And the captain gave heed to his protest, knowing that it came from his heart; and so he continued to fight in the ranks, honored, trusted, and loved by all his comrades. In the midst of the political campaign of ’64, when the contest for the office of President of the United States was stirring the North as no political contest had ever stirred it before; when Lincoln’s enemies felt that they had won the victory, and that the battle of the ballots on election day would only ratify it; when Lincoln himself gave up the hope that he would be permitted to lead the nation back to peace and safety; when only the votes of the soldiers in the field could by any possibility save the day, Rhett Bannister turned politician and went out electioneering. From man to man he went, from company to company, from regiment to regiment, earnest, anxious, persuasive, pleading with his whole heart and soul the cause of Abraham Lincoln. And when the November ballots were counted, and the overwhelming majority proved that the people in the North as well as the soldiers in the field had confidence in the great War President, no heart in the Army of the Potomac beat with more exultant pride and unbounded happiness than did the heart of Rhett Bannister, the Lincoln conscript. In March came the President’s second inaugural address. A newspaper containing a report of it floated early into camp and came into Bannister’s hands. He read the address word by word, sentence by sentence again and again. Then he called together the men who were fond of listening to him and read it to them. “You will not find,” he said, “in all history, nor in all literature, a clause so sublime in thought, so simple in diction, so sweet with divine charity as this; listen: ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive 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 orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’ “Gentlemen, that is Abraham Lincoln, than whom no man who ever lived in America has had a higher aim, a sweeter spirit, or a more prophetic vision.”