“You don’t suppose such men are goin’ to accept the best lot of regulations ever made without askin’ questions? Not a bit of it. They know when things are right and when they’re not. When they see a man who they know is nothing but a boy or one they know’s bein’ eat up with homesickness or one whose term is out, and ought to be let go, throwing everything over and desertin’, it don’t make them any better soldiers to have us shoot him. Makes ’em worse in my judgment, makes ’em think we don’t understand. Anyhow, discipline or no discipline, I ain’t goin’ to have any more of it than I can help. It ain’t good common sense. “You can’t run _this_ army altogether as if ’twas a machine. It ain’t. It’s a _people’s_ army. It offered itself. It has come down here to fight this thing out--just as it would go to the polls. It is greater than its generals, greater than the administration. We are created to care for it and lead it. It is not created for us. Every day the war has lasted I’ve felt this army growin’ in power and determination. I’ve felt its hand on me, guiding, compelling, threatening, upholding me, felt its distrust and its trust, its blame and its love. I’ve felt its patience and its sympathy. The greatest comfort I get is when sometimes I feel as if mebbe the army understood what I was tryin’ to do whether Greeley did or not. They understood because it’s _their_ war. Why, we might fail, every one of us, and this war would go on. The army would find its leaders like they say the old Roman armies sometimes did and would finish the fight. “I tell you, Billy, there ain’t nuthin’ that’s ever happened in the world so far as I know that gives one such faith in the people as this army and the way it acts. There’s been times, I ain’t denyin’, when I didn’t know but the war was goin’ to be too much for us, times when I thought that mebbe a republic like this couldn’t stand such a strain. It’s the kind of government we’ve got that’s bein’ tested in this war, government by the people, and it’s the People’s Army that makes me certain it can’t be upset.” I tell you it done me good to see him settin’ up straight there talkin’ so proud and confident, and as I was watchin’ him there popped into my head some words from a song I’d heard the soldiers sing: We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more-- From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore. You have called us and we’re coming. By Richmond’s bloody tide To lay us down, for Freedom’s sake, our brothers’ bones beside; Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before-- We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more. That was it. That was what he was, the Father of the Army, Father Abraham, and somehow the soldiers had found it out. Curious how a lot of people who never see a man in their lives will come to understand him exact. IN LINCOLN’S CHAIR