Voices from the Past Part 162

"There's such a shortage of medical supplies," a beautiful nurse exclaimed. "Isn't there something you can do to help? Did you know there are 12,000 wounded in and around the city?"

Note-

Check telegrams at T. Office. See Seward and Blain.

The White House

March 20, '65

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as G.o.d 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.

That is my prayer.

Something resembling peace came as I wrote.

7 a.m.

Office

A lieutenant visited my office one afternoon last week, a thin ghost of a man. Sitting in a chair alongside my desk, he seemed to totter, to lean toward the sun coming in the window.

He showed me pieces of bone that had been removed from a shoulder wound, laying them on my desk, in the sun.

I talked with him for about an hour, questioning about his army experiences, his home...he is mustered out. Back to Albany.

A soldier b.u.mped into me on the White House grounds, swearing because he had not been able to get his pay; his crutch poked at the ground, his leg-stump jerked, as he talked to me.

"Let me see your papers? Remember, I've been a lawyer and maybe I can help."

Jip is dead.

March 28th, '65

Someone is singing outside my office, singing that old favorite, "Ma.s.sa's in de cole, cole ground."

Memories.

I see the newspaper heading:

5,000 COTTON BALES BURNED.

Baton Rouge, last week bales were piled in the Commons, soaked with alcohol, and burned.

At this date, bales are valued at $100.00 per bale.

Another item, by the same reporter:

Two flatboats, loaded with cotton bales, were floated down the Mississippi, at New Orleans.

Soaked with alcohol, they were set afire...

My little mulatto brings me my lunch; she bows and says:

"Good day, mistaaaaa President...cawnbread...thais cawnbread on my tray..."

March 29th

I have gone through my desk today, weeding out.

I have had a pigeonhole marked: A.

That's for a.s.sa.s.sination.

I think there were about eighty 'nonymous threats in that pigeonhole. I have thrown them into the fireplace. I should have done this long ago. Some of the threats were made by persons who had never been to Was.h.i.+ngton, whose geographical knowledge would have led them to the stables rather than the White House. Some seemed to think I resided in the Was.h.i.+ngton monument. One person proposed that he a.s.sa.s.sinate me on the Presidential yacht. No doubt he felt that would please the press and general public.

It is uncommonly chilly this afternoon; I think I will have a fire in the fireplace. We can have some oak logs to burn up the ashes of the a.s.sa.s.sins.

General Grant and I have been on friendly terms for a long while. He likes to talk about his farming days in Missouri. He used to haul wood ten or twelve miles into St. Louis. $10.00 a cord. He is proud of his log cabin, which he designed and built, a two-story.

At his HQ we sat under a tent flap and talked. He unfolded a letter from his wife and showed me his baby's smudge print. Wife and son are two thousand miles away.