." "That is so," said Lincoln. "Well," said
Stephens, "we supposed that would have to be your view. But, to tell
you the truth, we have none of us been much afraid of being hanged with
you as President." He brought home, besides the compliment, an idea of
a kind which, if he could have had his way with his friends, might have
been rich in good. He had discovered how hopeless the people of the
South were, and he considered whether a friendly pronouncement might
not lead them more readily to surrender. He deplored the suffering in
which the South might now lie plunged, and it was a fixed part of his
creed that slavery was the sin not of the South but of the nation. So
he spent the day after his return in drafting a joint resolution which
he hoped the two Houses of Congress might pass, and a Proclamation
which he would in that case issue. In these he proposed to offer to
the Southern States four hundred million dollars in United States
bonds, being, as he calculated the cost to the North of two hundred
days of war, to be allotted among those States in proportion to the
property in slaves which each had lost. One half of this sum was to be
paid at once if the war ended by April 1, and the other half upon the
final adoption of the Constitutional Amendment. It would have been a
happy thing if the work of restoring peace could have lain with a
statesman whose rare aberrations from the path of practical politics
were of this kind. Yet, considering the natural passions which even in
this least revengeful of civil wars could not quite be repressed, we
should be judging the Congress of that day by a higher standard than we
should apply in other countries if we regarded this proposal as one
that could have been hopefully submitted to them. Lincoln's illusions
were dispelled on the following day when he read what he had written to
his Cabinet, and found that even among his own ministers not one man
supported him. It would have been worse than useless to put forward
his proposals and to fail. "You are all opposed to me," he said sadly;
and he put his papers away. But the war had now so far progressed that
it is necessary to turn back to the point at which we left it at the
end of 1864.

Winter weather brought a brief pause to the operations of the armies.
Sherman at Savannah was preparing to begin his northward march, a
harder matter, owing to the rivers and marshes that lay in his way,
than his triumphal progress from