双语·林肯传 20

20

Lincoln had learned, back in New Salem, that it was easy to rent a building and stock it with groceries; but to make it pay required qualities which neither he nor his drunken partner possessed.

He was destined to discover, through years of heartbreak and bloodshed, that it was easy to get a half million soldiers who were willing to die, and a hundred million dollars to equip them with rifles and bullets and blankets; but to win victories required a kind of leadership which it was almost impossible to find.

“How much in military matters,” exclaimed Lincoln, “depends on one master mind!”

So, time and again, he went down on his knees, asking the Almighty to send him a Robert E. Lee or a Joseph E. Johnston or a Stonewall Jackson.

“Jackson,” he said, “is a brave, honest, Presbyterian soldier. If we only had such a man to lead the armies of the North, the country would not be appalled with so many disasters.”

But where in all the Union forces was another Stonewall Jackson to be found? Nobody knew. Edmund Clarence Stedman published a famous poem every verse of which ended with the plea, “Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man.”

It was more than the refrain of a poem. It was the cry of a bleeding and distraught nation.

The President wept as he read it.

For two years he tried to find the leader for whom the nation was crying. He would give the army to one general who would lead it to futile slaughter, and set ten or thirty or forty thousand widows and orphans weeping and wailing throughout the land. Then this discredited commander would be relieved; and another, equally inept, would try his hand and get ten thousand more slaughtered; and Lincoln, clad in dressing-gown and carpet-slippers, would pace the floor all night as the reports came in, crying over and over:

“My God! What will the country say? My God! What will the country say?”

Then another general would assume command, and the futile slaughter would go on.

Some military critics now hold that McClellan, with all his astounding faults and amazing incapacity, was probably the best commander the Army of the Potomac ever had. So imagine, if you can, what the others must have been!

After McClellan's failure, Lincoln tried John Pope. Pope had done splendid work out in Missouri, had captured an island in the Mississippi and several thousand men.

He was like McClellan in two ways: he was handsome, and he was boastful. He declared that his headquarters was “in the saddle;” and he issued so many bombastic announcements that he was soon called “Proclamation Pope.”

“I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.” With that blunt, tactless sentence, he opened his first address to the army. He then proceeded to rebuke the troops for their inaction in the East, and insinuated that they were infernal cowards; and ended by boasting of the military miracles he would perform.

This proclamation made the new commander about as popular as a diamond-backed rattlesnake in dog-days: officers and men alike detested him.

McClellan's hatred for him was intense. Pope had come to take his place. Nobody realized that better than did McClellan—he was already writing for a position in New York—and he was consumed with jealousy, was bitter with envy and resentment.

Pope led the army into Virginia; a great battle was imminent; he needed every man he could get; so Lincoln showered McClellan with telegrams, ordering him to rush his men to Pope's aid with all possible celerity.

But did McClellan obey? He did not. He argued, he delayed, he protested, he telegraphed excuses, he recalled corps that he had sent ahead, and he “exhausted all the resources of a diabolical ingenuity in order to keep Pope from receiving reinforcements.” “Let Mr. Pope,” said he, contemptuously, “get out of his own scrape.”

Even after he heard the roar of the Confederate artillery, he still managed to keep thirty thousand of his troops from going to the aid of his obnoxious rival.

So Lee overwhelmed Pope's army on the old battle-field of Bull Run. The slaughter was terrible. The Federal soldiers again fled in a panic.

It was the story of the first Bull Run over again: once more a bloody and beaten mob poured into Washington.

Lee pursued them with his victorious troops. And even Lincoln believed the capital was lost. Gunboats were ordered up the river, and all the clerks in Washington—civilian and government alike—were called to arms to defend the city.

Stanton, Secretary of War, in a wild panic, telegraphed the governors of half a dozen States, imploring them to send all their militia and volunteer forces by special trains.

Saloons were closed, church bells tolled; men fell on their knees, beseeching Almighty God to save the city.

The old people and the women and children fled in terror. The streets resounded with the hoofs of hurrying horses, with the rattle of carriages dashing away to Maryland.

Stanton, preparing to transfer the Government to New York, ordered the arsenal stripped and all its supplies shipped North.

Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, ordered the nation's silver and gold transferred in feverish haste to the sub-Treasury in Wall Street.

Lincoln, weary and discouraged, exclaimed with a mingled groan and sigh:

“What shall I do?... What shall I do?... The bottom is out of the tub, the bottom is out of the tub.”

People believed that McClellan, in order to get revenge, had longed to see “Mr. Pope” defeated and his army crushed.

Even Lincoln had already called him to the White House and told him that people were accusing him of being a traitor, of wanting to see Washington captured and the South triumphant.

Stanton stormed about in a rage, his face fiery with indignation and hatred. Those who saw him said that if McClellan had walked into the war-office then, Stanton would have rushed at him and knocked him down.

Chase was even more bitter. He didn't want to hit McClellan. He said the man ought to be shot.

And the pious Chase wasn't speaking figuratively. Neither was he exaggerating. He literally wanted McClellan blindfolded, backed up against a stone wall, and a dozen bullets sent crashing through his heart.

But Lincoln, with his understanding nature and Christ-like spirit, condemned no one. True, Pope had failed, but hadn't he done his best? Lincoln, himself, had met defeat too often to blame any one else for failure.

So he sent Pope out to the Northwest to subdue an uprising of Sioux Indians, and gave the army back to McClellan. Why? Because, Lincoln said: “There is no man in the army who can lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he.... If he can't fight, himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.” The President knew that he would be condemned for restoring “little Mac” to command. And he was—bitterly. Even by his Cabinet. Stanton and Chase actually declared that they would rather have Washington captured by Lee than to see the traitorous and contemptible McClellan given command of the army again.

Lincoln was so hurt at their violent opposition that he said he would resign if the Cabinet wished it.

A few months later, after the Battle of Antietam, McClellan absolutely refused to obey Lincoln's orders to follow Lee and attack him, so the army was taken away from him again; and his military career was ended forever.

The Army of the Potomac must have another leader. But who was he? Where was he? No one knew.

In desperation, Lincoln offered the command to Burnside. He wasn't fit for it, and he knew it. He refused it twice; and, when it was forced upon him, he wept. Then he took the army and made a rash attack on Lee's fortifications at Fredericksburg, and lost thirteen thousand men. Men uselessly butchered, for there wasn't the faintest hope of success.

Officers as well as privates began to desert in large numbers.

So Burnside, in turn, was relieved, and the army given to another braggart, “Fighting Joe” Hooker.

“May God have mercy on Lee,” he vaunted, “for I shall not.”

He led what he called “the finest army on the planet” against Lee. He had twice as many men as the Confederates, but Lee hurled him back across the river at Chancellorsville and destroyed seventeen thousand of his troops.

It was one of the most disastrous defeats of the war.

It occurred in May, 1863; and the President's secretary records that he heard the tramp of Lincoln's feet during all the terrible hours of sleepless nights as he paced up and down his room, crying, “Lost! Lost! All is lost!” Finally, however, he went down to Fredericksburg to cheer up “Fighting Joe” and encourage the army.

Lincoln was denounced bitterly for all this futile slaughter; and gloom and discouragement settled over the nation.

And quickly on top of these military sorrows, came a domestic tragedy. Lincoln was inordinately fond of his two little sons, Tad and Willie. He often stole away, on a summer evening, to play “town ball” with them, his coat-tails flying out behind him as he ran from base to base. Sometimes, he would shoot marbles with them all the way from the White House to the war-office. At night he loved to get down on the floor and roll and romp with them. On bright, warm days he would sometimes go out back of the White House and play with the boys and their two goats.

Tad and Willie kept the White House in an uproar, organizing minstrel shows, putting the servants through military drill, running in and out among the office-seekers. If they took a fancy to a certain applicant, they would see that he got in to see “Old Abe” immediately. If they couldn't get him in the front way, they knew of back entrances.

With as little respect for ceremony and precedent as their father had, they dashed in and interrupted a Cabinet meeting once to inform the President that the cat in the basement had just had kittens.

On another occasion the stern Salmon P. Chase was irritated and disgusted because Tad climbed all over his father and finally perched on his shoulder and sat astride of his neck while Chase was discussing the grave financial situation that confronted the country.

Some one gave Willie a pony. He insisted on riding it in all kinds of winter weather; so he got wet and chilled and came down with a severe cold. Soon it had become a serious fever. Night after night Lincoln sat for hours by his bedside; and when the little fellow passed away, his father, choking with sobs, cried:

“My poor boy! My poor boy! He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. It is hard, hard to have him die.”

Mrs. Keckley, who was in the room at the time, says:

He buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion.... The pale face of her dead boy threw Mrs. Lincoln into convulsions. She was so completely overwhelmed with sorrow she did not attend the funeral.

After Willie's death Mrs. Lincoln could not bear to look upon his picture. Mrs. Keckley tells us:

She could not bear the sight of anything he loved, not even a flower. Costly bouquets were presented to her, but she turned from them with a shudder, and either placed them in a room where she could not see them, or threw them out of the window. She gave away all of Willie's toys... and, after his death, she never again crossed the threshold of the Guests' Room in which he died or the Green Room in which he was embalmed.

In a frenzy of grief Mrs. Lincoln called in a so-called spiritualist who masqueraded under the title of “Lord Colchester.” This unmitigated impostor was exposed later and ordered out of town under a threat of imprisonment. But Mrs. Lincoln, in her distress, received “Lord Colchester” in the White House; and there, in a darkened room, she was persuaded that the scratching on the wainscoting, the tapping on the wall, and the rapping of the table, were loving messages from her lost boy.

She wept as she received them.

Lincoln, prostrate with grief, sank into a listless despair. He could hardly discharge his public duties. Letters, telegrams lay on his desk unanswered. His physician feared that he might never rally, that he might succumb entirely to his desolation.

The President would sometimes sit and read aloud for hours, with only his secretary or his aide for an audience. Generally it was Shakspere he read. One day he was reading “King John” to his aide, and when he came to the passage in which Constance bewails her lost boy, Lincoln closed the book, and repeated these words from memory:

And, father cardinal, I have heard you say

That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:

If that be true, I shall see my boy again.

“Colonel, did you ever dream of a lost friend,” the President asked, “and feel that you were holding sweet communion with him, and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a reality? I often dream of my boy Willie like that.” And dropping his head on the table, Lincoln sobbed aloud.