Grant in Birth of a Nation. I am wondering if this is accurate. And, a book, if such a book exists. Thanks, —Margaret Bennett. I appreciate the scholarly treatment—even-handed portrayal—of this monumental production in the history of cinematography. Of course, I would expect nothing less from a professor at Michigan. When we teach the history of Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation is often required viewing, precisely because it is one of the cultural products that helped engender the deep misunderstandings of Reconstruction that characterized the first half of the 20th century, and that linger into our own time.
Through intensive research in the archival materials of the post-Civil War period, historians have demonstrated that the Reconstruction era was a visionary moment, characterized by an ambitious experiment in the enforcement of equal rights, not a vindictive Northern attack on white people in the South, as Griffith portrayed it.
During Reconstruction, Congress attempted to set in place an inter-racial democracy, one in which all Americans, including former slaves, were to be empowered in law and politics.
Though short-lived, Reconstruction remains relevant today. Constitution, the development of African American political and cultural institutions, an example of cross-racial political alliances, and the establishment of public education in the American South. He valorized the Ku Klux Klan, thus endorsing what is widely recognized as having been a domestic terrorist organization. He caricatured African Americans as unworthy of political or civil rights, ignoring the responsibilities they had borne as soldiers, and parodying their access to office-holding and citizenship in the late s and early s.
Griffith turned his back on history and produced propaganda. He set aside what many Americans had known as a period of striving for democratic ideals, and substituted a fantasy that imagined the nation as having been wounded by Reconstruction, and then healed by the reconciliation of white Americans across the North-South divide.
To construct this portrait, the film alternately ignored and mocked the contributions of, and the political and social demands made by, African Americans. It was part of a broader campaign that was enacted in the highest echelons of law and politics. The U. Supreme Court approved state-mandated racial segregation in the case of Plessy v.
Ferguson, and the denial of voting rights to black citizens in Giles v. Harris in President Woodrow Wilson, who endorsed The Birth of a Nation, oversaw the segregation of the federal government. The accomplishments of Reconstruction were thus destroyed by a campaign of forced segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence.
LeRoy McAfee assumed command of the 49th NCT, being promoted to full colonel on 1, November , and held that post until the army's surrender at Appomattox. Thomas Dixon, Jr. Thomas Dixon Thomas Dixon Jr. McAfee's nephew, Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Dixon's father, Thomas Dixon Sr. Leroy McAfee, both joined the Klan early in the Reconstruction era with the aim of "bringing order" to the tumultuous times. He was a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives. He graduated with first honors from the University of North Carolina in ; President James Buchanan was the featured speaker at the graduation. Battle Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.
Buchanan President Buchanan Buchanan Administration. 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. The President accompanied her to the door with a deference of manner that showed he had been deeply touched.
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.
One feels this instinctively. When Mrs. Stanton was seated at his desk writing. 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:. 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. They say he is the greatest Secretary of War in our history.
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. 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.
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:. 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:. 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. He took the paper, tore it into pieces, slipped one of his long arms around the Secretary, and said in low accents: Go on with your work. I will have my way in this matter; but I will attend to it personally.
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. I will wait in the next room. 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. He was absolutely bald, and wore a heavy brown wig that seemed too small to reach the edge of his enormous forehead.
He rarely visited the White House. He was the able, bold, unscrupulous leader of leaders, and men came to see him. He rarely smiled, and when he did it was the smile of the cynic and misanthrope.
His tongue had the lash of a scorpion. He was a greater terror to the trimmers and time-servers of his own party than to his political foes. He had hated the President with sullen, consistent, and unyielding venom from his first nomination at Chicago down to the last rumour of his new proclamation. In temperament a fanatic, in impulse a born revolutionist, the word conservatism was to him as a red rag to a bull. The first clash of arms was music to his soul.
He laughed at the call for 75, volunteers, and demanded the immediate equipment of an army of a million men. He saw it grow to 2,, 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. The giant figure in the White House alone had dared to brook his anger and block the way; for old Stoneman was the Congress of the United States. The opposition was too weak even for his contempt.
Cool, deliberate, and venomous alike in victory or defeat, the fascination of his positive faith and revolutionary programme had drawn the rank and file of his party in Congress to him as charmed satellites. The President greeted him cordially, and with his habitual deference to age and physical infirmity hastened to place for him an easy chair near his desk. He was breathing heavily and evidently labouring under great emotion. He brought his cane to the floor with violence, placed both hands on its crook, leaned his massive jaws on his hands for a moment, and then said:.
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! Lincoln listened with dignity, and a ripple of fun played about his eyes as he looked at his grim visitor.
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? 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?
Why trim the hedge and lie about it? We, too, are revolutionists, and you are our executive. The Constitution sustained and protected slavery. My first duty is to re-establish the Constitution as our supreme law over every inch of our soil. I have sworn to preserve it! 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. That North Carolina and other waste territories of the United States are unfit to associate with civilized communities?
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. A nation cannot make conquest of its own territory. 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. It is only a suggestion. The State alone has the power to confer the ballot. If such be attempted, one must go to the wall.
Our party and the Nation will then be safe. That would be progress with a vengeance. Yet the heavens have not fallen. 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. We can well afford a few million dollars more to effect a permanent settlement of the issue.
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.
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. 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. You have been the ever-ready champion of traitors. 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?
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.
Before the sheer grandeur of its history our children will walk with silent lips and uncovered heads. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. A new fool is born every second. They are ruled by impulse and passion. I laughed at it myself. And yet the people unanimously called me again to lead them to victory. The slumbering fires of passion will be kindled.
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! He leaned heavily on his cane, and took a shambling step toward the door.
Force your scheme of revenge on the South, and you sow the wind to reap the whirlwind. 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.
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. 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:. 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. 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. Now that she is crushed and lies bleeding at our feet—you shall not make war on the wounded, dying, and the dead!
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! 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. Was his the mysterious arm back of Stanton? Echoes of the fierce struggle with the President had floated through the half-open door. 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.
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. 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:. 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. 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. 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.
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! 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. 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. 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 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:. Elsie stammered, looked away, and tried to hide her emotion. She rose at length, threw her arms around Elsie in a resistless impulse, kissed her and whispered:.
He was bubbling over with quiet joy that the end had come and he could soon return to a rational life. 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 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. 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. You have already made yourself my brother in what you did for Ben. 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.
I wish to take you to the theatre to-night, if you will go? 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. War is not exactly a spiritual stimulant, and it blurs the calendar. I believe we fight on Sundays oftener than on any other day.
Grant has just arrived in town. Cameron, your flattery is very sweet. Elsie and I do not remember our mother, and all this friendly criticism is more than welcome. May I go? To-day the flag was raised over Fort Sumter, the anniversary of its surrender four years ago. The city will be illuminated.
I will sit with Ben. I wish you to see the President. They walked to the Capitol hill and down Pennsylvania Avenue. The city was in a ferment. Vast crowds thronged the streets. In front of the hotel where General Grant stopped the throng was so dense the streets were completely blocked.
Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, at every turn, in squads, in companies, in regimental crowds, shouting cries of victory. The display of lights was dazzling in its splendour. Every building in every street, in every nook and corner of the city, was lighted from attic to cellar. The public buildings and churches vied with each other in the magnificence of their decorations and splendour of illuminations.
They turned a corner, and suddenly the Capitol on the throne of its imperial hill loomed a grand constellation in the heavens! Another look, and it seemed a huge bonfire against the background of the dark skies.
Every window in its labyrinths of marble, from the massive base to its crowning statue of Freedom, gleamed and flashed with light—more than ten thousand jets poured their rays through its windows, besides the innumerable lights that circled the mighty dome within and without.
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.
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. They passed the City Hall and saw across its front, in giant letters of fire thirty feet deep, the words: 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. 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.
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!
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. I hope you have good seats. We can see everything on the stage, in the box, and every nook and corner of the house. What a crowd! The building was a mass of throbbing humanity, and, over all, the hum of the thrilling wonder of peace and victory! The women in magnificent costumes, officers in uniforms flashing with gold, the show of wealth and power, the perfume of flowers and the music of violin and flutes gave Margaret the impression of a dream, so sharp was the contrast with her own life and people in the South.
The interior of the house was a billow of red, white, and blue. 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. 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.
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