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freeman’s grave.” Some were misinformed that “we are not stronger today than when we began this struggle.” Others were willing to reconstruct the Union. He was glad they were scorned in South Carolina. He had sought an honorable peace, but every overture had been met with insolence. Did anyone imagine that the Yankees could be conquered in retreat, “or do you not all know that the only way to make spaniels civil is to whip them?” He brought good cheer from Hood’s army, he said, which had grown since Atlanta had fallen. Sherman would be limping back north in a month. It was only natural that Hood’s retreat had produced some despondency, “but as I approached the region occupied by our troops, the hope increased, until at last I found in the army the acme of confidence itself.”
    Poorly fed, clothed, and led, the South Carolinians cheered.

    On November 7, the day before the Yankee election, Davis told his Congress that independence was not negotiable. No one was surprised. Then he spoke the unspeakable. If the South must accept subjugation or make soldiers of its slaves, he saw “no reason to doubt what should then beour decision.” Shock waves rolled out from the capital. The South had declared its independence to preserve its slaves. Now Davis would free its slaves to preserve its independence. The war of secession that had ruined his country and killed six hundred thousand of her sons had become an end in itself.
    The once-handsome city of Richmond was rusty and unkempt. In the winter months to come, the coldest in recent memory, the city would be rife with beggars, many of them women and children. To the shame of a young Rebel officer, the poorer classes would be “scantily clad in every kind of makeshift garment.” Hungry men and women lacking overcoats, subsisting on bacon and peas, would talk of peace “with their teeth chattering.” Rats, mice, and pigeons would disappear from the streets.
    One hundred twenty-five miles to the north in Washington City, Seward wrote his wife: The Rebels were exhausted and did not know it. Lincoln’s reelection would make them conscious of it.

CHAPTER SIX
    Who Will He Treat With, or How Commence the Work?
    The crowd began to gather on the moonlit White House lawn an hour before the parade. “Every face was visible in the bright moonlight,” said the Daily National Republican, “and a more joyous and enthusiastic throng was never seen.” By the appointed hour of nine, when the sound of distant drums could be heard marching west down Pennsylvania Avenue from the foot of Capitol Hill, a sea of eager celebrants, well fed, well dressed, flush with the glow of victory, had overflowed the Executive Mansion’s grounds and spilled into Lafayette Square, come to cheer the reelection of Abraham Lincoln.
    Lincoln’s friend Noah Brooks, a newspaperman who had covered him in Illinois, was watching from a White House window when the parade curled into view, “gemmed with colored lights,” bright with “illuminations.” A regimental band lent a military air to a cavalcade “gay with banners and resplendent with lanterns and transparencies.” The Sixth Ward contributed a band of its own. Hock’s Drum Corps brought up the rear. As the marchers started down the White House carriageway, artillerymen in blue discharged a pair of cannon, blasting the crowd with excitement and the reek of half-burned powder. Assembled around the portico, the bands played “Hail, Columbia” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” punctuated by artillery. The president’s eleven-year-old son, Tad, “the pet of the house,” a doting bodyguard called him, a lovable boy with a speech impediment, ran laughing from window to window, igniting illuminations of his own proud design, thrilled beyond words when the cannon concussed the windowpanes.
    Having read his own obituaries, the