“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
   right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
   the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him
   who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his children
  —­to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
   among ourselves and with all nations.”

AFTERWORD

The author has chosen St. Louis for the principal scene of this story for many reasons.  Grant and Sherman were living there before the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was an unknown lawyer in the neighboring state of Illinois.  It has been one of the aims of this book to show the remarkable contrasts in the lives of these great men who came out of the West.  This old city of St. Louis, which was founded by Laclede in 1765, likewise became the principal meeting-place of two great streams of emigration which had been separated, more or less, since Cromwell’s day.  To be sure, they were not all Cavaliers who settled in the tidewater Colonies.  There were Puritan settlements in both Maryland and Virginia.  But the life in the Southern states took on the more liberal tinge which had characterized that of the Royalists, even to the extent of affecting the Scotch Calvinists, while the asceticism of the Roundheads was the keynote of the Puritan character in New England.  When this great country of ours began to develop, the streams moved westward; one over what became the plain states of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, and the other across the Blue Ridge Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee.  They mixed along the line of the Ohio River.  They met at St. Louis, and, farther west, in Kansas.

Nor can the German element in St. Louis be ignored.  The part played by this people in the Civil War is a matter of history.  The scope of this book has not permitted the author to introduce the peasantry and trading classes which formed the mass in this movement.  But Richter, the type of the university-bred revolutionist which emigrated after ’48, is drawn more or less from life.  And the duel described actually took place in Berlin.

St. Louis is the author’s birthplace, and his home, the home of those friends whom he has known from childhood and who have always treated him with unfaltering kindness.  He begs that they will believe him when he says that only such characters as he loves are reminiscent of those he has known there.  The city has a large population,—­large enough to include all the types that are to be found in the middle West.

One word more.  This book is written of a time when feeling ran high.  It has been necessary to put strong speech into the mouths of the characters.  The breach that threatened our country’s existence is healed now.  There is no side but Abraham Lincoln’s side.  And this side, with all reverence and patriotism, the author has tried to take.