Part 5

“At any rate that’s the way I see it, and I’ve tried hard ever since I’ve been down here to do all I could for the boys. I know lots of officers think I peek around camp too much, think ’tain’t good for discipline. But I’ve always felt I ought to know how they was livin’ and there didn’t seem to be no other sure way of findin’ out. Officers ain’t always good housekeepers, and I kinda felt I’d got to keep my eye on the cupboard.

“I reckon Stanton thinks I’ve interfered too much, but there’s been more’n enough trouble to go around in this war, and the only hope was helpin’ where you could. But ’tain’t much one can do. I can no more help every soldier that comes to me in trouble than I can dip all the water out of the Potomac with a teaspoon.

“Then there’s that pardoning business. Every now and then I have to fix it up with Stanton or some officer for pardoning so many boys. I suppose it’s pretty hard for them not to have all their rules lived up to. They’ve worked out a lot of laws to govern this army, and I s’pose it’s natural enough for ’em to think the most important thing in the world is havin’ ’em obeyed. They’ve got it fixed so the boys do everything accordin’ to regulations. They won’t even let ’em die of something that ain’t on the list--got to die accordin’ to the regulations. But by jingo, Billy, I ain’t goin’ to have boys shot accordin’ to no dumb regulations! I ain’t goin’ to have a butcher’s day every Friday in the army if I can help it. It’s so what they say about me, that I’m always lookin’ for an excuse to pardon somebody. I do it every time I can find a reason. When they’re young and when they’re green or when they’ve been worked on by Copperheads or when they’ve got disgusted lyin’ still and come to think we ain’t doin’ our job--when I see that I ain’t goin’ to have ’em shot. And then there’s my leg cases. I’ve got a drawerful. They make Holt maddest--says he ain’t any use for cowards. Well, generally speakin’ I ain’t, but I ain’t sure what I’d do if I was standin’ in front of a gun, and more’n that as I told Holt if Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs how can he help their running away with him?

“You can’t make me believe it’s good policy to shoot these soldiers, anyhow. Seems to me one thing we’ve never taken into account as we ought to is that this is a _volunteer_ army. These men came down here to put an end to this rebellion and not to get trained as soldiers. They just dropped the work they was doin’ right where it was--never stopped to fix up things to be away long. Why, we’ve got a little minister at the head of one company that was preachin’ when he heard the news of Bull Run. He shut up his Bible, told the congregation what had happened, and said: ‘Brethren, I reckon it’s time for us to adjourn this meetin’ and go home and drill,’ and they did it, and now they’re down with Grant. When the war’s over that man will go back and finish that sermon.

“That’s the way with most of ’em. You can’t treat such an army like you would one that had been brought up to soljerin’ as a business. They’ll take discipline enough to fight, but they don’t take any stock in it as a means of earnin’ a livin’.

“More’n that they’ve got their own ideas about politics and military tactics and mighty clear ideas about all of us that are runnin’ things. You can’t fool ’em on an officer. They know when one ain’t fit to command, and time and time again they’ve pestered a coward or a braggart or a bully out of the service. An officer who does his job best he can, even if he ain’t very smart, just honest and faithful, they’ll stand by and help. If he’s a big one, a real big man, they can’t do enough for him. Take the way they feel about Thomas, the store they set by him. I met a boy on crutches out by the White House the other day and asked him where he got wounded. He told me about the place they held. ‘Pretty hot, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Yes, but Old Pap put us there and he wouldn’t ’a’ done it if he hadn’t known we could ’a’ held it.’ No more question ‘Old Pap’ than they would God Almighty. But if it had been some generals they’d skedaddled.

“They ain’t never made any mistake about _me_ just because I’m president. A while after Bull Run I met a boy out on the street here on crutches, thin and white, and I stopped to ask him about how he got hurt. Well, Billy, he looked at me hard as nails, and he says: ‘Be you Abe Lincoln?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘all I’ve got to say is you don’t know your job. I enlisted glad enough to do my part and I’ve done it, but you ain’t done yourn. You promised to feed me, and I marched three days at the beginning of these troubles without anything to eat but hardtack and two chunks of salt pork--no bread, no coffee--and what I did get wasn’t regular. They got us up one mornin’ and marched us ten miles without breakfast. Do you call that providin’ for an army? And they sent us down to fight the Rebs at Bull Run, and when we was doin’ our best and holdin’ ’em--I tell you, holdin’ ’em--they told us to fall back. I swore I wouldn’t--I hadn’t come down there for that. They made me--rode me down. I got struck--struck in the back. Struck in the back and they left me there--never came for me, never gave me a drink and I dyin’ of thirst. I crawled five miles for water, and I’d be dead and rottin’ in Virginia to-day if a teamster hadn’t picked me up and brought me to this town and found an old darkey to take care of me. You ain’t doin’ your job, Abe Lincoln; you won’t win this war until you learn to take care of the soldiers.’

“I couldn’t say a thing. It was true. It’s been true all the time. It’s true to-day. We ain’t takin’ care of the soldiers like we ought.

“You don’t suppose such men are goin’ to accept the best lot of regulations ever made without askin’ questions? Not a bit of it. They know when things are right and when they’re not. When they see a man who they know is nothing but a boy or one they know’s bein’ eat up with homesickness or one whose term is out, and ought to be let go, throwing everything over and desertin’, it don’t make them any better soldiers to have us shoot him. Makes ’em worse in my judgment, makes ’em think we don’t understand. Anyhow, discipline or no discipline, I ain’t goin’ to have any more of it than I can help. It ain’t good common sense.

“You can’t run _this_ army altogether as if ’twas a machine. It ain’t. It’s a _people’s_ army. It offered itself. It has come down here to fight this thing out--just as it would go to the polls. It is greater than its generals, greater than the administration. We are created to care for it and lead it. It is not created for us. Every day the war has lasted I’ve felt this army growin’ in power and determination. I’ve felt its hand on me, guiding, compelling, threatening, upholding me, felt its distrust and its trust, its blame and its love. I’ve felt its patience and its sympathy. The greatest comfort I get is when sometimes I feel as if mebbe the army understood what I was tryin’ to do whether Greeley did or not. They understood because it’s _their_ war. Why, we might fail, every one of us, and this war would go on. The army would find its leaders like they say the old Roman armies sometimes did and would finish the fight.

“I tell you, Billy, there ain’t nuthin’ that’s ever happened in the world so far as I know that gives one such faith in the people as this army and the way it acts. There’s been times, I ain’t denyin’, when I didn’t know but the war was goin’ to be too much for us, times when I thought that mebbe a republic like this couldn’t stand such a strain. It’s the kind of government we’ve got that’s bein’ tested in this war, government by the people, and it’s the People’s Army that makes me certain it can’t be upset.”

I tell you it done me good to see him settin’ up straight there talkin’ so proud and confident, and as I was watchin’ him there popped into my head some words from a song I’d heard the soldiers sing:

We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more-- From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore.

You have called us and we’re coming. By Richmond’s bloody tide To lay us down, for Freedom’s sake, our brothers’ bones beside;

Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before-- We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.

That was it. That was what he was, the Father of the Army, Father Abraham, and somehow the soldiers had found it out. Curious how a lot of people who never see a man in their lives will come to understand him exact.

IN LINCOLN’S CHAIR

“Yes, sir; he was what I call a _godly_ man. Fact is, I never knew anybody I felt so sure would walk straight into Heaven, everybody welcomin’ him, nobody fussin’ or fumin’ about his bein’ let in as Abraham Lincoln.”

Billy was tilted back in a worn high-back Windsor, I seated properly in his famous “Lincoln’s chair,” a seat too revered for anybody to stand on two legs. It was a snowy blusterly day and the talk had run on uninterruptedly from the weather to the campaign. (The year was 1896, and Billy, being a gold Democrat, was gloomy over politics.) We had finally arrived, as we always did when we met, at “when Mr. Lincoln was alive,” and Billy had been dwelling lovingly on his great friend’s gentleness, goodness, honesty.

“You know I never knew anybody,” he went on, “who seemed to me more interested in God, more curious about Him, more anxious to find out what He was drivin’ at in the world, than Mr. Lincoln. I reckon he was allus that way. There ain’t any doubt that from the time he was a little shaver he grabbed on to everything that came his way--wouldn’t let it go ’til he had it worked out, fixed in his mind so he understood it, and could tell it the way he saw it. Same about religion as everything else. Of course he didn’t get no religious teachin’ like youngsters have nowadays--Sunday schools and church regular every Sunday--lessons all worked out, and all kinds of books to explain ’em. Still I ain’t sure but what they give so many helps now, the Bible don’t get much show.

“It wa’n’t so when Mr. Lincoln was a boy. No, sir. Bible was the whole thing, and there ain’t any doubt he knew it pretty near by heart, knew it well before he ever could read, for Lincoln had a good mother, that’s sure, the kind that wanted more than anything else in the world to have her boy grow up to be a good man, and she did all she knew how to teach him right.

“I remember hearin’ him say once how she used to tell him Bible stories, teach him verses--always quotin’ ’em. I can see him now sprawlin’ on the floor in front of the fire listenin’ to Nancy Hanks tellin’ him about Moses and Jacob and Noah and all those old fellows, tellin’ him about Jesus and his dyin’ on the cross. I tell you that took hold of a little shaver, livin’ like he did, remote and not havin’ many books or places to go. Filled you chuck full of wonder and mystery, made you lie awake nights, and sometimes swelled you all up, wantin’ to be good.

“Must have come mighty hard on him havin’ her die. Think of a little codger like him seein’ his mother lyin’ dead in that shack of theirs, seein’ Tom Lincoln holdin’ his head and wonderin’ what he’d do now. Poor little tad! He must have crept up and looked at her, and gone out and throwed himself on the ground and cried himself out. Hard thing for a boy of nine to lose his mother, specially in such a place as they lived in.

“I don’t see how he could get much comfort out of what they taught about her dyin’, sayin’ it was God’s will, and hintin’ that if you’d been what you ought to be it wouldn’t have happened, never told a man that if he let a woman work herself to death it was his doin’s she died--not God’s will at all--God’s will she should live and be happy and make him happy.

“But I must say Mr. Lincoln had luck in the step-mother he got. If there ever was a good woman, it was Sarah Johnston, and she certain did her duty by Tom Lincoln’s children. ’Twa’n’t so easy either, poor as he was, the kind that never really got a hold on anything. Sarah Johnston did her part--teachin’ Mr. Lincoln just as his own mother would, and just as anxious as she’d been to have him grow up a good man. I tell you she was proud of him when he got to be President. I remember seein’ her back in ’62 or ’3 on the farm Mr. Lincoln gave her, little ways out of Charleston. One of the last things Mr. Lincoln did before he went to Washington was to go down there and see his step-mother. He knew better than anybody what she’d done for him.

“Yes, sir, the best religious teachin’ Mr. Lincoln ever got was from Tom Lincoln’s two wives. It was the kind that went deep and stuck, because he saw ’em livin’ it every day, practicin’ it on him and his sister and his father and the neighbors. Whatever else he might have seen and learnt, when he was a boy he knew what his two mothers thought religion meant, and he never got away from that.

“Of course he had other teachin’, principally what he got from the preachers that came around, now and then. Ramblin’ lot they was, men all het up over the sins of the world, and bent on doin’ their part towards headin’ off people from hell-fire. They traveled around alone, sometimes on horseback, sometimes afoot--poor as Job, not too much to wear or to eat, never thinkin’ of themselves, only about savin’ souls; and it was natural that bein’ alone so much, seein’ so much misery and so much wickedness, for there was lots that was bad in that part of the world in them times--natural enough meditatin’ as they did that they preached pretty strong doctrine. Didn’t have a chance often at a congregation, and felt they must scare it to repentance if they couldn’t do no other way. They’d work up people ’til they got ’em to shoutin’ for mercy.

“I don’t suppose they ever had anybody that listened better to ’em than Mr. Lincoln. I can just see him watchin’ ’em and tryin’ to understand what they meant. He was curious, rolled things over, kept at ’em and no amount of excitement they stirred up would ever have upset him. No, he wa’n’t that kind.

“But he remembered what they said, and the way they said it. Used to get the youngsters together and try it on them. I heard him talkin’ in here one day about the early preachin’ and I remember his sayin’: ’I got to be quite a preacher myself in those days. You know how those old fellows felt they hadn’t done their duty if they didn’t get everybody in the church weepin’ for their sins. We never set much store by a preacher that didn’t draw tears and groans. Pretty strong doctrine, mostly hell-fire. There was a time when I preached myself to the children every week we didn’t have a minister. I didn’t think much of my sermon if I didn’t make ’em cry. I reckon there was more oratory than religion in what I had to say.’

“I reckon he was right about that, allus tryin’ to see if he could do what other folks did, sort of measurin’ himself.

“Yes, sir, so far as preachin’ was concerned it was a God of wrath that Abraham Lincoln was brought up on, and there ain’t any denyin’ that he had to go through a lot that carried out that idea. A boy can’t grow up in a backwoods settlement like Gentryville, Indiana, without seein’ a lot that’s puzzlin’, sort of scares you and makes you miserable. Things was harsh and things was skimpy. There wa’n’t so much to eat. Sometimes there was fever and ague and rheumatiz and milk sick. Woman died from too much work. No medicine--no care, like his mother did. I expect there wa’n’t any human crime or sorrow he didn’t know about, didn’t wonder about. Thing couldn’t be so terrible he would keep away from it. Why I heard him tell once how a boy he knew went crazy, never got over it, used to sing to himself all night long, and Mr. Lincoln said that he couldn’t keep away, but used to slip out nights and listen to that poor idiot croonin’ to himself. He was like that, interested in strange things he didn’t understand, in signs and dreams and mysteries.

“Still things have to be worse than they generally are anywhere to keep a boy down-hearted right along--specially a boy like Mr. Lincoln, with an investigatin’ turn of mind like his, so many new things comin’ along to surprise you. Why it was almost like Robinson Crusoe out there--wild land, havin’ to make everything for yourself--hunt your meat and grow your cotton, mighty excitin’ life for a boy--lots to do--lots of fun, too, winter and summer. Somehow when you grow up in the country you can’t make out that God ain’t kind, if he is severe. I reckon that was the way Mr. Lincoln sized it up early; world might be a vale of tears, like they taught, but he saw it was mighty interestin’ too, and a good deal of fun to be got along with the tears.

“Trouble was later to keep things balanced. The older he grew, the more he read, and he begun to run up against a kind of thinkin’ along about the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two that was a good deal different from that he’d been used to, books that made out the Bible wa’n’t so, that even said there wa’n’t any God. We all took a turn at readin’ Tom Paine and Voltaire out here, and there was another book--somebody’s ‘Ruins’--I forget the name.”

“Volney?”

“Yes, that’s it. Volney’s Ruins.”

“Do you know I think that book took an awful grip on Mr. Lincoln. I reckon it was the first time he had ever realized how long the world’s been runnin’; how many lots of men have lived and settled countries and built cities and how time and time again they’ve all been wiped out. Mr. Lincoln couldn’t get over that. I’ve heard him talk about how old the world was time and time again, how nothing lasted--men--cities--nations. One set on top of another--men comin’ along just as interested and busy as we are, in doin’ things, and then little by little all they done passin’ away.

“He was always speculatin’ about that kind of thing. I remember in ’48 when he came back from Congress he stopped to see Niagara Falls. Well, sir, when he got home he couldn’t talk about anything else for days, seemed to knock politics clean out of his mind. He’d sit there that fall in that chair you’re in and talk and talk about it. Talk just like it’s printed in those books his secretary got up. I never cared myself for all those articles they wrote. Wrong, am I? Mebbe so, but there wa’n’t enough of Mr. Lincoln in ’em to suit me. I wanted to know what he said about everything in his own words. But I tell you when I saw the books with the things he had said and wrote all brought together nice and neat, and one after another, I just took to that. I’ve got ’em here in my desk, often read ’em and lots of it sounds just as natural, almost hear him sayin’ it, just as if he was settin’ here by the stove.

“Now what he tells about Niagara in the book is like that--just as if he was here. I can hear him sayin’: ‘Why, Billy, when Columbus first landed here, when Christ suffered on the Cross, when Moses crossed dry-shod through the Red Sea, even when Adam was first made, Niagara was roarin’ away. He’d talk in here just as it is printed there; how the big beasts whose bones they’ve found in mounds must have seen the falls, how it’s older than them and older than the first race of men. They’re all dead and gone, not even bones of many of ’em left, and yet there’s Niagara boomin’ away fresh as ever.

“He used to prove by the way the water had worn away the rocks that the world was at least fourteen thousand years old. A long spell, but folks tell me it ain’t nothin’ to what is bein’ estimated now.

“Makes men seem pretty small, don’t it? God seems to wipe ’em out as careless like as if He were cleanin’ a slate. How could He care and do that? It made such a mite of a man, no better’n a fly. That’s what bothered Mr. Lincoln. I know how he felt. That’s the way it hit me when I first began to understand all the stars were worlds like ours. What I couldn’t see and can’t now is how we can be so blame sure ours is the only world with men on. And if they’re others and they’re wiped out regular like we are, well it knocked me all of a heap at first, ’peared to me mighty unlikely that God knew anything about _me_.

“I expect Mr. Lincoln felt something like that when he studied how old the world was and how one set of ruins was piled on top of another.

“Then there was another thing. Lots of those old cities and old nations wa’n’t Christian at all, and yet accordin’ to the ruins it looked as if the people was just as happy, knew just as much, had just as good laws as any Christian nation now; some of them a blamed sight better. Now how was a boy like Lincoln going to handle a problem like that? Well I guess for a time he handled it like the man who wrote about the Ruins. Never seemed queer to me he should have written a free-thinkin’ book after that kind of readin’. I reckon he had to write something to get his head clear. Allus had to have things clear.

“You know that story of course about that book. First time I ever heard it was back in 1846 when him and Elder Cartwright was runnin’ for Congress. You know about Cartwright? Well, sir, he made his campaign against Lincoln in ’46, not on politics at all--made it on chargin’ him with bein’ an infidel because he wa’n’t a church member and because he said Mr. Lincoln had written a free thought book when he was a boy. He kept it up until along in the fall Mr. Lincoln shut him up good. He’d gone down to where Cartwright lived to make a political speech and some of us went along. Cartwright was runnin’ a revival, and long in the evening before startin’ home we went in and set in the back of the church. When it came time to ask sinners to come forward, the elder got pretty excited. ‘Where be you goin’?’ he shouted. ‘To Hell if you don’t repent and come to this altar.’ At last he began to call on Mr. Lincoln to come forward. Well, you know nobody likes to be called out like that right in meetin’. Mr. Lincoln didn’t budge, just set there. The elder he kept it up. Finally he shouted, ‘If Mr. Lincoln ain’t goin’ to repent and go to Heaven, where is he goin’?’ Intimatin’, I suppose, that he was headed for Hell. ‘Where be you goin’, Mr. Lincoln?’ he shouted.

“Well, sir, at that Mr. Lincoln rose up and said quiet like:

“‘I’m goin’ to Congress.’

“For a minute you could have heard a pin drop and then--well, I just snorted--couldn’t help it. Ma was awful ashamed when I told her, said I oughtin’ to done it--right in meetin’, but I couldn’t help it--just set there and shook and shook. The elder didn’t make any more observations to Mr. Lincoln that trip.

“Goin’ home I said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, you just served the elder right, shut him up, and I guess you’re right; you be goin’ to Congress.’

“‘Well, Billy,’ he said, smilin’ and lookin’ serious. ‘I’ve made up my mind that Brother Cartwright ain’t goin’ to make the religion of Jesus Christ a political issue in this District if I can help it.’

“Some of the elder’s friends pretended to think Mr. Lincoln was mockin’ at the Christian religion when he answered back like that. Not a bit. He was protectin’ it accordin’ to my way of thinkin’.

“I reckon I understand him a little because I’m more or less that way myself--can’t help seein’ things funny. I’ve done a lot of things Ma says people misunderstand. A while back comin’ home from New York I did somethin’ I expect some people would have called mockin’ at religion; Mr. Lincoln wouldn’t.

“You see I’d been down to buy drugs and comin’ home I was readin’ the Bible in the mornin’ in my seat in the sleepin’ car. Allus read a chapter every mornin’, Ma got me in the way of it, and I like it--does me good--keeps me from burstin’ out at somebody when I get mad, that is, it does for the most part.

“Well, as I was sayin’, I was readin’ my chapter, and I reckon mebbe I was readin’ out loud when I looked up and see the porter lookin’ at me and kinda snickerin’.