I have just above compared the condition of the South at the close of the war to that of a forest of mighty trees, all suddenly dashed to the earth by the force of overwhelming and irresistible winds—even the terrible winds that are swept upon the land from the wild and stormy ocean that breaks upon our shores. The question next was how were we to clear this forest land; remove all the trees with their great upturned roots; fill up the great cavities—in a word, "clear the land," and worst of all, restore the forest? What Abraham Lincoln might have done if he had lived—he and his cabinet between them—I am unable to say. A great many people are of the opinion that had Lincoln lived things would have gone ten times better with Reconstruction than they did. That may have been so, but the wish was father to the thought, and it has always been my opinion that there would have been a bad time of it for years and years to come, as there was without the great war President. Poor fellow! Because ever during his lifetime, and when the war was going on, there were many times when Lincoln himself confessed that he was almost at his wit’s end, and did not know what to do for the best. With the Southerners going home, sullen, angry and defeated, and four millions of slaves redeemed from the curse of the "peculiar institution," for the very life of me I am unable to see that any one with much less wisdom than that which is divine, could ever had at once brought order out of chaos in a day, or even in a year. Even with the assistance of 10,000 giants, it must have taken time to clear away that fallen forest, fill up the awful gaps, and put a new forest in the place of the one that had been knocked down! In order to make a beginning at Reconstruction it was decided to place the late rebellious States under military governors, who acted in concert with the Bureau for Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands. This "Freedman’s Bureau," as it was briefly called, was wisely established in the spring of 1865 for the purpose of assisting in every possible way those 4,000,000 of the African race whom the war had made free and turned loose on the country. Of course they must not be permitted to starve, and the Government at Washington wisely established the bureau to assist them in tiding over the crisis. Richmond and the Confederacy had not fallen yet, but the grand crash was at hand, and all things were in readiness for the mighty changes that were at the door of the nation.