The Story of Our Country Part 17

What Sherman did was to cut loose from the railroads and telegraphs and march his whole army into the center of Georgia. For a whole month the people of the North heard nothing of him. His sixty thousand men might be starving for food, or might all be killed, so far as was known. It was November when they started and it was near Christmas when they were heard of again.

They had lived on the country and destroyed railroads and stores, and at length they came to the sea at the city of Savannah. Three daring scouts made their way in a boat down the river by night and brought to the fleet the first news of Sherman's march. No doubt you have heard the song "Marching through Georgia." That was written to describe Sherman's famous march.

The South was now getting weaker, and weaker, and most men saw that the war was near its end. It came to an end in April, 1865. Grant kept moving south till he got round the Confederate earthworks at Petersburg, and Lee was forced to leave Richmond in great haste.

The Union army followed as fast as it could march, and the cavalry rode on until it was ahead of the Confederates. Then General Lee saw that he was surrounded by an army far stronger than his own. He could fight no longer. His men were nearly starved. To fight would be to have them all killed. So on the 9th of April he offered his sword to General Grant, and the long and b.l.o.o.d.y war was at an end.

No one was gladder of this than President Lincoln, who had done so much to bring it about. Poor man! five days afterwards he was shot in a theatre at Washington by an actor named John Wilkes Booth. This was done out of revenge for the defeat of the South. But the people of the South did not approve of this act of murder, and in Abraham Lincoln they lost one whom they would have found a good friend.

Booth was followed and killed, but his death could not bring back to life the murdered President, whom the people loved so warmly that they mourned for him as if he had been, like Washington, the Father of his Country. It was a terrible crime, and it turned the joy which the people felt, at the end of the war, into the deepest sorrow and grief.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WASTE OF WAR AND THE WEALTH OF PEACE

LET us suppose that the history of the whole world is spread out before us like a picture, and that we are looking down on it. What will we see?

Well, we will see places where a terrible storm seems to have swept over the picture, and left only darkness and ruin in its track. And we will see other places where the sun seems to have poured down its bright beams, and all is clear and bright and beautiful. The dark places are those of war; the bright places are those of peace. All through history there have been times when men have gone out to kill and burn and do all the harm they could; and there have been other times when they stayed at home to work, and build up what war had cast down, and bring plenty and happiness to the nations.

In the picture of our own history we see such dark and bright places.

And the darkest of them all is the terrible Civil War, the story of which you have just read. For in this war our people fought against and killed one another, and all the harm was done at home, instead of in foreign lands. The war was a dreadful one. Hundreds of thousands of our people were killed or wounded, and the ground in hundreds of places was red with blood. Houses, barns and factories were burned, railroads were torn up, ships were sunk, growing crops were trampled into the earth.

And last of all came that horrid murder of our good and great President Lincoln, one of the best and n.o.blest men who ever sat in the presidential chair. Such is war--the most frightful thing we can think of or talk about. Some of my young friends may like to play soldier; but if they should grow up and get to be real soldiers they would find out what war means. Now, if we look again at the picture of our history, we shall see a great bright s.p.a.ce of peace following the dark s.p.a.ce of the Civil War. That is what I wish to tell you about now--the reign of peace, when everybody was busy at work in building up what had been torn down by the red hand of war, and our country grew faster than it had ever grown before.

There is one thing I must say here. I have told you that slavery was the cause of the war. If there had been no slaves in the country there would have been no war. And the one good thing the war did for us was to get rid of the slaves. President Lincoln declared that all the slaves should be free, and since that time there has not been a slave in the land. So we can never have a war for that cause again.

When the war was done, the soldiers marched back to their homes. Their old battle-flags, rent and torn by bullets, were put away as valued treasures; their rusty rifles, which had killed thousands of men, were given back to the government; they took up their axes, they went into the fields with their ploughs, they entered the workshops with their tools, and soon they were all at work again, as if they had never seen a field of battle.

This took place long before any of my young readers were born. But there are many old soldiers living who took part in it, and when you see the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, marching with their ragged flags and battle-scarred faces, it may bring to you some vision of what they have seen, and make you think of the fallen comrades they left behind, dead or bleeding upon the battle-field.

During your short lives there has been no war which came near to us in our homes. The angel of peace has spread her white wings over our land, and plenty and prosperity have been the rule. None of our young folks have known what it is for an army of soldiers to march past their homes, destroying and burning, and leaving ashes and ruins where there had been happy homes and fertile fields. But in the past of our country this happened to many as young as you, and they were glad that their lives were left them, after everything else was gone.

Let us put the thought of war out of our minds, and go on to see what took place under the blessed reign of peace. The first thing of which I shall tell you was one of the most wonderful of all. You know how the telegraph wires spread over the country until they were many thousands of miles in length. In the next chapter you may read how the electric telegraph was invented. In the year after the war ended a still greater thing was done. A telegraph cable was laid under the ocean from Europe to America. This had been done before, but it had proved a failure. The new cable was a success, and since then a man in London has been able to talk with a man in New York as if he were not a hundred yards away. Of course, I do not mean with his voice, but with the click of the telegraph instrument.

The year after that a great addition was made to the United States.

There was a large region in the north, known as Russian America, which Russia offered to sell to this country for seven million dollars. Many people talked about this as some of their forefathers had talked about the purchase of Louisiana by President Jefferson. They said that it was a land of ice and snow which Russia wanted to get rid of, and that it would be of no use to anybody. But it was bought for all that, and it has proven a very good bargain.

This country we now call Alaska. We get there all the sealskins from which the rich and warm cloaks of the ladies are made. And most of the canned salmon, which some of you think very good food, come from Alaska.

That country is rich in furs and fish and timber; and that is not all, for it is rich in gold. Millions of dollars worth of gold are obtained there every year. It has been something like California, whose gold was not found till Americans got there to dig.

These are not the only things that took place in the years after the war. Railroads were being built in all directions. East and west, north and south, they went, and travel became easier than it had been before.

The greatest thing done in this way was the building of a railroad across the mountains and the plains to San Francisco, on the far Pacific coast, three thousand miles away from the Atlantic sh.o.r.es. Before that time men who wanted to go to California had to drag along over thousands of miles in slow wagon trains and spend weeks and months on the road.

Now they could go there in less than a week. It was the longest railroad that the world had ever seen, up to that time.

While all this was going on, people were coming to this country in great mult.i.tudes, crossing the ocean to find new homes in our happy land. They did not have to come in slow sailing ships as in former times, but were brought here in swift steamships, that crossed the seas almost as fast as the iron horse crossed the land. All these new people went to work, some in the cities and some in the country, and they all helped to make our nation rich and powerful.

But you must not think that everything went well, and that we had no dark days. Every country has its troubles, even in times of peace. War is not the only trouble. Great fires break out, storms sweep over the land, earthquakes shake down cities, and many other disasters take place. Of all these things, fire, when it gets beyond control, is the most terrible; and it is of a frightful fire that I wish to speak.

About the year 1831 a small fort stood near the sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan, and around this a few pioneer families had built their homes, which were only rude log houses. In 1871, forty years afterwards, the fort and the huts had long been gone and a large city stood at that place. Its growth had been wonderful. Only forty years old and already it was one of the great cities of the country. This was the famous city of Chicago, which has grown more rapidly than any other great city ever known.

One night in October a dreadful thing took place in this city. A cow kicked over a lamp in a stable. The straw on the floor took fire, and in a minute the blaze shot up into the air. The people ran for water, but they were too slow, and in a few minutes the whole stable was in flames.

You may think that this was not of much account, but there happened to be a gale of wind, and soon great blazing fragments were flying through the air and falling on roofs squares away. It was not long before there was a terrible fire over almost the entire city.

Chicago at that time was mostly built of wood, and the fire spread until it looked as if the whole great city would be burnt to ashes. For two days it kept on burning until the richest part of the city had gone up in smoke and flame. Many people were burned to death in the streets and two hundred million dollars worth of property was destroyed. It was the most frightful fire of modern times. But Americans do not stop for fire or water. The city was built up again, far handsomer than before, and it is now one of the greatest cities, not only of this country, but of the world.

This was not the only disaster which came upon the country. In 1886 there was a frightful earthquake in South Carolina, that shook down a great part of the city of Charleston. And in 1889 there was a terrible flood that swept away the young city of Johnstown, in Pennsylvania, and drowned more than two thousand people. And there were tornadoes, or wind storms, in the west that blew down whole towns as you might blow down a house of cardboard with your breath. And there were great strikes and riots that were almost like war, and various other troubles. But all these could not stop the growth of the country. Every year it became richer. New people came, new factories were built, new fields were farmed, and the United States seemed like a great hive of industry, and its people like so many bees, working away, day by day, and gathering wealth as bees gather honey.

It not only got many of the old articles of wealth, but it found many new ones also. Never was there a country with so many inventors or men that have made things new and useful to everybody, and never were there more wonderful inventions. I have told you about some of our inventors; I shall have to speak of some more of them. There were hundreds of men busily at work at inventing new machines and tools, new things to help everybody--the farmer, the merchant, the workman in the factory, and the cook in the kitchen. It went on so that there was not much done by hand, as in old times, but nearly everything was done by machine.

CHAPTER XXV

THE MARVELS OF INVENTION

IT is not a pleasant thing to go hungry for twenty-four hours and to go many days without half enough to eat. I think all my readers will agree with me in this. I fancy none of you would like to find an empty table before you when the dinner bell rings. But this is a thing that has happened to many inventors; and one of these was Samuel F. B. Morse, to whose genius we owe the electric telegraph.

You know about the invention of the steamboat, the locomotive, the cotton-gin and various other early inventions; but there have been many later inventions, and one of the most important of these is the telegraph, which tells us every day what is taking place over the whole world.

Professor Morse was a New York artist who studied painting in Europe, and in the year 1832 took pa.s.sage home in the ship "Sully." One day a talk went on in the cabin of the ship. Dr. Jackson, one of the pa.s.sengers, told how some persons in Paris had sent an electric current through several miles of wire in less than a second of time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AND THEIR FAMOUS AEROPLANE.]

"If that is the case," said Morse, "why could not words and sentences be sent in the same way?"

"That's a good idea. It would be a great thing if we could send news as fast as lightning," said one of the pa.s.sengers.

"Why can't we?" said Morse; "I think we can do it."

Very likely the rest of the pa.s.sengers soon forgot all about that conversation, but Morse did not. During the remainder of the voyage he was very quiet and kept much to himself. He was thinking over what he had heard. Before the ship had reached New York he had worked out a plan of telegraphing. He proposed to carry the wire in tubes underground, and to use an alphabet of dots and dashes, the same that is used by telegraphers to-day.

When he went on sh.o.r.e Morse said to the captain: "Captain, if you should hear of the telegraph one of these days as the wonder of the world, remember that the discovery was made on board the good ship 'Sully.'"

"If I can make it go ten miles without stopping, I can make it go round the world," he said to a pa.s.senger.

But it is easier to think out a thing than to put it in practice. Poor Morse was more than ten years in working out his plans and getting people to help him in them. He got out of money and was near starving, but he kept at it. After three years he managed to send a message through seventeen hundred feet of wire. He could read it, but his friends could not, and no one was ready to put money in such a scheme.

They looked at it as a toy to amuse children. Then he went to Europe and tried to get money there, but he found the people there as hard to convince as those in America.

"No one is in such a hurry for news as all that," they said. "People would rather get their news in the good old way. Your wires work, Mr.

Morse, but it would take a great deal of money to lay miles of them underground, and we are not going to take such chances as that with our money."

Mr. Morse next tried to get Congress to grant him a sum of money. He wanted to build a wire from Baltimore to Washington and show how it would work. But it is never easy to get money from Congress, and he kept at it for five years in vain.

It was the 3d of March, 1843. At twelve o'clock that night the session of Congress would end. Morse kept about the Senate chamber till nearly midnight, in hopes his bill would pa.s.s. Then he gave it up in despair and went to his boarding house. He was sure his little bill would not be thought of in the crowd of business before Congress and was greatly depressed in consequence.