“He got powerful discouraged sometimes, for it did seem the first three years of the war as if the Almighty wa’n’t sympathizin’ over much with the North. You remember how I told you once of havin’ a long talk with him at night that time I went down to Washington to see him. Things was bad, awful bad. Country just plumb worn out with the war. People was beginnin’ to turn against it. Couldn’t stand the blood lettin’, the sufferin’, and the awful wickedness of it. There was a lot of that feelin’ in ’64. People willin’ to give up anything--let the South go--let her keep her slaves--do anything to put an end to the killin’. I tell you a man has to keep his eyes ahead in war--keep tellin’ himself over and over what’s it all about. Mr. Lincoln had to. They were talkin’ peace to him, riotin’ about the drafts, stirrin’ up more kinds of trouble for him than he ever knew there was, I reckon. And he felt it--felt it bad; and that night it seemed to do him good to talk it out. You see I come from home, and I didn’t have no connection with things down there, and ’twas natural he’d open up to me as he couldn’t to them on the ground; and he did. “‘I’ve studied a lot, Billy,’ he said, ‘whether this is God’s side of this war. I’ve tried my best to figure it out straight, and I can’t see anything but that He must be for us. But look how things is goin’. “‘One thing sure all I can do is to follow what I think’s right. Whatever shall appear to be God’s will, I’ll do. There’s quite a number of people who seem to think they know what God wants me to do. They come down every now and then and tell me so. I must say as I’ve told some of them that it’s more’n likely if God is goin’ to reveal His will on a point connected with my duty He’d naturally reveal it to me. They don’t all lay it up against me when I talk that way. Take the Quakers. They’re good people, and they’ve been in a bad fix for they don’t believe in slavery, and they don’t believe in war, and yet it seems to have come to the point that out of this war started to save free government, we’re going to get rid of slavery. But they can’t accept that way. Still they don’t lay it up against me that I do, and they pray regular for me. “‘We’ve been wrong, North and South, about slavery. No use to blame it all on the South. We’ve been in it too, from the start. If both sides had been willin’ to give in a little, we might a worked it out, that is if we’d all been willin’ to admit the thing was wrong, and take our share of the burden in puttin’ an end to it. It’s because we wouldn’t or mebbe couldn’t that war has come.