Now that we’ve laid aside the shams of our school histories and looked upon the tragically soiled linen of the Civil War, we find even cleaner shams laid over the period _right after_ that war. You know as we scratch our head and try to look wise when our young son attacks us with a question about his history lesson, we see, among the cobwebs those days of ’65, ’66 and ’67 as a time of sleeping beauty. The tired, worn soldiers of the war, in our misty memory, are beating their swords into pruning hooks and all that sort of thing. Are we wrong? Yes, we are. Life was anything but beauty for our country then. They were days of frightful, alarming duty. For we were even in a worse fix than when Sumter’s guns tumbled us helter-skelter into catastrophe. On all sides were threatenings of big wars and slaughter. On the north the Fenians were trying to carry on strife against Great Britain from within our borders, and the Alabama claims were adding to the fuel. The South, smarting under revengeful reconstruction laws, was angered to a pitch of frenzy. In Mexico, Napoleon the third had set up an empire, placing the Archduke Maximilian of Austria on the throne in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. The thousands of irreconcilables of the former Confederacy could there find a foothold to work against us. And in the West, a half million Indians, unrestrained during the Civil War, were overrunning half our territory, and sprinkling the soil with death and massacre. In the midst of all this trouble, Abraham Lincoln was shot down in cold blood. We had gone from a sizzling frying pan into a surrounding fire.