by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (1885)
Ulysses S. Grant was a statesman and military leader who served as general and commander of the Union armies during the American Civil War, before going on to become the nation’s 18th President. The following eulogy was delivered by noted abolitionist and Congregational Clergyman Henry Ward Beecher at Boston’s Tremont Temple on October 22, 1885.
ANOTHER NAME is added to the roll of those whom the world will not willingly let die. A few years since storm-clouds filled his heaven, and obloquy, slander and bitter lies rained down upon him.
The clouds are all blown away, under a serene sky he laid down his life, and the Nation wept. The path to his tomb is worn by the feet of innumerable pilgrims. The mildewed lips of Slander are silent, and even Criticism hesitates lest some incautious word should mar the history of the modest, gentle magnanimous Warrior.
The whole Nation watched his passage through humiliating misfortunes with unfeigned sympathy; the whole world sighed when his life ended! At his burial the unsworded hands of those whom he had fought lifted his bier and bore him to his tomb with love and reverence.
Grant made no claim to saintship. He was a man of like passions, and with as marked limitations as other men. Nothing could be more distasteful to his honest, modest soul while living, and nothing more unbecoming to his memory, than lying exaggerations and fulsome flatteries.
Men without faults are apt to be men without force. A round diamond has no brilliancy. Lights and shadows, hills and valleys, give beauty to the landscape. The faults of great and generous natures are often over-ripe goodness, or the shadows which their virtues cast.
Three elements enter into the career of a great citizen:
That which his ancestry gives;
That which opportunity gives;
That which his will develops.
Grant came from a sturdy New England stock; New England derived it from Scotland, Scotland bred it, at a time when Covenanters and Puritans were made—men of iron consciences hammered out upon the anvil of adversity. From N. E. the stream flowed to the Ohio, where it enriched the soil till it brought forth abundant harvests of great men. When it was Grant’s time to be born, he came forth without celestial portents and his youth had in it no prophecy of his manhood. His boyhood was wholesome, robust, with a vigorous frame. With a heart susceptible of tender love, he yet was not social. He was patient and persistent. He loved horses, and could master them. That is a good sign.
Grant had no art of creating circumstances; opportunity must seek him, or else he would plod through life without disclosing the gifts which God hid in him. The gold in the hills cannot disclose itself. It must be sought and dug.
A sharp and wiry politician, for some reason of Providence, performed a generous deed, in sending young Grant to West Point. He finished his course there, distinguished as a skillfull and bold rider, with an inclination to mathematics, but with little taste for the theory and literature of war, but with sympathy for its external and material developments. In boyhood and youth he was marked by simplicity, candor, veracity and silence.
After leaving the Academy he saw service in Mexico, and afterward in California, but without conspicuous results.
Then came a clouded period, a sad life of irresolute vibration between self-indulgence and aspiration through intemperance. He resigned from the army, and at that time one would have feared that his life would end in eclipse. Hercules crushed two serpents sent to destroy him in his cradle. It was later in his life that Grant destroyed the enemy that “biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder.”
At length he struck at the root of the matter. Others agree not to drink, which is good, Grant overcame the wish to drink—which is better. But the cloud hung over his reputation for many years, and threatened his ascendency when better days came. Of all his victories, many and great, this was the greatest that he conquered himself. His will was stronger than his passions.
Poor, much shattered, he essayed farming. Carrying wood for sale to St. Louis did not seem to be that for which he was created; neither did planting crops, or raising cattle.
Tanning is an honorable calling, and, to many, a road to wealth. Grant found no gold in the tan vat.
Then he became a listless merchant—a silent, unsocial and rather moody waiter upon petty traffic.
He was a good subaltern, a poor farmer, a worse tanner, a worthless trafficer. Without civil experience, without literary gifts, too diffident to be ambitious, too modest to put himself forward, too honest to be a politician, he was of all men the least likely to attain eminence, and absolutely unfitted, apparently, for pre-eminence; yet God’s Providence selected him.
When the prophet Samuel went forth to annoint a successor to the impetuous and imperious King Saul, he caused all the children of Jesse to pass before him. He rejected one by one the whole band. At length the youngest called from among the flock came in, and the Lord said to Samuel, “Arise, this is he,” and Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brethren, and the spirit of the Lord came upon him from that day forward. (1 Sam. 16.)
Ordained was Grant with the ointment of war—black and sulphurous.
Had Grant died at the tan-yard, or from behind the counter, the world would never have suspected that it had lost a hero. He would have fallen as an undistinguishable leaf among the millions cast down every year. His time had not come. It was plain that he had no capacity to create his opportunity. It must find him out, or he would die ignoble and unknown!
It was coming! Already the clouds afar off were gathering. He saw them not. No figures were seen upon the dim horizon of the already near future.
The insulted flag; the garments rolled in blood; a million men in arms; the sulphurous smoke of battle; gorey heaps upon desperate battle fields; an army of slowly moving crippled heroes; graveyards populous as cities; they were all in the clouded horizon, though he saw them not!
Let us look upon the scene on which he was soon to exert a mighty energy.
This continent lay waiting for ages for the seed of civilization. At length a sower came forth to sow. While he sowed the good seed of liberty and Christian civilization, an enemy, darkling, sowed tares. They sprang up and grew together. The Constitution cradled both Slavery and Liberty. While yet ungrown they dwelt together in peace. They snarled in youth, quarreled when half grown, and fought when of full age. The final catastrophe was inevitable. No finesse, no device or compromise could withstand the inevitable. The conflict began in Congress; it drifted into commerce; it rose into the very air, and public sentiment grew hot, and raged in the pulpit, the forum, and in politics.
The South, like a queenly beauty, grew imperious and exacting; the North, like an obsequious suitor, knelt at her feet, only to receive contempt and mockery.
Both parties, Whig and Democrat, drank of the cup of her sorcery. It killed the Whig party. The Democrat was tougher, and was only besotted. A few, like John the Baptist, were preaching repentance, but, like him, they were in the wilderness, and seemed rude and shaggy fanatics.
If a wise moderation had possessed the South, if they had conciliated the North, if they had met the just scruples of honest men, who, hating slavery, dreaded the dishonor of breaking the compacts of the Constitution, the South might have held control for another hundred years. It was not to be. God sent a strong delusion upon them.
Nothing can be plainer than that all parties in the State were drifting in the dark, without any comprehension of the elemental causes at work. Without prescience or sagacity, like ignorant physicians, they prescribed at random; they sewed on patches, new compromise upon old garments, sought to conceal the real depth and danger of the gathering torrent by crying peace, peace, to each other. In short, they were seeking to medicate volcanoes and stop earthquakes by administering political quinine. The wise statesmen were bewildred and politicians were juggling fools.
The South had laid the foundation of her industry, her commerce, and her commonwealth upon slavery. It was slavery that inspired her councils, that engorged her philanthropy, that corrupted her political economy and theology, that disturbed all the ways of active politics; broke up sympathy between North and South. As Ahab met Elijah with, “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?” so Slavery charged the sentiments of Freedom with vexatious meddling and unwarrantable interference.
The South had builded herself upon the rock of Slavery. It lay in the very channels of Civilization, like some Flood Rock lying sullen off Hell Gate. The tides of controversy rushed upon it and split into eddies and swirling pools, bringing incessant disaster. The rock would not move. It must be removed. It was the South itself that furnished the engineers. Arrogance in Council sunk the shaft, Violence chambered the subterranean passages, and Infatuation loaded them with infernal dynamite. All was secure. Their rock was their fortress. The hand that fired upon Sumter exploded the mine, and tore the fortress to atoms. For one moment it rose into the air like spectral hills—for one moment the waters rocked with wild confusion, then settled back to quiet, and the way of civilization was opened!
The spark that was kindled at Fort Sumter fell upon the North, like fire upon autumnal prairies. Men came together in the presence of this universal calamity with sudden fusion. They forgot all separations of politics, parties, or even of religion itself. It was a conflagration of patriotism. The bugle and the drum rang out in every neighborhood, the plow stood still in the furrow, the hammer dropped from the anvil, book and pen were forgotten, pulpit and forum, court and shop, felt the electric shock. Parties dissolved and reformed. The Democratic party sent forth a host of noble men, and swelled the Republican ranks, and gave many noble leaders and irresistible energy to the Hosts of War. The whole land became a military school, and officers and men began to learn the art and practice of war.
When once the North had organized its armies, there was soon disclosed an amiable folly of conciliation. It hoped for some peaceable way out of the war; generals seemed to fight so that no one should be hurt; they saw the mirage of future parties above the battlefield, and anxiously considered the political effect of their military conduct. They were fighting not to break down rebellion, but to secure a future presidency—or governorship. The South had smelted into a glowing mass. It believed in its course with an infatuation that would have been glorious if the cause had been better! It put its whole soul into it and struck hard!
The South fought for slavery and independence. The North fought for Union, but for political success after the War. Thus for two years, not unmarked by great deeds, the war lingered. Lincoln, sad and sorrowful, felt the moderation of his generals, and longed for a man of iron mould, who had but two words in his military vocabulary, Victory or Annihilation.
He was coming! He was heard from at Henry and Donelson.
Three great names were rising to sight—Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan; and larger than either, Grant! With his advent the armies, with some repulses, went steadily forward, from conquering to conquer. Aside from all military qualities, he had one absorbing spirit—the Union must be saved, the rebellion must be beaten, the Confederate armies must be threshed to chaff as on a summer threshing floor. He had no political ambition, no imaginary reputation to preserve or gain. A great genius for grand strategy, a comprehension of complex and vast armies, caution, prudence and silence while preparing, an endless patience, an indomitable will, and a real, downright fighting quality.
Thus at length Grant was really born! He had lain in the nest for long as an infertile egg. The brooding of war hatched the egg, and an eagle came forth!
* * *
It is impossible to reach the full measure of Grant’s military genius until we survey the greatness of this most extraordinary war of modern days, or it may be said of any age.
For more than four years there were more than a million men on each side, stretched out upon a line of between one and two thousand miles, and a blockade rigorously enforced along a coast of an equal extent. During that time, counting no battle in which there were not five hundred Union men engaged, there was fought more than two thousand engagements—two thousand two hundred and sixty-one of record.
Amid this sea of blood, there shot up great battles, that for numbers, fighting and losses, will rank with the great battles of the world.
In 1862 the losses by death, wounds and missing on each side, as extracted from Government Records, were:
1863.
| 8. Chancellorsville............................ | 16,030 | 12,281 | 28,311 |
| 9. Gettysburg.................................... | 23,186 | 31,621 | 54,807 |
| 10. Chicamauga................................. | 15,851 | 17,804 | 33,655 |
| 11. Chattanooga................................... | 5,616 | 8,684 |
1864.
| 12. Wilderness.................................... | 37,737 | 11,400 | 49,137 |
| 13. Spotsylvania.................................. | 26,421 | 9,000 | 35,421 |
| 14. Cold Harbor................................ | 14,931 | 1,700 | 16,700 |
| 15. Petersburg.................................... | 10,586 | 28,000 | 38,586 |
| 16. Chattanooga to Atlanta................. | 37,199 |
Over 26,000 Northern soldiers died in prison, in captivity. If we reckon all who perished by violence and by sickness on both sides, nearly a million died in the War of Emancipation.
The number must be largely swelled if we add all who died at home, of sickness and wounds received in the campaign.
The Secretary of War, in his report, dated November 22, 1865, makes the following remarks, which show more than anything else the spirit animating the people of the loyal States: “On several occasions, when troops were promptly needed to avert impending disaster, vigorous exertion brought them into the field from remote States with incredible speed. Official reports show that after the disasters on the Peninsula, in 1862, over 80,000 troops were enlisted, organized, armed, equipped, and sent into the field in less than a month. 60,000 troops have repeatedly gone to the field within four weeks. 90,000 infantry were sent to the armies from the five States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, within twenty days. When Lee’s army surrendered, thousands of recruits were pouring in, and men were discharged from recruiting stations and rendezvous in every State.”
Into this sulphurous storm of war Grant entered almost unknown. It was with difficulty that he could obtain a command. Once set forward, Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chicamauga, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, Appomattox, these were his footsteps. In four years he had risen, without political favor, from the bottom to the very highest command—not second to any living commander in all the world!
His plans were large, his undiscouraged will was patient to obduracy. He was not fighting for reputation, nor for the display of generalship, nor for a future Presidency. He had but one motive, and that as intense as life itself—the subjugation of the rebellion and the restoration of the broken Union. He embodied the feelings of the common people. He was their perfect representative. The war was waged for the maintenance of the Union, the suppression of armed resistance, and, at length, for the eradication of Slavery. Every step, from Donelson to Appomattox, evinced with increasing intensity this his one terrible purpose. He never wavered, turned aside, or dallied. He waded through blood to the horses’ bridles.
In all this career he never lost courage or equanimity. With a million men, for whose movements he was responsible, he yet carried a tranquil mind, neither depressed by disasters, nor elated by success. Gentle of heart, familiar with all, never boasting, always modest—Grant came of the old self-contained stock, men of a simple force of being, which allied his genius to the great elemental forces of Nature, silent, invisible, irresistible. When his work was done, and the defeat of Confederate armies was final, this dreadful man of blood was tender toward his late adversaries as a woman toward her son. He imposed no humiliating conditions, spared the feelings of his antagonists, sent home the disbanded Southern men with food and with horses for working their crops, and when a revengeful spirit in the Executive Chair showed itself, and threatened the chief Southern Generals, Grant, with a holy indignation, interposed himself, and compelled his superior to relinquish his rash purpose.
There have been men—there are yet—for stupidity is long-lived—who regard Grant as only a man of luck. Surely he was! Is it not luck through such an ancestry to have had conferred upon him such a body, such a disposition, such greatness of soul, such patriotism unalloyed by ambition, such military genius, such an indomitable will, and such a capacity for handling the largest armies of any age?
For four years and more this man of continuous Luck, across a rugged continent, in the face of armies of men as brave as his own, commanded by Generals of extraordinary ability, performed every function of strategy in grand War, which Jomini attributes to Napoleon and his greatest marshals, and Napier to Wellington. Whether Grant could have conducted a successful retreat will never be known. He was never defeated.
Grant has been severely criticised for the waste of life. War is not created for the purpose of saving life, but by a noble spending of blood to save the Commonwealth. The great end which he achieved would have been cheaply gained, at double the expense.
After the Battle of the Wilderness he was styled the Butcher.
But we are not to forget the circumstances under which the conduct of the last great campaign was committed to him. For four years the heroic and patient Army of the Potomac had squandered blood and treasure without measure, and had gained not a step. With Generals many, excellently skilled in logistics, skillful in everything but success, they fought and retreated; they dug, they waded, they advanced and retreated. They went down to Richmond and looked upon it, and came back to defend Washington.
Their victories were fruitless. Antietam was ably fought, but weakly followed up. Gettysburg, with hideous slaughter, sent Lee back unpursued, undestroyed, though he waited three or four days, helpless, cooped-up and surely doomed had Sheridan or Grant been in Meade’s place.
The Army of the Potomac needed a General who knew how to employ their splendid bravery, their all-enduring pluck. They had danced long enough; they had led off—changed partners—chasséd—they had gone into campaigns with slow and solemn music, but returned with quick-steps. They seemed desirous of making war so as not to exasperate the South.
Do not men know that nothing spends life faster than unfighting war? Disease is more deadly than the bullet. In all the war, but one out of every 42 that died were slain by the bullet, and one out of every 13 by disease. 6,000,000 men passed through the Hospitals during the war; over three million with malarial diseases.
It seemed doubtful whether the Government was putting down rebellion, or whether Lee was putting down the Government. An eminent critic says: “The fire and passion, downright earnestness and self-abandon that the South threw into the struggle at the outset and maintained for two full years, had, it must be admitted, so far impaired the morale of the Union forces, that while courage was nowhere wanting, self-confidence had been seriously diminished. This was especially true of the devoted and decimated Army of the Potomac, whose commanders, after the first battle of Bull Run, always appeared to be afraid of exasperating the enemy. Driving Lee to extremities was the one thing that they were all loth to do. They would fight to the last drop of blood to defend Washington, to hold their own, to preserve the Union, but to corner the enemy, to drive him to desperation, to make him shed the last drop of his own blood, was the one thing they would not do, and no amount of urging could make them do it. It was this arrière pensée that held the hand of McClellan and of Meade after Antietam and Gettysburg. Both of these engagements were victories for the Army of the Potomac, and both were robbed of their fruits by a lurking fear of the lion at bay. “They are ‘shooing’ the enemy out of Maryland,” said Lincoln, with his peculiar aptness and homeliness.”
When Grant came to the Army of the Potomac, he reversed the methods of all who preceded him. Braver soldiers never were, and Valiant Commanders; but the Generals had not learned the art of fighting with deadly intent. Peace is very good for peace, but war is organized Rage. It means destruction or it means nothing.
At the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant stripped his commissary train of its guards to fill a gap in the line of battle. When expostulated with for exposing his Army to the loss of all its provisions, his reply was:
“When this army is whipped, it will not want any provisions.”
All Summer, all the Autumn, all the Winter, all the Spring, and early Summer again, he hammered Lee, with blow on blow, until, at Appomattox, the great, but not greatest, Southern General went to the ground.
Grant was a great fighter, but not a fighter only.
His mind took in the whole field of war—as wide and complex as any that ever Napoleon knew. He combined in his plans the operations of three Armies, and for the first time in the War, the whole of Union forces were acting in concert.
He had the patience of Fate, and the force of Thor. If he neglected the rules of war, as at Vicksburg, it was to make better rules, to those who were strong enough to employ them.
Counselors gave him materials. He formed his own plans. Abhorring Show, simple in manner, gentle in his intercourse, modest and even diffident in regard to his own personality, he seems to have been the only man in Camp who was ignorant of his own greatness. Never was a Commander better served, never were subordinates more magnanimously treated. The fame of his Generals was as dear to him as his own. Those who might have been expected to be his rivals, were his bosom friends. While there were envies and jealousies among minor officers, the great names, Thomas, Sherman, Sheridan, give to history a new instance of a great friendship between great Warriors.
Some future day a Napier will picture the final drama: the breaking up of Lee’s right wing at Five Forks; Lee’s retreat; Grant’s grim, relentless pursuit; Sheridan, like a raging lion, heading off the fleeing armies, that were wearied, worn, decimated, conquered; and, at the end, the modesty of their Victorious General; the delicacy with which he treated his beaten foe; the humanity of the terms given to the men: sent away with food, and horses for their farms; all this will form a picture of War and of Peace.
He never forgot that the South was part of his country. The moment that the South lay panting and helpless upon the ground, Grant carried himself with magnanimous and sympathetic consideration. After the fall of Richmond he turned aside and returned to Washington without entering the conquered Capital.
When Johnston surrendered upon terms not agreeable to Lincoln, Stanton, like a roaring lion fearing to lose its prey, sent Grant to overrule him. He loved Sherman, and was unwilling to enter his camp lest he should seem to snatch from him the glory of his illustrious campaign. From a near town he enabled Sherman to reconstruct his terms, and accept Gen’l Johnston’s surrender.
When Lincoln was dead, Vice-President Johnson became President; a man well fitted for carrying on a fight, but not skilled in Peace, with a morbid sense of Justice, he determined that the leaders of rebellion should be made to suffer as examples; as if the death of all the first-born, the desolation of every Southern home, the impoverished condition and bankruptcy of every citizen were not example enough! He ordered Lee to be arrested. Grant refused. When Johnson would have employed the Army to effect his purposes, Grant, with quick but noble rebellion, refused obedience to his superior, and, arranging to take from his hands all military control, repressed the President’s wild temper and savage purpose of a dishonoring Justice.
Having brought the long and disastrous war to a close, in his own heart Grant would have chosen to have rested upon his laurels, and lived a retired military life. It was not to be permitted. He was called to the Presidency by universal acclaim, and it fell to him to conduct a campaign of Reconstruction even more burdensome than the war.
It would seem impossible to combine in one, eminent civil and military genius. To a certain extent they have elements in common. But the predominant element in war is organized Force; of civil government, Influence. Statesmanship is less brilliant than Generalship, but requires a different and a higher moral and intellectual genius. God is frugal in creating great men—men great enough to hold in eminence, the elements of a great General and of a great Ruler. Washington was eminent in Statesmanship—but then he was not a great General. At any rate, he had no opportunity to develop the fact.
Alexander was a mere brutal fighter.
Cesar as Emperor differed from Cesar as General only as a sword sheathed differs from a sword unsheathed.
Frederick the Great was simply a Military Ruler.
Napoleon came near to combine the two elements in the earlier period of his career, but the genius of Force gradually weakened that sense of right and justice on which Statesmanship must rest.
Grant had in him the element of great Statesmanship; but neither his education, nor his training, nor the desperate necessities of war, gave it a fair chance of development in a condition of things which bewildered the wisest statesmen.
The tangled skein of affairs would have tasked a Cavour or a Bismarck. The Period of Reconstruction is yet too near our war-inflamed eyes to be philosophically judged.
1. Came the disbanding of the army. That was so easily done that the world has never done justice to the marvel. The soldiers of three great armies dropped their arms at the word of command, dissolved their organizations, and disappeared. To-day the mightiest force on earth, to-morrow they were not! As a summer storm darkens the whole heavens, shakes the ground with its thunder, and empties its quiver of lightning, and is gone in an hour, as if it had never been, so was it with both armies. Neither in the South nor in the North was there a cabal of officers, nor any affray of soldiers—for every soldier was yet more a citizen.
In this resumption of citizen life, Grant, accompanied by his most brilliant Generals, led the way. He hated war, its very insignia, and in foreign lands refused to witness military pageants. He had had enough of war. He loved peace.
When advanced to the Presidency, three vital questions were to be solved.
1. The status of the four million Emancipated Slaves.
2. The adjustment of the political relations of the dislocated States.
3. The restraint and control of that gulf-stream of Finance which threatened to wash out the foundations of honest industry, and which brought to the Nation more moral mischief than had the whole war itself. We are in peril from golden quicksands yet.
Grant was eminently wise upon this question. His veto saved the country from a vitiated and corrupting circulation.
The exaltation of the domestic African to immediate Citizenship was the most audacious act of faith and fidelity that ever was witnessed.
Their fidelity to the duties of bondage was most Christian. In all the war, knowing that their emancipation was to be gained or lost, there was never an insurrection, nor a recorded instance of cruelty or insubordination. This came not from cowardice; for, when, in the later periods of the war, they were enlisted and drilled, they made soldiers so brave as to extort admiration and praise from prejudice itself. They deserved their liberty for their good conduct.
But, were they prepared for Citizenship? The safety of our civil economy rests upon the intelligence of the citizen. But the slaves in mass were greatly ignorant.
It was a political necessity to arm them with the ballot as a means of self-defense.
In many of the Southern States a probationary state would have been wiser, but in others it would have remanded them to substantial bondage.
In this grand department of Statesmanship General Grant accepted the views of the most eminent Republicans, Stanton, Chase, Sumner, Thad. Stevens, Fessenden, Sherman, Garfield, Conkling, Evarts, and of all the great leaders.
In the readjustment of the political relations of the South he was wise, generous, and magnanimous in his career. Not a line in letter, speech or message can be found that would wound the self-respect of Southern citizens.
When the dangerous heresy of a Greenback currency had gained political power, and Congress was disposed to open the flood-gates of a rotten currency, his veto, an act of courage, turned back the deluge and saved the land from a whole generation of mischief. Had he done but this one thing, he would have deserved well of History.
The respects in which he fell below the line of sound Statesmanship—and these are not a few—are to be attributed to the influence of advisers whom he had taken into his confidence. Such was his loyalty to friendship that it must be set down as a fault—a fault rarely found among public men.
Many springs of mischief were opened which still flow. When it was proposed to nominate Grant for a third term, the real objections to the movement among wise and dispassionate men was not so much against Grant as against the staff which would come in with him.
On the whole, if one considers the intrinsic difficulty of the question belonging to his administration, the stormy days of politics and parties during his eight years, it must be admitted that the country owes to his unselfish disposition, to his general wisdom, to his unsullied integrity, if not the meed of wisest yet the reputation of one who, pre-eminent in war, was eminent in administration, more perhaps by the wisdom of a noble nature than by that intelligence which is bred only by experience. Imperious counselors and corrupt parasites dimmed the light of his political administration.
We turn from Grant’s public life to his unrestful private life. After a return from a tour of the world, during which he met on all hands a distinguished reception, he ventured upon the dangerous road of speculation. The desire of large wealth was deep-seated in Grant’s soul. His early experience of poverty had probably taken away from it all romance. Had wealth been sought by a legitimate production of real property, he would have added one more laurel to his career. But, with childlike simplicity of ignorance, he committed all he had to the wild chances of legalized gambling. But a few days before the humiliating crash came, he believed himself to be worth three millions of dollars! What service had been rendered for it? What equivalent of industry, skill, productiveness, distribution or convenience? None. Did he never think that this golden robe, with which he designed to clothe his declining years, was woven of air, was in its nature unsubstantial, and not reputable? His success was a gorgeous bubble, reflecting on its brilliant surface all the hues of heaven, but which grew thinner as it swelled larger. A touch dispelled the illusion, and left him poor.
It is a significant proof of the impression produced upon the public mind of the essential honesty of his mind, and of the simplicity of his ignorance of practical business, that the whole nation condoned his folly, and believed in his intentional honesty. But the iron had entered his soul. That which all the hardships of war, and the wearing anxieties of public administration could not do, the shame and bitterness of this great Bankruptcy achieved.
The resisting forces of his body gave way. A disease in ambush sprang forth and carried him captive. Patiently he sat in the region and shadow of death. A mild heroism of gentleness and patience hovered about him. The iron will that had upheld him in all the vicissitudes of war, still in a gracious guise sustained his lingering hours.
His household love, never tarnished, never abated, now roused him to one last heroic achievement—to provide for the future of his family. No longer were there golden hopes for himself. The vision of wealth had vanished. But love took its place, and under weakness, pain and anguish, he wrought out a history of his remarkable career. A kindly hand administered the trust. It has amply secured his loved household from want.
When the last lines were written, he laid back upon his couch and breathed back his great Soul to God, whom he had worshiped unos-tentatiously after the manner of his fathers.
A man he was without vices, with an absolute hatred of lies, and an ineradicable love of truth, of a perfect loyalty to friendship, neither envious of others nor selfish for himself. With a zeal for the public good, unfeigned, he has left to memory only such weaknesses as connect him with humanity, and such virtues as will rank him among heroes.
The tidings of his death, long expected, gave a shock to the whole world. Governments, Rulers, Eminent Statesmen and Scholars from all civilized nations gave sincere tokens of sympathy. For the hour, sympathy rolled as a wave over all our own land. It closed the last furrow of war, it extinguished the last prejudice, it effaced the last vestige of hatred, and cursed be the hand that shall bring them back!
Johnston and Buckner on one side, Sherman and Sheridan upon the other of his bier, he has come to his tomb a silent symbol that Liberty had conquered Slavery, Patriotism Rebellion, and Peace War.
He rests in peace. No drum or cannon shall disturb his rest.
Sleep, Hero, until another trumpet shall shake the heavens and the earth. Then come forth to glory in immortality.