Lincoln Story Book, The

<h3>"WENT AND RETURNED!"</h3> <p>The last days of March, 1865, contained the three battles, closing with that of Five Forks, signalizing the collapse of the Confederacy at Richmond. The President, at the front, sent the news of victories to the Cabinet at home. After the battles, the advance of the triumphing Unionists. On Monday morning Lincoln was enabled to telegraph the talismanic words so often dreamed of in the last agonizing years of fluctuating hope:</p> <p>"<i>Richmond has fallen</i>! I am about to enter!"</p> <p>Secretary Stanton, of the war office, immediately implored: "Do not peril your life!"</p> <p>But in the morning he received this line from the most independent President known since Jackson:</p> <p>"Received your despatch; went to Richmond, and returned this morning!"</p> <p>Expostulated with by Speaker Colfax on the apparent rashness, for he had completed "the foolhardy act" by occupying President Jefferson Davis' vacated house, he replied with the calm of a man of destiny:</p> <p>"I should have been alarmed myself if any other person had been President and gone there; but <i>I</i> did not feel in any danger whatever."</p> <p>(NOTE.--Mark the analogy in great men. General Grant says of his first emotions in war--the Mexican--"If some one else had been colonel, and I had been lieutenant-colonel, I do not think I would have felt any trepidation.") <br/> <br/> <br/></p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />