“While we stood in the soft evening air, watching the faint trembling of the long tendrils of waving willow, and feeling the dewy coolness that was flung out by the old oaks above us, Mr. Lincoln joined us, and stood silent, too, taking in the scene.

“’How sleep the brave who sink to rest, By all their country’s wishes blest,” he said, softly. . .

“Around the ‘Home’ grows every variety of tree, particularly of the evergreen class.  Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves.  One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce.

“‘Let me discourse on a theme I understand,’ said the President.  ’I know all about trees in right of being a backwoodsman.  I’ll show you the difference between spruce, pine and cedar, and this shred of green, which is neither one nor the other, but a kind of illegitimate cypress.  He then proceeded to gather specimens of each, and explain the distinctive formation of foliage belonging to each."(11)

Those summer nights of July, 1864, had many secrets which the tired President musing in the shadows of the giant trees or finding solace with the greatest of earthly minds would have given much to know.  How were Gilmore and Jaquess faring?  What was really afoot in Canada?  And that unnatural silence of the Vindictives, what did that mean?  And the two great armies, Grant’s in Virginia, Sherman’s in Georgia, was there never to be stirring news of either of these?  The hush of the moment, the atmosphere of suspense that seemed to envelop him, it was just what had always for his imagination had such strange charm in the stories of fated men.  He turned again to Macbeth, or to Richard II, or to Hamlet.  Shakespeare, too, understood these mysterious pauses—­who better!

The sense of the impending was strengthened by the alarms of some of his best friends.  They besought him to abandon his avowed purpose to call for a draft of half a million under the new Enrollment Act.  Many voices joined the one chorus:  the country is on the verge of despair; you will wreck the cause by demanding another colossal sacrifice.  But he would not listen.  When, in desperation, they struck precisely the wrong note, and hinted at the ruin of his political prospects, he had his calm reply:  “it matters not what becomes of me.  We must have men.  If I go down, I intend to go like the Cumberland, with my colors flying."(12)

Thus the days passed until the eighteenth of July.  Meanwhile the irresponsible Greeley had made a sad mess of his Canadian adventure.  Though Lincoln had given him definite instructions, requiring him to negotiate only with agents who could produce written authority from Davis, and who would treat on the basis of restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, Greeley ignored both these unconditional requirements.(13)