e consolation
that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved
and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid
so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
Abraham Lincoln.

Nor did the Lincoln touch stop there. It even began to make its
quietly persuasive way among the finer spirits of the South from
the very day on which the Second Inaugural closed with words which
were the noblest consummation of the prophecy made in the First.
This was the prophecy: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching
from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and
hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus
of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the
better angels of our nature." And this the consummation: "With
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan--to
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations."

CHAPTER VI

LEE AND JACKSON: 1862-3

Most Southerners remained spellbound by the glamour of Bull Run
till the hard, sharp truths of '62 began to rouse them from their
flattering dream. They fondly hoped, and even half believed, that
if another Northern army dared to invade Virginia it would certainly
fail against their entrenchments at Bull Run. If, so ran the argument,
the North failed in the open field it must fail still worse against
a fortified position.

The Southern generals vainly urged their Government to put forth
its utmost strength at once, before the more complex and less united
North had time to recover and begin anew. They asked for sixty
thousand men at Bull Run, to be used for a vigorous counterstroke
at Washington. They pointed out the absurdity of misusing the Bull
Run (or Manassas) position as a mere shield, fixed to one spot,
instead of making it the hilt of a sword thrust straight at the heart
of the North. Robert E. Lee, now a full general in the Confederate
Army and adviser to the President, grasped the whole situation
from the firs