der swept the North. Lincoln refused to remove
him. And on his head was heaped the blame for all the anguish of the
bitter years of failure.

His answer to his critics was remorseless.

"We must fight to win. Grant is the ablest general we have. His losses
are appalling. But the struggle is now on to the bitter end. Our
resources of men and money are exhaustless. The South cannot replace her
fallen sons. Her losses, therefore, are fatal!"

War had revealed to all at last that the Abolition crusade had been
built on a lie. The negro had proven a bulwark of strength to the South.
Had their theories been true, had the slaves been beaten and abused the
Black Bees would surely have swarmed. A single Southern village put to
the torch by black hands would have done for Lee's army what no opponent
had been able to do. It would have been destroyed in a night. The
Confederacy would have gone down in hopeless ruin.

Not a black hand had been raised against a Southern man or woman in
all the raging hell. This fact is the South's vindication against the
slanders of the Abolitionists. The negroes stood by their old masters.
They worked his fields; they guarded his women and children; they
mourned over the graves of their fallen sons.

And now in the supreme hour of gathering darkness came the last act of
the tragedy--the arming of the Northern blacks and the training of their
hands to slay a superior race.

In the first year of the war Lincoln had firmly refused the prayer of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he be allowed to arm and drill the Black
Legions of the North. Later the pressure could not be resisted. The
daily murder of the flower of the race had lowered its morale. It had
lowered the value set on racial trait and character. The Cavalier and
Puritan, with a thousand years of inspiring history throbbing in their
veins, had become mere cannon fodder. The cry for men and still more men
was endless. And this cry must be heard, or the war would end.

Men of the white breed were clasping hands at last across the lines
under the friendly cover of the night. They spoke softly through their
tears of home and loved ones. The tumult and the shout had passed. The
jeer and taunt, blind passion and sordid hate lay buried in the long,
deep graves of a hundred fields of blood.

Grant's new plan of campaign resulted in the deadlock of Petersburg.
The two armies now lay behind thirty-five miles of deep trenches with a
stretch of vol