Zoe!  I send up my name by an usher.  The word comes back quickly to join her behind the scenes.  There she is waiting for me.  And we fall into each other’s arms and sob.  She is all I have left in the world except little Reverdy.  I hold her from me.  She is majestic, glorious in the maturity of great beauty, intelligence, art.  She has long been a singer of note under this name of Madam Zante.  What of Fortescue?  She ran away from him.  What was the explanation of Fortescue’s trick?  So far as we could guess at it, only that he had used the murder of another woman to get the property that he had learned from Zoe that she had inherited.  But we had no time to talk of this now.  “Come with me, Zoe, to my house.”  And Zoe came.  But she was soon off again to nurse in the hospitals.

It is November, 1861.  Word comes to us that Reverdy’s boy, Amos, has been killed in the battle of Belmont.  Douglas has now been in sleep five months; now Amos is a sacrifice to the war.  He had joined Captain Grant’s army against Sarah’s fierce protest.  He had gone forth happy and proud.  Now he was to rest in the cemetery in Jacksonville near the dust of my father, near the dust of Major Hardin, and Lamborn.

And so it was that Zoe and I stood side by side touching the dead hand of Amos.  Sarah was too grief-stricken to be surprised at Zoe’s reappearance in our lives.  She wailed incessantly:  “What is free territory to me?  My boy is dead!  What is the end of slavery to me?  My boy is dead!  There was no use for this war, no use, no use!  It needed never to be.  If they had only listened to Douglas.  What are Lincoln and Jeff Davis thinking of?  My boy is dead.”

And for nights after returning to Chicago I heard Sarah’s voice crying:  “my boy! my boy!”

The battle of Gettysburg has been fought.  That single thing that makes or destroys every man had come upon General Lee and commanded him to follow.  In his case it was audacity.  He had invaded Pennsylvania and been hurled back.  And not long after I heard that Isabel’s husband had been killed in that terrible battle.  She did not write me.  The silence of life had come over us.

I read the Gettysburg address of Lincoln.  It moved me like a symphony.  But I did not believe it to be true.  This government was not conceived in liberty.  It was not dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  We were not engaged in a strife which tested whether this government so conceived and so dedicated could survive.  The South could have set up a separate government and the same liberty and the same equality which informed the union would have remained intact.  Isabel’s husband, and the other thousands who had died there had not consecrated the ground unless the Union meant something more than a union.  It had to mean liberty and more than the emancipation of the negroes for that ground to be consecrated.  And a few years later its glory was detracted from by the machinations of merchants who grew fat on the blood of that battle.  And yet I was moved by Lincoln’s words more profoundly than by anything that I had ever read.