“Duncan is in his grave;
  After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
  Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
  Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
  Can touch him further.”

On the Tuesday, April 11, a triumphant crowd came to the White House to greet Lincoln.  He made them a speech, carefully prepared in substance rather than in form, dealing with the question of reconstruction in the South, with special reference to what was already in progress in Louisiana.  The precise points of controversy that arose in this regard hardly matter now.  Lincoln disclaimed any wish to insist pedantically upon any detailed plan of his; but he declared his wish equally to keep clear of any merely pedantic points of controversy with any in the South who were loyally striving to revive State Government with acceptance of the Union and without slavery; and he urged that genuine though small beginnings should be encouraged.  He regretted that in Louisiana his wish for the enfranchisement of educated negroes and of negro soldiers had not been followed; but as the freedom of the negroes was unreservedly accepted, as provision was made for them in the public schools, and the new State constitution allowed the Legislature to enfranchise them, there was clear gain.  “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.  What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States.  So new and unprecedented,” he ended, “is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals.  Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement.  Important principles may and must be inflexible.  In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South.  I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper.”  A full generation has had cause to lament that that announcement was never to be made.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, with solemn religious service the Union flag was hoisted again on Fort Sumter by General Anderson, its old defender.  On that morning there was a Cabinet Council in Washington.  Seward was absent, in bed with an injury from a carriage accident.  Grant was there a little anxious to get news from Sherman.  Lincoln was in a happy mood.  He had earlier that morning enjoyed greatly a talk with Robert Lincoln about the young man’s new experience of soldiering.  He now told Grant and the Cabinet that good news was coming from Sherman.  He knew it, he said, for last night he had dreamed a dream, which had come to him several times before.  In this dream, whenever it came, he was sailing in a ship of a peculiar build, indescribable but always the same, and being borne on it with great speed towards a dark and undefined shore.  He had always dreamed