A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Vol 2 Part 17

He whipped out a flashlight and strode down to the ledge. There were many of the abandoned electron guns standing about on tripods, or overturned by the fleeing gangsters. Something soft gave under Bullard's boot. He played his light along the ground and saw a sight that under other circ.u.mstances would have been revolting. Loose hands and feet, attached to charred stumps of arm or leg, were strewn widely. Other and less readily indentifiable fragments of disintegrated humanity lay among them. Ziffler's strong-arm squad, once the terror of the outer planets, had been dispersed in the fullest sense of the word.

Bullard turned on his amplifier.

"O.K., Moore. Round up the men and bring them down. We're going back."

The trek back across the icy waste seemed infinitely shorter and easier than it had on the outward journey. Men's hearts were light now, and not leaden as before. To the Polliwogs, the knowledge they had lost their s.h.i.+p had been as dispiriting as the seeming certainty of their impending doom. Now all that was changed. A mile ahead of them lay the Pollux, just as they had left her.

The search for Ziffler and the stragglers took some time, but they found them, cowering and whimpering behind a boulder.

"Iron them well and thrown them into the brig," snapped Bullard, and went into his s.h.i.+p.

He grabbed a signal pad and wrote a brief report.

A little later the grand admiral at Lunar Base stretched out his hand for the flimsy bit of yellow paper his orderly had brought him. He read it, then read it again. He frowned a little and scratched his head."Has Bullard gone highbrow on us, or what the h.e.l.l?" he asked, tossing the message over to Bissel.

Bissel picked it up and read: After reflection, the enemy succ.u.mbed.

BULLARD.

THE LOST YEARS.

by Oscar Lewis

Had the a.s.sa.s.sin's mind dwelt on the enormity of the crime he -was contemplating, had his resolution jailed, or his hand wavered, the Nation might happily have been spared this overwhelming calamity...

DR. JONATHAN BAUERMANN APRIL 26, 1865.

1865.

Last evening while attending the theater, the President was attacked in his box by an unknown a.s.sailant, who then leaped to the stage, shouted some unintelligible words, and escaped in the confusion that followed. The wounded man was carried across the street to a lodging house and put to bed. His condition is said to be grave.

The Globe, Philadelphia, Pa., April 15 Shortly after two o'clock this afternoon, the physicians who have been in constant attendance at the President's bedside issued this bulletin: "No marked change has occurred during the past 24 hours. The patient slept three hours this morning. At 12 o'clock noon his pulse and temperature remained high, his respiration was somewhat easier."

The Times-Journal, Cincinnati, Ohio, April 17 The President's' physicians, while they continue to manifest deep concern, were noticeably less pessimistic this morning. For the first time in seven days the crowd before the roped-off area on Tenth Street was small. No bulletin was issued from the sickroom today.

The Star, Albany, N.Y., April 22 Copyright 1951 by Oscar Lewis. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Alonzo Hammond, M.D., stated today that, weather permitting, the President would be moved tomorrow morning to the Executive Mansion, where rooms have been made ready for him and for the nurses who will attend him during his convalescence.

The Daily Advertiser, St. Louis, Mo., April 26 Now that the uncertainty and suspense of the last fortnight are past, and each day brings added a.s.surance that the fanatical plot against the President's life has failed, every citizen, whatever his political faith, will breathe a sigh of relief. But our jubilation at this happy outcome must not blind us to the fact that the nation faces numerous problems of the utmost urgency that call for prompt action by the executive branch of the government. The Gazette, therefore, warmly endorses the proposal made by the Hon. Thad-deus Stevens during his address at Baltimore on Tuesday last: that pending the Chief Executive's recovery to a point where he can, with safety to himself andthe union, rea.s.sume the duties of his office, the reins of authority be delegated to the cabinet, with full power to make decisions on such critical issues as cannot prudently be postponed until Congress reconvenes.

Editorial in The Gazette, Boston, Ma.s.s., April 30 FROM MEMORIES OF A WARTIME NURSE.

BY ELIZABETH PALMER BANKE.

PUBLISHED BY TICKNOR & FIELDS.

BOSTON, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS, 1867.

ONE morning in late April [1865] an orderly came into the ward and told me I was wanted in the superintendent's office. As soon as I was able to leave I went downstairs and across the courtyard, trying to guess the reason for this summons. When I entered, Doctor Wilmot picked up a paper from his desk and handed it to me. I glanced through it hastily. It was a letter from the Surgeon General of the Army directing the superintendent to select a female nurse from the hospital staff and have her report to him at once for special duty.

To my look of inquiry, Doctor Wilmot replied that he knew nothing of the nature of this a.s.signment, but that judging from the channels through which it had come it must be of considerable importance. He then wrote a brief note, addressed it to the Surgeon General, and asked me to deliver it in person. I returned to the ward, where I spoke briefly with the nurse who was to take over my duties, then hurried to the dormitory, stopping there only long enough to change into my street clothes and to gather up a few belongings. Five minutes later, seated in Doctor Wilmot's own carriage, which he had put at my disposal, I was hurrying across the city, little knowing that I had embarked on the most responsible a.s.signment of my whole nursing career...

Next morning as we drove through the muddy streets Doctor Hammond explained that while the patient appeared to be making steady progress, his condition was such as to cause continued concern, and that every precaution must therefore be taken to a.s.sure him uninterrupted rest and quiet. When we arrived before the gates, there were soldiers on guard there, as there had been ever since the night of the attack, but the officer in charge pa.s.sed Doctor Hammond's carriage through without challenge. A moment later the coachman drew up before the entrance and we stepped down and entered the hallway, proceeding at once to the family living quarters on the second floor and on down the corridor to the extreme western end, where the sickroom was located. Adjoining the latter was a much smaller room that had been a.s.signed to the nurses. For the next several weeks I shared this small chamber with my a.s.sociate, an amiable, middle-aged woman named Margaret White, each of us serving on alternate s.h.i.+fts so that one or the other was constantly on call...

During the first week a vigilant watch was maintained night and day. Except for the nurse on duty, and the doctors themselves, everyone was excluded from the sickroom, the one exception to this rule being the patient's wife, whose deep concern was evident to all, and who came and sat quietly at the bedside for an hour or more each afternoon...

As the days pa.s.sed and the wounded man's condition continued to improve, the strain and uncertainty that had gripped the household, and indeed the entire nation, gave place to a feeling of confidence which, cautious at first, daily grew more p.r.o.nounced. Nowhere was this changing att.i.tude more evident than in the sickroom itself. During the first few days after he was brought home the patient had seemed content to lie quietly in the darkened room, taking but little notice of what went on about him. As his strength returned, however, this enforced idleness daily grew more burdensome, and his protests against it, mild atfirst, presently became so insistent that the doctors were obliged to modify their order excluding all callers. The visitors were, however, limited to members of the immediate family: his wife of course and their two sons, the elder of whom was in his early twenties and the other a high-spirited lad of about twelve. The latter, who had long been allowed the run of the house, had found it hard to curb his normal habits during the days when the rule of silence was rigidly enforced. Now, however, no such restrictions were placed on his behavior during his daily visits to the bedside, and the result was that his boyish exuberance dispelled the gloom from the chamber and brought indulgent smiles to the wan face on the pillow...

As he continued to mend, the responsibilities of his high office came to occupy an ever larger place in his thoughts, and the doctors, facing appeals that daily grew more urgent, had no choice but to agree to a gradual resumption of his official duties, although they were at pains to point out the danger of overtaxing his still feeble strength. Thus by mid-May he was permitted to sit up in bed for a limited period each morning while he discussed with his secretaries-both of whom customarily addressed him as "the Shogun"-such matters as could not prudently be longer postponed. Presently, too, the rule against visitors was further relaxed, so that soon the injured man was following an increasingly active schedule, with half his mornings given over to official business and the afternoons to a succession of visitors: cabinet officers, members of the Congress, officers of the Army and Navy, and a variety of friends, advisers and well-wishers.

Despite this busy program, or perhaps because of it, his recovery continued apace. Soon he was strong enough to leave his bed afternoons and receive callers while seated in an armchair before the windows, from which he could look out toward the Potomac and, closer at hand, admire the trees in the President's Park, the branches of which were now garlanded with the bright colors of spring. Then one day, toward the middle of the month, he asked that his clothing be brought in and proceeded to dress himself, rejecting all offers of a.s.sistance, whereupon, supported only by a cane, he made his way slowly down the hallway to his long-vacant study.

As it proved, this first visit to his study marked the virtual end of his illness, for he returned briefly to his study the next afternoon and again, for a much longer period, on the day following. That evening, it having grown clear that my services were no longer needed, Doctor Hammond stated that I was free to report back to my regular duties at the hospital. This I did the next day, much pleased that my special a.s.signment had had so happy an outcome...

SUMMER AT AUBURN, 1869: BEING EX-CERPTS FROM THE DIARY OF MATTHEW.

BOSLEY, WITH ADDITIONS FROM VARI-OUS SOURCES. COMPILED AND EDITED.

BY SYLVa.n.u.s SLADE.

A NOTE ON THE EDITOR: Sylva.n.u.s Slade was born at Auburn, California, on December 4, 1879, and died at Sacramento, August 19, 1949. For more than forty years he taught in the various California schools, attaining the rank of vice-princ.i.p.al of a Sacramento junior high school shortly before he retired in 1943. Throughout his long career he had an abiding interest in the history of his native state, an interest that was manifested not only by his members.h.i.+p in various California historical societies and his faithful attendance at their meetings (often in the role of speaker) but by his frequent contributions of historical studies to their publications.

Summer at Auburn, 1869 is the last of this series of papers he lived to complete, and, as he stated in a brief foreword to his ma.n.u.script, his interest in that now forgotten episode in California history was first engaged by a reading of the Diary of Matthew Bosley, which was owned by a granddaughter of its writer. Using that faded, pen-written doc.u.ment as a. basis for his study, Slade, with characteristic industry andpatience, searched through numerous books, newspapers, and periodicals of the period, located and interviewed the few then living who had personal knowledge of so remote a time, and, after two years of close application to his task, completed the carefully annotated, scholarly, and reasonably complete narrative that appears on the following pages.

A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE CIRc.u.mSTANCES.

LEADING TO THE SHOGUN's VISIT TO CALIFORNIA, TOGETHER WITH CERTAIN.

HAPPENINGS EN ROUTE.

SOON after the close of his second term, the Shogun received from an old California acquaintance, Brooke David, a new and urgent invitation to make his long-contemplated visit to the west coast. This time David had a forceful new argument to add to those he had employed earlier. The transcontinental railroad, begun during the early years of the Shogun's administration, and the progress of which he had followed with close interest, had recently been completed, and the overland pa.s.sage to California, once long and arduous, could now be made in comparative comfort. Perhaps that was the deciding factor, for the Shogun's return to private life had failed to bring about the hoped-for improvement in his health, and it may be that his doctor had advised against his facing the heat and dust and jolt of so long a ride in the Concord stages.

In any event, only a day or two after Brooke David's letter reached Springfield, he dispatched a reply accepting the Californian's invitation to spend a few weeks at the latter's summer home in the Sierra foothills, and stating that he planned to leave in about a fortnight. "One of the advantages of being on the shelf," he added, "is that I have no commitments urgent enough to demand my presence anywhere. ... I can be idle in California quite as well as here, and perhaps more pleasantly..."

He left home on June 2, traveling via the Illinois Central to Council Bluffs, where on the evening of the yd he. boarded the cars of the Overland for the four-day trip. He was accompanied by Matthew Bosley. These excerpts from Bosley's diary tell something of the journey.

June 4 [1869]: The Shogun slept late and I, knowing that he rarely rests well in the sleeping cars, did not awaken him until, a few minutes before 8 o'clock, the conductor pa.s.sed through and announced that we were due at North Platte in half an hour, where a zo-minute stop would be made for breakfast. When I carried the news to him, urging the need for haste, the Shogun, who had removed only his outer garments, sat up and began laboriously drawing on his pantaloons, complaining all the while that his bed was much too short and that he had been obliged to sleep doubled up like a jack-knife...

He finished dressing while the train was drawing to a stop and he was pulling on his rumpled coat as he joined the group in the aisle. His manner was bleak and morose as we followed in the wake of the headlong rush to the station eating-house. He brightened measurably, however, when, we having found places at one of the long tables, pitchers of coffee were placed before us and these were followed by platters of eggs and bacon and fragrant mounds of cornbread fresh from the oven.

To this he did full justice, having eaten but sparingly the evening before, then joined in the lively talk at our end of the table, entertaining the group with anecdotes of the boarding-house at Vandalia where he had lived while a member of the Illinois legislature. This continued pleasantly enough until blasts of the locomotive summoned us back to the cars. He was in good spirits when we returned to our seats, his melancholy forgotten...June 5: News of the Shogun's presence having traveled through the train, our car has become a congregating place where at most hours of the day seldom less than half a dozen men-and an occasional woman-stand about, blocking the pa.s.sageway so trainmen have difficulty pus.h.i.+ng through.

Most of these are curious idlers; they stand and stare for a few moments, then return contented to their cars, and their places are taken by others. This continued all morning and well into the afternoon, the crowd melting away only when some object on the prairie outside draws the curious to the windows.

The Shogun bears this inspection with tolerant good humor. He spent much of the morning dozing or looking out at the pa.s.sing scenery, getting up from time to time and, in his halting gait, walking the length of the car to stretch his legs, which grow cramped in the confined s.p.a.ce between the seats. This afternoon he took from his satchel a book by Artemus Ward and read it for an hour, chuckling now and again at the late humorist's drolleries and seemingly unaware of the group in the aisle. The latter were, therefore, taken aback when he suddenly closed the book and, looking musingly at his uninvited visitors, addressed them as follows: "I've just been reading here," he said gravely, "something that reminded me of a preacher they used to tell about back in Indiana. This fellow rode into our village one day on a broken-down horse and started preaching in the schoolhouse. But only a few came to hear his sermons and after a few Sundays he got downright discouraged. But before giving up entirely he decided to make one last try, so he wrote out a little notice on a sheet of paper and tacked it up in front of the village store. The notice announced that after his sermon on the following Sunday he was going to have on exhibit in the schoolyard a very remarkable animal known as a Bos domesticus. That of course caused a good deal of curiosity, and when Sunday came the schoolhouse was crowded. The preacher delivered a long and very dull sermon, then led the congregation outside and pointed out a very ordinary-looking cow he had borrowed from a neighbor, explaining that Bos domesticus was the critter's Latin name. 'But that cow's no different from any other cow,' said one of the onlookers. The preacher admitted that that was so. 'Then why did you have us come out here and look at it?' they wanted to know. 'Well,' said the preacher, 'if you hadn't come and seen it with your own eyes you might have thought you were missing something worth looking at.'"

The Shogun put on his gla.s.ses and resumed his reading, and soon the crowd, catching the point of his yarn and looking a bit shamefaced, drifted away. But they were soon replaced by others...

June 6: This morning we stopped at the village of Promontory, where the pa.s.sengers were obliged to transfer, with their belongings, from the cars of the Union Pacific to those of the Central Pacific, which are to carry us on westward. There was a long delay while the west-bound train was being made ready to receive us. Meantime we stood about in s.h.i.+vering groups, exposed to a chill wind blowing off the Great Salt Lake, which lay before us, looking gray and cheerless in the dim sunlight.

The coaches of the western link of the road, when at length we were admitted to them, were distressingly cold, for the fires had not yet been kindled in the stoves. During the first hour or more after we left Promontory all sat bundled in coats and blankets, and a gloomy silence settled over the car, which was broken only when the half-frozen pa.s.sengers voiced bitter complaints against the company's indifference to the comfort of its patrons.

The Shogun sat wrapped in silence, taking no part in this demonstration. But when an official of the road, who chanced to be aboard, presently put in an appearance and affably introduced himself, the Shogun greeted him with marked reserve. Undeterred by the formality of his reception, the official spoke volubly of the other's services to the railroad during the construction period, and expressed his regret that his superiors had not learned in advance that he was planning this trip. Had it been known, he declared, proper steps would have been taken to a.s.sure him a comfortable pa.s.sage. One of the company's privatecars, he went on, was always available for the use of distinguished travelers, and it would have been a pleasure to place it at his disposal.

The Shogun listened patiently to this voluble visitor, and when the latter had finished he remarked dryly that since he no longer held any official position in the government, he neither wished nor expected any services that were not available to all the traveling public. Then he added mildly that he would be obliged if the other would grant him one small favor: on his way back to his car would he mind tossing a few sticks of firewood into the stove?

Somewhat deflated, the official departed on this errand, and presently the car grew tolerably warm.

June 7: One of our fellow pa.s.sengers is a man named Llewellyn, an inspector for the Post Office Department, on his way to California and Oregon on official business. He sat with us for an hour this afternoon and spoke entertainingly of his experiences in the South after the war, when the postal service was being re-established. Llewellyn expressed his astonishment at the Shogun's familiarity with this subject, saying that he seemed to have a complete knowledge of the inner workings of the department.

The Shogun sighed. "During all the years I was in Was.h.i.+ngton," he replied, "half the visitors to my office came to urge me to appoint some friend or relative to the postmasters.h.i.+p at some town or village in their home districts. Yes, first and last, I learned a great deal about the postal service. Sometimes I used to wonder what the country considered most important: getting the mails delivered or putting down the Rebellion."

During his conversation with Llewellyn, the Shogun revealed something I had not known before: that when he was a young man he had served for a time as postmaster at the frontier village where he lived.

"It was my first government job," he recalled, "and in many ways it was more satisfactory than any I've held since. I ran the office to suit myself, with n.o.body to tell me what I must or must not do, or to point out how badly I was performing the job and how much better it could have been done by almost anybody else. Out at New Salem I carried the mail about in my hat, and if I felt like taking a day off and going off visiting, the people who had business to transact didn't mind waiting until I got back. I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't have followed that plan after I went to Was.h.i.+ngton instead of placing myself at the beck and call of every Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry who had an ax to grind and looked to me to furnish the grindstone."

After Llewellyn had gone back to his car, the Shogun's thoughts continued to dwell on his frontier youth.

He spoke of the wooded hills and valleys of Indiana and Illinois, so different from the barren plains through which we were pa.s.sing. At one station where the train stopped for wood and water he looked out at a cattle-loading corral beside the track. Its high sides were made of boards.

"We seldom saw fences like that back home," he remarked. "Ours were all made out of rails that had to be cut and split by hand. It took us days of the hardest sort of work to do what the rudest of sawmills could have done in half an hour. For years I haven't been able to look at a rail fence without reflecting on all the toil and sweat that went into making it. And all because none of us had the enterprise, or the skill, to throw a dam across one of the brooks and rig up a water-operated mill."

"It seems odd, sir," I observed, "to hear you speak slightingly of fence-rails."

He smiled a bit sadly. "I know, Matt, I know," he replied. "I don't expect I'll ever live that story down.

Perhaps it was wise politics that day in Chicago to carry those rails into the convention hall, although I'd hate to have to take an oath that they were the identical rails I once split. But I've never been altogether proud of that symbol. It's no great satisfaction to reflect that you're going to be remembered-as long as you're remembered at all-be-cause you wasted your youth doing by hand a job that could have been done faster and better and far, far easier with the help of a simple piece of machinery."A RETROSPECTIVE CHAPTER, DRAWN LARGELY FROM THE BOSLEY DIARY, BEARING ON EVENTS PRIOR TO THE SHOGUN'S COMING TO AUBURN.

MATTHEW BOSLEY was born, on September 23, 1844, near the village of Newark Valley, in southern New York State, close to the Pennsylvania border. At the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in an infantry company being recruited in that area, and took part in the Peninsula Campaign and in the Second Battle of Bull Run. By the summer of 1862 he was a mounted orderly attached to the staff of General Burnside, and in December of that year, as he was returning from carrying a dispatch to an advanced position during the Battle of Fredericksburg, his horse was struck by a Rebel sh.e.l.l.

Bosley's left leg was caught beneath the animal as it fell, and broken in two places. He managed, however, to crawl to a dressing station, where he was placed in a mule-drawn ambulance and taken to a field hospital. Because of the congested roads, this short trip consumed many hours, and after his arrival he lay for a full day in the rain before the overburdened staff could give him attention. When at length he was lifted on the operating table, he was delirious with fever, and his leg was so badly infected that the surgeon had no choice but to amputate it.

His chances of recovery seemed remote, but after a few days, during which the issue remained in doubt, he began to mend. Early in 1863 he was transferred to the old Union Hotel in Georgetown, which had been converted into a military hospital. There he was presently fitted with a wooden leg, and it was there, in the early summer of the same year, that there took place a chance meeting that profoundly influenced his future.

The President, who as often as he could spare the time visited the military hospitals in and about Was.h.i.+ngton, rode up one morning while a group of convalescent soldiers was playing bsaeball in an adjacent field. He reined his horse beside the fence and looked on for a few minutes, then continued on to the hospital and made a tour of the wards, stopping from time to time to exchange a few words with the patients. But he had not forgotten the baseball game in the near-by field, and when he returned to the Chief Surgeon's office he asked to have brought in the patient who had been playing with so much agility despite the handicap of a peg leg.

Young Bosley was summoned, and after being questioned about how he had received his injury, he was asked his plans for the future. The youth replied that he was soon to be discharged from the hospital and returned to civilian life, but that he was hopeful of finding something that a one-legged man could do to help put down the Rebellion. At the end of the interview the President shook hands and complimented him on his pluck. But-as Bosley later recorded in his diary-no promises were made, and he was therefore surprised and mystified when, on receiving his discharge a few days later, he was handed a letter from one of the Presidential secretaries asking that he report next morning at the Executive Mansion.

The result was that Bosley became a White House messenger, a post he continued to occupy for three years. He was clearly a young man of ambition, for in the intervals when he was not carrying messages to and from the various governmental bureaus he mapped out a course of study designed to fill in the gaps in his education. He applied himself to such good purpose that when, in the spring of 1867, another clerk was added to the White House staff, he was chosen to fill the post.

Young Bosley did not begin keeping his diary until almost two years later -its first entry is dated January i, 1869-and it is only by occasional reminiscent pa.s.sages that he makes reference to events during the period that followed the close of the Rebellion. Once started, however, he kepthis journal faithfully, rarely missing a day. During the first few weeks his entries are brief and perfunctory, being mainly concerned with the work of winding up the affairs of the outgoing administration and with preparations for turning over the White House to its new occupant in early March. As time went on, however, his daily stints grow longer, sometimes taking on a philosophical tone, and thus it grows clear that he came to look on his diary as a place not only to record each day's happenings but to reflect on their possible significance.

The doc.u.ment does not state precisely when and under what circ.u.mstances young Bosley agreed to enter the employ of his admired chief after the latter returned to private life. The arrangement must have been concluded before the beginning of February 1869, however, for on the 6th of that month the diary contains this extended pa.s.sage: This afternoon the Shogun called me into his study and, indicating an open drawer in the cabinet that stands behind his desk, asked me to run through the papers it contained, putting aside what might be worth preserving and sending what remained down to the bas.e.m.e.nt to be burned.

When, an hour or two later, he got back from his drive, he returned, as is his custom, to his study for another period of work. In pa.s.sing through the anteroom he seemed surprised to find me still at my task.

He stood beside the table for a few moments, silently looking on. I was far from finished, for the drawer had been filled to the top with papers: drafts of speeches and messages, letters bearing on personal matters, odds and ends of notes, memoranda, and the like, all tossed together in a confused ma.s.s. The material that seemed to me of no particular value-mostly hastily scrib-bled notations on matters long since disposed of-I had thrown on the floor, placing the rest, according to its subject-matter, on one or another of several piles on the table.

He looked at these bulky stacks, then at the comparatively small number of discarded papers on the floor, and his face showed a half-humorous concern as he asked if I had any idea how much the railroads were going to charge to carry all his belongings out to Springfield. I replied that I supposed the expense would be considerable, but that many of the papers seemed to me worth preserving and that I would hate to be responsible for destroying them. At some future time, I added, it might be that someone would undertake to write a history of his administration and, if so, doc.u.ments of that sort would come in very handy. This must have seemed to him a highly unlikely possibility, for his only answer was a sort of mirthless chuckle. But I could see that he was not displeased. "If that's the way you feel about it, Matt,"

he said, "go ahead and pack up whatever you like. No doubt we can find some corner out in Springfield where it can be stowed away. I don't suppose there's any harm in letting it gather dust for a few years before someone carries it outside and builds a bonfire."

I replied that I was sure the time would come when many of these writings would be looked on as valuable historical doc.u.ments.

He put a hand on my shoulder and from the quizzical expression on his face I guessed that he was about to tell another of his stories. I was not disappointed.

"Matt," he said, "many years ago out in Illinois they used to tell about an old fellow named Jeff Presley.

Presley had a hog farm and for years he worked hard trying to make a go of it. But no matter how much he tried, something always happened to spoil his plans. His hogs would get sick and die, or they would break through the fences and stray away into the woods, and whenever he took a load of them in to market, the prices were so low he could hardly give them away. Well, that went on for a long time and at last he lost his farm and had to move into a cabin on the edge of town, where he supported himself by doing whatever odd jobs he could find. One day a friend went out to visit him, and as he came up to the cabin, he was surprised to see a pen in the yard with a pig inside. 'Jeff, you've had nothing but bad luck with them critters,' his friend said. 'I should think you'd never want to lay eyes on one again.' 'Well,'said Jeff, Til tell you how it is. I keep this animal around to remind myself that I'm no great shakes as a hog-farmer and that I'll be well advised to steer clear of that business in the future.'"

The Shogun chuckled at the memory and continued on to his study. But when he reached the door he paused and added gravely: "Matt, maybe it will be a good idea after all to send a few boxes of those papers out to Springfield."

Subsequent diary entries make it clear that during the final weeks in Was.h.i.+ngton, Bosley devoted several hours each day to this task, sorting out the official letters and doc.u.ments, to be deposited in the national archives, destroying those personal papers that seemed of no importance, and putting what remained aside to be s.h.i.+pped out to Illinois.

The material that fell into this last category must have been a considerable bulk, for on February 12 Bosley writes that he had already fitted three large wooden cases and that the job was far from finished. The diary entry of that date contains this pa.s.sage: Today is the Shogun's sixtieth birthday, but the event was little noticed by the public at large, although in late afternoon the members of the White House staff presented him with a stout walking-stick with a suitable inscription engraved on its silver head. He was much touched by this small gift and had a few words for each of us, saying that he would remember always the loyalty of our little group during the trying times we had all been through...

Then the diarist adds this philosophical comment: Those of us who see him daily cannot but observe how deeply he feels his present unpopularity, an unpopularity brought about by the jealousies and misrepresentations of his political enemies, many of them members of his own party. It is tragic but true that the Shogun prepares to leave office believing that his final term has been four years of failure, for he has about him constantly an air of melancholy and defeat. It is not that he regrets the policies he has advocated from the beginning and to which he has adhered despite the abuses of those who regard his leniency toward the vanquished as a sign of weakness and indecision. Rather, he feels that where he has erred was in his failure to convince the opposition that the harsh measures they advocated, and have so largely put into effect, have served only to prolong the strife that would otherwise have ended when the war itself drew to a close...

The frequency with which the Shogun's simplest acts were distorted by his opponents was a constant annoyance to his hot-tempered young aide. The following excerpt from his diary of February 20 [1869] is typical of numerous similar outbursts: The New York newspapers of yesterday carry accounts of a speech delivered at the Cooper Union Hall in that city on Thursday last, in which the speaker, a figure high in the counsels of the Radical Republicans, won the applause of his listeners by repeating the old charge that the Shogun's act in granting clemency to certain a.s.sociates of the actor Booth was a deliberate and unjustified affront to the courts that had duly tried and convicted them. In particular this demagogue professed to deplore his intercession on behalf of Mrs. Surratt, ignoring the fact that but for his executive order the nation would have been under the painful necessity of sending that misguided woman to the gallows.

The last weeks in Was.h.i.+ngton, already gloomy enough, were further darkened by an episode that was widely heralded in the press, thus adding to the already heavy cares of the outgoing executive.

In mid-February the President's wife returned to Springfield to prepare the family home foroccupancy, for it was felt that the excitement and confusion of the final leave-taking would aggravate her already highly nervous state. Bosley records that much difficulty was encountered in persuading her to leave, and that although the date of her departure was several times fixed, she each time changed her mind and insisted on remaining until March 4 in order to ride in the inaugural parade.

On February 25, however, the President drove with her to the depot and put her on the train. She was accompanied by their younger son, then fifteen, and by her personal maid, Harriet Slide, and arrangements were made to have her met at Chicago by her sister, Mrs. Edwards, who would continue on with her to Springfield.

On the morning she reached Chicago, however, Mrs. Edwards was delayed and did not reach the depot until some fifteen minutes after the train had arrived. This slight miscarriage of the carefully laid plans had an unfortunate result. The President's wife, finding no one to meet her, went to the station master's office and, in a state of high excitement, charged that she had been made the victim of a plot on the part of her enemies to spirit her out of Was.h.i.+ngton, and demanded that he provide means for her immediate return.

Mrs. Edwards, who had meantime arrived, managed to calm the overwrought woman and, with some difficulty, persuaded her to give up her plan of hurrying back to the capital. But the commotion had caused a crowd to gather outside the station master's office, and the result was that highly colored accounts of the episode were published in several Chicago journals and widely copied by antiadministration papers throughout the nation.

In his entry for February 28, Bosley gives a full account of that unhappy affair and ends with this comment: The Shogun, who usually accepts with equanimity the slanders of the opposition press, was stirred to a mighty anger by this needless and ungallant action in heralding to the world the outbreak of a woman too hara.s.sed to be held responsible for her behavior. The dispatches filled him with rage, and he relieved his feelings by expressing in the strongest terms, liberally studded with frontier epithets, his abhorrence of those editors who stooped to make political capital by such means. He quickly regained his composure, however, although when I encountered him later in the day his air of dejection, which has been evident enough in recent months, had deepened measurably. I think, though, that he was aware of the unspoken sympathy of all of us, for he had a worn smile and a kindly word for each.

Young Bosley's desire for what he termed the vindication of his employer's policies did not grow less with the pa.s.sage of time, and after the move to Springfield his diary often touches on that theme. The following pa.s.sage was written on March 24: In the mail this morning was a letter from the editor of Harper's Monthly Magazine suggesting a paper, or, should the length of the ma.n.u.script justify it, several papers, telling the story of the war years, "not from the viewpoint of the soldier in the field, but from the pen of one who, as Commander-in-Chief, had formulated those broad policies that led to victory for the Union forces."

It was a long letter, presenting what seemed to me unanswerable arguments in favor of writing such a narrative and pointing out both its present interest and its future value. I confess that I was elated at the proposal, and when I had finished reading it,

1.