India America and World Brotherhood

Toward the close of the war came the second candidacy of Lincoln for the Presidency with a tremendous effort made by the combined forces of disloyalty and timidity to defeat him on the ground that the war was a failure and should be stopped at once and that the indpendence of the seceding States should be recognized. [...] Throughout the long and terrible experiences of the war evidence had come in a thousand ways to the people of the South that the great heart at the head of the Nation in Washington 'cared equally for them and that he saved them suffering in every way in his power and was their truest friend. [...] Edwin Markham himself a man of the soil a blacksmith by trade in his early years but now ranking among our most virile poets has written of Lincoln : The color of the ground was in him the red earth The tang and odor of the primal things ; The rectitude and patience of the rocks ; The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; The courage of the bird that dares the sea ; The pity of the sno [...] So came the Captain with the mighty heart ; And when the step of earthquake shook the house Wresting the rafters from their ancient hold He held the ridgepole up and spiked again The framework of the Home. [...] It should be noted in this instance as in all similar social movements that while the emancipation of the Negroes for the time being materially impoverished the South yet at the same time it lifted a great miasma of iliertia from that whole section of the country and the majority of thinking people in the South are to-day glad that slavery is a thing of the past.