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president was grateful for his resurrection, but Noah Brooks thought that few who had known him in Illinois would recognize him now. He looked like a sick man. On the day before the parade, he confided in Brooks that he would have been “a little mortified” had the people turned him out, but the lifting of his burdens would have been worth the sting. He had said more than once that “nothing touches the tired spot,” and his triumphant reelection was no exception. Twenty-five states had voted. McClellan had carried three: New Jersey and the loyal slave states of Delaware and Kentucky. Lower down the ballot, many Copperheads had been smoked. Though the incoming Congress would be more Republican than ever, the Radicals had gained strength to overpower their temperate president.
    But now his people were calling for him. When the moment seemed right, he showed himself at the open center window beneath the pillared portico where Jefferson and Jackson had spoken. According to the National Republican (a partisan source to be sure), the crowd cheered for minutes before they let him speak. Then their hero positioned his spectacles on the end of his nose and read a little speech in his high-pitched Western twang, his practiced voice carrying over the crowd.
    A national election had been held in the midst of a civil war, he said. The world had not known that such a thing was possible. The voters had shown that “he who is most devoted to the Union and most opposed to treason” could win the most votes. But their president wished no man ill, and the war was not yet won. Would the voters now unite “to save the common country”? Buoyed by their cheers, he said a few more words of thanks and reconciliation, delighting the upturned faces in the bright November moonlight, then stepped away from the window and turned to his aide John Hay. “Not very graceful,” he said, “but I am growing old enough not to care much for the manner of doing things.”
    Then the crowd rolled on to Seward’s with torches, sparklers, and bands until the governor appeared at his own upper window. From Lincoln they looked for eloquence. From Seward they wanted a laugh. He gave them half a dozen, compared himself to Saint Paul, predicted that within a short time “you will have to look mighty hard” to find anyone in the South who admitted he had been a secessionist, thanked God forbringing the end of the rebellion near, wished them luck the rest of the way. Basking in cheers and applause, his favorite kind of music, he exhorted the crowd to enjoy themselves, to visit his fellow Cabinet members and keep their spirits high. For hours to come, the revelers happily complied, keeping Washington City awake with bugles, drums, and torchlight.

    Some five hundred miles to the southwest, Rome, Georgia, was lit by arson. Earlier that day, out of touch with the high command, having cut his own telegraph wires, General Sherman had marched his legions out of Rome, leaving a smaller force behind with orders to take whatever it might need and destroy that night all workshops, warehouses, depots, factories, bridges, and public property before moving on to join him, fulfilling his pledge to make Georgia howl. The exercise would be repeated for a month and a half to come, as sixty thousand men burned an ugly path to Savannah, sustaining themselves on the way, taking cattle, crops, and silver, crushing the heart of the South, bringing the war to her people, punishing them for starting it, pressuring them to stop. “Sherman’s bummers,” they called themselves. Jefferson Davis and his generals had moved their warriors elsewhere, leaving nothing more formidable than isolated cavalry and ornery old men for the bummers to push aside. Their commander told a colleague, “I am going into the very bowels of the Confederacy, and propose to leave a trail that will be recognized fifty years hence.” William Tecumseh