was their reverence for the letter of the old law which led them to
ignore progress and claim the right to secede under the Constitution.
They will be true to Lee's pledge of surrender. I'm going to trust them
as my brethren. Let us fold up our banners now and smelt the guns--Love
rules--let her mightier purpose run!"

So big and generous, so broad and statesmanlike was his spirit that in
this hour of victory his personality became in a day the soul of the New
Republic. The South had already unconsciously grown to respect the man
who had loved yet fought her for what he believed to be her highest
good.

He was entering now a new phase of power. His influence over the people
was supreme. No man or set of men in Congress, or outside of it, could
defeat his policies. Even through the years of stunning defeats and
measureless despair his enemies had never successfully opposed a measure
on which he had set his heart.

His first great work accomplished in destroying slavery and restoring
the Union, there remained but two tasks on which his soul was set--to
heal the bitterness of the war and remove the negro race from physical
contact with the white.

He at once addressed himself to this work with enthusiasm. That he could
do it he never doubted for a moment.

His first care was to remove the negro soldiers from the country as
quickly as possible. He summoned General Butler and set him to work on
his scheme to use these one hundred and eighty thousand black troops to
dig the Panama Canal. He summoned Bradley, the Vermont contractor, and
put him to work on estimates for moving the negroes by ship to Africa or
by train to an undeveloped Western Territory.

His prophetic soul had pierced the future and seen with remorseless
logic that two such races as the Negro and Caucasian could not live side
by side in a free democracy. The Radical theorists of Congress were
demanding that these black men, emerging from four thousand years of
slavery and savagery should receive the ballot and the right to claim
the white man's daughter in marriage. They could only pass these
measures over the dead body of Abraham Lincoln.

The assassin came at last--a vain, foolish dreamer who had long breathed
the poisoned air of hatred. It needed but the flash of this madman's
pistol on the night of the 14th of April to reveal the grandeur of
Lincoln's character, the marvel of his patience and his wisdom.

The curtains of the box in Ford's theatre