The Lincoln Story Book Part 26

"THE HIGHEST MERIT TO THE SOLDIER."

"This extraordinary war in which we are engaged falls heavily upon all cla.s.ses of people, but the most heavily upon the soldier. For it has been said, 'All that a man hath he will give for his life;' and, while all contribute of their substance, the soldier puts his life at stake, and often yields it up in his country's cause. The highest merit, then, is due to the soldier."

"HOW SLEEP THE BRAVE?"

If Lincoln did not possess a wide range of reading, he had the habit of committing to memory entire pages of the text he delighted in.

The consequence was his invariable ability to not only utter apt quotations at length, but to cap them, if need be. Joining a group of visitors to Washington, at the Soldiers' Home, during the war, he suddenly, but in an undertone, murmured:

How sleep the brave who sink to rest By all their country's wishes blest?

The women were affected to tears by their susceptible nature, the surroundings of the cemetery with its graves, the evening dusk, and the touching voice with its apposite lines. An effect he redoubled by concluding:

And women o'er the graves shall weep, Where nameless heroes calmly sleep!

THE STOKERS AS BRAVE AS ANY.

The first troops arriving by way of the Potomac River were the volunteers of the first call, ninety-day men; the steamship _Daylight_--name of good omen! It was torrential rain, but the President and Secretary Seward came out to welcome them on the wharf.

As he would give a reception then and there, four sailors held a tarpaulin over his head like a canopy, and he shook hands all around, including the firemen and stokers out of the coal-hole. Grasping their s.m.u.tty hands, he declared that they were as brave as any one!

--(By General Viele, present.)

TRY AND GO AS FAR AS YOU CAN!

On the President, indefatigable in visiting the soldiers anywhere to see "how the boys are getting on," telling the head surgeon at City Point Hospital that he had come to shake hands with _all_ the inmates, the medical authority demurred. There were several thousands in the wards, and any man would be tired before he had gone the grand rounds.

"I think," protested Lincoln, with his set smile and dogged determination to have his own way, "I am quite equal to the task.

At any rate, I can try, and go as far as I can!"

It was on this, at another time--there were many of them, alas!--that it being found that the patients in one ward were clamoring because they had been pa.s.sed over, he insisted on shaking off the f.a.g and going to pay them respect also.

"The brave boys must not be disappointed in their 'Father Abraham!'"

ARGUMENT OF "THE STUB-TAILED COW."

The President had the knack of ill.u.s.trating a false syllogism by a story from the front. Soldiers stole a cow from a farmyard. It had but the stump of a tail, and foreseeing that there might be a requisition by the owner, who pa.s.sed for a Union sympathizer, they disguised the creature by attaching a long switch from a dead bovine. Sure enough the man came to headquarters, and from his patriotic plea of having lost much by adhering to the old cause, his demand was accorded. If he could find his lost animal, he was ent.i.tled to it and the offenders would be punished. It had not been obtained by the regular forage, that he swore. Well, he was brought by the officer seeing him round to the pen where the beeves were secured which the commissariat duly furnished. Here the rival suppliers had stabled the creature, and she was lashing off the flies with the subst.i.tute for the detached tail with supreme felicity in the lost enjoyment. The farmer scanned her with more than a merely suspicious eye, so that the lookers-on grew anxious, and the sub-officer with him, and who thought of his own plate of beef, hastened to say:

"Well, you don't see anything here anywheres like your beastie, do you, old father?"

"I dunno. Thar suttinly is one cow the pictur' of mine--but my Lilywhite was a stump--had a stub-tail, you know!"

"Hum!" said the corporal firmly, "but this here cow has a long tail!--ain't it?"

"True--and mine were a stub--let us seek farther, officer!"

PEGGED OR SEWED?

Shoemaking machinery not having attained the present development which pastes imitation-leather uppers upon paper soles, the soldiers of the first Union Army had to trudge in the boots made with wooden pegs to hold the portions together; in wet weather the pegs swelled and held tolerably, but in dryness the a.s.similation failed and the upper crust yawned off the base like a crab-sh.e.l.l divided. As for the supposed sewed ones, they went to the sub-officers, but the thread was so poor that parting was as thorough as sudden. Mr. Lincoln _wonted_, as Walt Whitman says, to repeat this tale when the army contractors were swarming in his room for a bidding:

"A soldier of the Army of the Potomac was being carried to the rear among the other wounded, when he spied one of the women following the army to vend delicacies. In her basket, no doubt, were the cookies to his fancy--the tarts and pies--open or covered. So he hailed her: 'Old lady, are them pies sewed or pegged?'"

SOLDIERING APART FROM POLITICS.

In 1864, a soldier at work on the Baltimore defenses, an outbreak of Southern sympathizers being apprehended, attended a Democratic meeting and made a speech there in favor of its principles and General McClellan as the standard-bearer. Secretary of War Stanton, fierce like all apostates, turned on this Democrat, and his disgrace as to the army was threatened. Captain Andrews went to the fountain-head with his remonstrance. He was right, for Lincoln said:

"Andrews has as good a right to hold onto his Democracy, if he chooses, as Stanton had to throw his overboard. No; when the military duties of a soldier are fully and faithfully performed, he can manage his politics his own way!"

A TIME THAT TRIED THE SOUL.

It was the Pennsylvania governor, Curtin, who brought the bad news from Fredericksburg battle-field, where Burnside was repulsed in December, 1862.

"It was a terrible slaughter--the scene a veritable slaughter-pen."

This blunt trope stirred up Lincoln, who had been a pig-slaughterer in his day, remember. He groaned, wrung his hands, and "took on" with terrible agony of spirit.

"I remember his saying over and over again," says the governor: "'What has G.o.d put me in this place for?'"