Say it again.”

“Please, Marster!”

“Now both together, and a little louder!”

“Please, Marster,” came the united chorus.

“Now what kind of a dog did I say you are?”

“The kind as comes when his marster calls.”

“Both together—the under dog seems to have too much
cover, like his mouth might be full of cotton.”

They repeated it louder.
224

“A common—stump-tailed—cur-dog?”

“Yessir.”

“Say it.”

“A common—stump-tailed—cur-dog—Marster!”

“A pair of them.”

“A pair of ’em.”

“No, the whole thing—all together—‘we—are—a—pair!’”

“Yes—Marster.” They repeated it in chorus.

“With apologies to the dogs——”

“Apologies to the dogs——”

“And why does your master honour the kennel with his
presence to-day?”

“He hit a nigger on the head so hard that he strained
the nigger’s ankle, and he’s restin’ from his labours.”

“That’s right, Towser. If I had you and Tige a few
hours every day I could make good squirrel-dogs out of
you.”

There was a pause. Phil looked up and smiled.

“What does it sound like?” asked the Captain, with a
shade of doubt in his voice.

“Sounds to me like a Sunday-school teacher taking his
class through a new catechism.”

The Captain fumbled hurriedly for his keys.

“There’s something wrong in there.”

He opened the door and sprang in.

Ben Cameron was sitting on top of the two toughs, knocking
their heads together as they repeated each chorus.

“Walk in, gentlemen. The show is going on now—the
animals are doing beautifully,” said Ben.
225

The Captain muttered an oath. Phil suddenly grasped
him by the throat, hurled him against the wall, and
snatched the keys from his hand.

“Now open your mouth, you white-livered cur, and
inside of twenty-four hours I’ll have you behind the bars.
I have all the evidence I need. I’m an ex-officer of the
United States Army, of the fighting corps—not the vulture
division. This is my friend. Accompany us to the
street and strike your charges from the record.”

The coward did as he was ordered, and Ben hurried
back to Piedmont with a friend toward whom he began
to feel closer than a brother.

When Elsie heard the full story of the outrage, she bore
herself toward Ben with unusual tenderness, and yet he
knew that the event had driven their lives farther apart.
He felt instinctively the cold silent eye of her father, and
his pride stiffened under it. The girl had never considered
the possibility of a marriage without her father’s
blessing. Ben Cameron was too proud to ask it. He
began to fear that the differences between her father and
his people reached to the deepest sources of life.

Phil found himself a hero at the Cameron House. Margaret
said little, but her bearing spoke in deeper language
than words. He felt it would be mean to take advantage
of her gratitude.

But he was quick to respond to the motherly tenderness
of Mrs. Cameron. In the groups of neighbours who
gathered in the evenings to discuss with the doctor the
hopes, fears, and sorrows of the people, Phil was a
charmed listener to the most brilliant conversations he
226
had ever heard. It seemed the normal expression of their
lives. He had never before seen people come together
to talk to one another after this fashion. More and
more the simplicity, dignity, patience, courtesy, and
sympathy of these people in their bearing toward one
another impressed him. More and more he grew to like
them.

Marion went out of her way to express her open admiration
for Phil and tease him about Margaret. The Rev.
Hugh McAlpin was monopolizing her on the Wednesday
following his return from Columbia and Phil sought
Marion for sympathy.

“What will you give me if I tease you about Margaret
right before her?” she asked.

He blushed furiously.

“Don’t you dare such a thing on peril of your life!”

“You know you like to be teased about her,” she cried,
her blue eyes dancing with fun.

“With such a pretty little friend to do the teasing all by
ourselves, perhaps——”

“You’ll never get her unless you have more spunk.”

“Then I’ll find consolation with you.”

“No, I mean to marry young.”

“And your ideal of life?”

“To fill the world with flowers, laughter, and music—especially
my own home—and never do a thing I can
make my husband do for me! How do you like it?”

“I think it very sweet,” Phil answered soberly.

At noon on the following Friday, the Piedmont Eagle
appeared with an editorial signed by Dr. Cameron, denouncing
227
in the fine language of the old school the
arrest of Ben as “despotism and the usurpation of
authority.”

At three o’clock, Captain Gilbert, in command of the
troops stationed in the village, marched a squad of soldiers
to the newspaper office. One of them carried a sledge-hammer.
In ten minutes he demolished the office,
heaped the type and their splintered cases on top of the
battered press in the middle of the street, and set fire to
the pile.

On the courthouse door he nailed this proclamation:

Not content with this display of power, he determined
to make an example of Dr. Cameron, as the leader of
public opinion in the county.

He ordered a squad of his negro troops to arrest him
immediately and take him to Columbia for obstructing
the execution of the Reconstruction Acts. He placed
the squad under command of Gus, whom he promoted to
be a corporal, with instructions to wait until the doctor
was inside his house, boldly enter it and arrest him.

When Gus marched his black janizaries into the house,
no one was in the office. Margaret had gone for a ride
228
with Phil, and Ben had strolled with Elsie to Lover’s
Leap, unconscious of the excitement in town.

Dr. Cameron himself had heard nothing of it, having
just reached home from a visit to a country patient.

Gus stationed his men at each door, and with another
trooper walked straight into Mrs. Cameron’s bedroom,
where the doctor was resting on a lounge.

Had an imp of perdition suddenly sprung through the
floor, the master of the house of Cameron would not have
been more enraged or surprised.

A sudden leap, as the spring of a panther, and he stood
before his former slave, his slender frame erect, his face
a livid spot in its snow-white hair, his brilliant eyes
flashing with fury.

Gus suddenly lost control of his knees.

His old master transfixed him with his eyes, and in a
voice, whose tones gripped him by the throat, said:

“How dare you?”

The gun fell from the negro’s hand, and he dropped to
the floor on his face.

His companion uttered a yell and sprang through the
door, rallying the men as he went:

“Fall back! Fall back! He’s killed Gus! Shot him
dead wid his eye. He’s conjured him! Git de whole
army quick.”

They fled to the Commandant.

Gilbert ordered the negroes to their tents and led his
whole company of white regulars to the hotel, arrested
Dr. Cameron, and rescued his fainting trooper, who had
been revived and placed under a tree on the lawn.
229

The little Captain had a wicked look on his face. He
refused to allow the doctor a moment’s delay to leave
instructions for his wife, who had gone to visit a neighbour.
He was placed in the guard-house, and a detail of
twenty soldiers stationed around it.

The arrest was made so quickly, not a dozen people in
town had heard of it. As fast as it was known, people
poured into the house, one by one, to express their sympathy.
But a greater surprise awaited them.

Within thirty minutes after he had been placed in
prison, a Lieutenant entered, accompanied by a soldier
and a negro blacksmith who carried in his hand two big
chains with shackles on each end.

The doctor gazed at the intruders a moment with incredulity,
and then, as the enormity of the outrage
dawned on him, he flushed and drew himself erect, his
face livid and rigid.

He clutched his throat with his slender fingers, slowly
recovered himself, glanced at the shackles in the black
hands and then at the young Lieutenant’s face, and said
slowly, with heaving breast:

“My God! Have you been sent to place these irons
on me?”

“Such are my orders, sir,” replied the officer, motioning
to the negro smith to approach. He stepped forward,
unlocked the padlock, and prepared the fetters to be
placed on his arms and legs. These fetters were of
enormous weight, made of iron rods three quarters
of an inch thick and connected together by chains of
like weight.
230

“This is monstrous!” groaned the doctor, with choking
agony, glancing helplessly about the bare cell for some
weapon with which to defend himself.

Suddenly looking the Lieutenant in the face, he said:

“I demand, sir, to see your commanding officer. He
cannot pretend that these shackles are needed to hold a
weak unarmed man in prison, guarded by two hundred
soldiers?”

“It is useless. I have his orders direct.”

“But I must see him. No such outrage has ever been
recorded in the history of the American people. I appeal
to the Magna Charta rights of every man who speaks
the English tongue—no man shall be arrested or imprisoned
or deprived of his own household, or of his liberties,
unless by the legal judgment of his peers or by the
law of the land!”

“The bayonet is your only law. My orders admit of
no delay. For your own sake, I advise you to submit.
As a soldier, Dr. Cameron, you know I must execute
orders.”

“These are not the orders of a soldier!” shouted the
prisoner, enraged beyond all control. “They are orders
for a jailer, a hangman, a scullion—no soldier who wears
the sword of a civilized nation can take such orders. The
war is over; the South is conquered; I have no country
save America. For the honour of the flag, for which I
once poured out my blood on the heights of Buena Vista,
I protest against this shame!”

The Lieutenant fell back a moment before the burst of
his anger.
231

“Kill me! Kill me!” he went on passionately, throwing
his arms wide open and exposing his breast. “Kill—I
am in your power. I have no desire to live under such
conditions. Kill, but you must not inflict on me and on
my people this insult worse than death!”

“Do your duty, blacksmith,” said the officer, turning
his back and walking toward the door.

The negro advanced with the chains cautiously, and
attempted to snap one of the shackles on the doctor’s
right arm.

With sudden maniac frenzy, Dr. Cameron seized the
negro by the throat, hurled him to the floor, and backed
against the wall.

The Lieutenant approached and remonstrated:

“Why compel me to add the indignity of personal violence?
You must submit.”

“I am your prisoner,” fiercely retorted the doctor.
“I have been a soldier in the armies of America, and I
know how to die. Kill me, and my last breath will be a
blessing. But while I have life to resist, for myself and
for my people, this thing shall not be done!”

The Lieutenant called a sergeant and a file of soldiers,
and the sergeant stepped forward to seize the prisoner.

Dr. Cameron sprang on him with the ferocity of a
tiger, seized his musket, and attempted to wrench it from
his grasp.

The men closed in on him. A short passionate fight
and the slender, proud, gray-haired man lay panting on
the floor.

Four powerful assailants held his hands and feet, and
232
the negro smith, with a grin, secured the rivet on the
right ankle and turned the key in the padlock on the left.

As he drove the rivet into the shackle on his left arm,
a spurt of bruised blood from the old Mexican War wound
stained the iron.

Dr. Cameron lay for a moment in a stupor. At length
he slowly rose. The clank of the heavy chains seemed
to choke him with horror. He sank on the floor, covering
his face with his hands and groaned:

“The shame! The shame! O God, that I might have
died! My poor, poor wife!”

Captain Gilbert entered and said with a sneer:

“I will take you now to see your wife and friends if
you would like to call before setting out for Columbia.”

The doctor paid no attention to him.

“Will you follow me while I lead you through this town,
to show them their chief has fallen, or will you force me
to drag you?”

Receiving no answer, he roughly drew the doctor to
his feet, held him by the arm, and led him thus in half-unconscious
stupor through the principal street, followed
by a drove of negroes. He ordered a squad of troops to
meet him at the depot. Not a white man appeared on
the streets. When one saw the sight and heard the clank
of those chains, there was a sudden tightening of the lip, a
clinched fist, and an averted face.

When they approached the hotel, Mrs. Cameron ran to
meet him, her face white as death.

In silence she kissed his lips, kissed each shackle on
his wrists, took her handkerchief and wiped the bruised
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blood from the old wound on his arm the iron had opened
afresh, and then with a look, beneath which the Captain
shrank, she said in low tones:

“Do your work quickly. You have but a few moments
to get out of this town with your prisoner. I have sent
a friend to hold my son. If he comes before you go, he
will kill you on sight as he would a mad dog.”

With a sneer, the Captain passed the hotel and led the
doctor, still in half-unconscious stupor, toward the depot
down past his old slave quarters. He had given his
negroes who remained faithful each a cabin and a lot.

They looked on in awed silence as the Captain proclaimed:

“Fellow citizens, you are the equal of any white man
who walks the ground. The white man’s day is done.
Your turn has come.”

As he passed Jake’s cabin, the doctor’s faithful man
stepped suddenly in front of him, looking at the Captain
out of the corners of his eyes, and asked:

“Is I yo’ equal?”

“Yes.”

“Des lak any white man?”

“Exactly.”

The negro’s fist suddenly shot into Gilbert’s nose with
the crack of a sledge-hammer, laying him stunned on the
pavement.

“Den take dat f’um yo’ equal, d—n you!” he cried,
bending over his prostrate figure. “I’ll show you how to
treat my ole marster, you low-down slue-footed devil!”

The stirring little drama roused the doctor and he
234
turned to his servant with his old-time courtesy, and
said:

“Thank you, Jake.”

“Come in here, Marse Richard; I knock dem things
off’n you in er minute, ’en I get you outen dis town in er
jiffy.”

“No, Jake, that is not my way; bring this gentleman
some water, and then my horse and buggy. You can
take me to the depot. This officer can follow with his
men.” And he did.

When Phil returned with Margaret, he drove at
Mrs. Cameron’s request to find Ben, brought
him with all speed to the hotel, took him to his
room, and locked the door before he told him the news.
After an hour’s blind rage, he agreed to obey his father’s
positive orders to keep away from the Captain until his
return, and to attempt no violence against the authorities.

Phil undertook to manage the case in Columbia, and
spent three days collecting his evidence before leaving.

Swifter feet had anticipated him. Two days after the
arrival of Dr. Cameron at the fort in Colombia, a dust-stained,
tired negro was ushered into the presence of
General Howle.

He looked about timidly and laughed loudly.

“Well, my man, what’s the trouble? You seem to
have walked all the way, and laugh as if you were glad
of it.”

“I ‘spec’ I is, sah,” said Jake, sidling up confidentially.

“Well?” said Howle good-humouredly.

Jake’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“I hears you got my ole marster, Dr. Cameron, in dis
place.”

“Yes. What do you know against him?”
236

“Nuttin’, sah. I des hurry ’long down ter take his
place, so’s you can sen’ him back home. He’s erbleeged
ter go. Dey’s er pow’ful lot er sick folks up dar in de
country cain’t git ’long widout him, an er pow’ful lot er
well ones gwiner be raisin’ de debbel ’bout dis. You can
hol’ me, sah. Des tell my ole marster when ter be yere,
en he sho’ come.”

Jake paused and bowed low.

“Yessah, hit’s des lak I tell you. Fuddermo’, I ’spec’
I’se de man what done de damages. I ’spec’ I bus’ de
Capt’n’s nose so ’tain gwine be no mo’ good to ’im.”

Howle questioned Jake as to the whole affair, asked him
a hundred questions about the condition of the county,
the position of Dr. Cameron, and the possible effect of
this event on the temper of the people.

The affair had already given him a bad hour. The
news of this shackling of one of the most prominent men
in the State had spread like wildfire, and had caused the
first deep growl of anger from the people. He saw that it
was a senseless piece of stupidity. The election was rapidly
approaching. He was master of the State, and the less
friction the better. His mind was made up instantly.
He released Dr. Cameron with an apology, and returned
with him and Jake for a personal inspection of the affairs
of Ulster county.

In a thirty-minutes’ interview with Captain Gilbert,
Howle gave him more pain than his broken nose.

“And why did you nail up the doors of that Presbyterian
church?” he asked suavely.

“Because McAlpin, the young cub who preaches there,
237
dared come to this camp and insult me about the arrest of
old Cameron.”

“I suppose you issued an order silencing him from the
ministry?”

“I did, and told him I’d shackle him if he opened his
mouth again.”

“Good. The throne of Russia needn’t worry about a
worthy successor. Any further ecclesiastical orders?”

“None, except the oaths I’ve prescribed for them before
they shall preach again.”

“Fine! These Scotch Covenanters will feel at home
with you.”

“Well, I’ve made them bite the dust—and they know
who’s runnin’ this town, and don’t you forget it.”

“No doubt. Yet we may have too much of even a
good thing. The League is here to run this country.
The business of the military is to keep still and back them
when they need it.”

“We’ve the strongest council here to be found in any
county in this section,” said Gilbert with pride.

“Just so. The League meets once a week. We have
promised them the land of their masters and equal social
and political rights. Their members go armed to these
meetings and drill on Saturdays in the public square.
The white man is afraid to interfere lest his house or
barn take fire. A negro prisoner in the dock needs only
to make the sign to be acquitted. Not a negro will dare
to vote against us. Their women are formed into
societies, sworn to leave their husbands and refuse to
marry any man who dares our anger. The negro churches
238
have pledged themselves to expel him from their membership.
What more do you want?”

“There’s another side to it,” protested the Captain.
“Since the League has taken in the negroes, every Union
white man has dropped it like a hot iron, except the lone
scallawag or carpet-bagger who expects an office. In the
church, the social circle, in business or pleasure, these
men are lepers. How can a human being stand it? I’ve
tried to grind this hellish spirit in the dirt under my heel,
and unless you can do it they’ll beat you in the long run!
You’ve got to have some Southern white men or you’re
lost.”

“I’ll risk it with a hundred thousand negro majority,”
said Howle with a sneer. “The fun will just begin then.
In the meantime, I’ll have you ease up on this county’s
government. I’ve brought that man back who knocked
you down. Let him alone. I’ve pardoned him. The
less said about this affair, the better.”

As the day of the election under the new régime of Reconstruction
drew near, the negroes were excited by
rumours of the coming great events. Every man was to
receive forty acres of land for his vote, and the enthusiastic
speakers and teachers had made the dream a resistless
one by declaring that the Government would throw in a
mule with the forty acres. Some who had hesitated
about the forty acres of land, remembering that it must be
worked, couldn’t resist the idea of owning a mule.

The Freedman’s Bureau reaped a harvest in $2 marriage
fees from negroes who were urged thus to make
239
their children heirs of landed estates stocked with
mules.

Every stranger who appeared in the village was regarded
with awe as a possible surveyor sent from Washington
to run the lines of these forty-acre plots.

And in due time the surveyors appeared. Uncle Aleck,
who now devoted his entire time to organizing the League,
and drinking whiskey which the dues he collected made
easy, was walking back to Piedmont from a League meeting
in the country, dreaming of this promised land.

He lifted his eyes from the dusty way and saw before
him two surveyors with their arms full of line stakes
painted red, white, and blue. They were well-dressed
Yankees—he could not be mistaken. Not a doubt disturbed
his mind. The kingdom of heaven was at hand!

He bowed low and cried:

“Praise de Lawd! De messengers is come! I’se
waited long, but I sees ’em now wid my own eyes!”

“You can bet your life on that, old pard,” said the
spokesman of the pair. “We go two and two, just as the
apostles did in the olden times. We have only a few left.
The boys are hurrying to get their homes. All you’ve got
to do is to drive one of these red, white, and blue stakes
down at each corner of the forty acres of land you want,
and every rebel in the infernal regions can’t pull it up.”

“Hear dat now!”

“Just like I tell you. When this stake goes into the
ground, it’s like planting a thousand cannon at each
corner.”

“En will the Lawd’s messengers come wid me right
240
now to de bend er de creek whar I done pick out my
forty acres?”

“We will, if you have the needful for the ceremony.
The fee for the surveyor is small—only two dollars for
each stake. We have no time to linger with foolish
virgins who have no oil in their lamps. The bridegroom
has come. They who have no oil must remain
in outer darkness.” The speaker had evidently been
a preacher in the North, and his sacred accent sealed his
authority with the old negro, who had been an exhorter
himself.

Aleck felt in his pocket the jingle of twenty gold dollars,
the initiation fees of the week’s harvest of the League. He
drew them, counted out eight, and took his four stakes.
The surveyors kindly showed him how to drive them
down firmly to the first stripe of blue. When they had
stepped off a square of about forty acres of the Lenoir
farm, including the richest piece of bottom land on the
creek, which Aleck’s children under his wife’s direction
were working for Mrs. Lenoir, and the four stakes were
planted, old Aleck shouted:

“Glory ter God!”

“Now,” said the foremost surveyor, “you want a deed—a
deed in fee simple with the big seal of the Government
on it, and you’re fixed for life. The deed you can
take to the courthouse and make the clerk record it.”

The man drew from his pocket an official-looking
paper, with a red circular seal pasted on its face.

Uncle Aleck’s eyes danced.

“Is dat de deed?”
241