While these paling evidences of the fall were multiplying, Mr. Lincoln was re-elected President, by two hundred and twelve votes out of two hundred and thirty-three. Andrew Johnson, then fifty-six years old, who had both early and late in life handled the goose,—the one kind as acceptably as the other,—and had been himself cruelly plucked through the war by the masked plunderers in Tennessee, was placed in the easy nest of the Vice-Presidency. His first getting in was so awkward, that it was manifest something had turned his head. Sherman, taking breath at Savannah, again swung his effective scythe through the thin crop, lying between that city and Charleston, which was cut down, like a rank burdock, February 18, 1865. Then turning northwards, he gathered in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina; turned up to the sunlight dank villages, all unused to Northern implements,—cheered as he went by sable faces,—until at last he halted at Fayetteville, March 11, 1865, to take a hearty shake of the hand with his fellow-mowers, General Terry and Admiral Porter. From Wilmington, he again whetted up his keen blade and cleared the Southern field. Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Hardee manifested a disposition to stop him at Bentonville; but a blow sent them reeling from his path, and he went vigorously forward, garnering blessed harvests for his country and himself. [Illustration: COTTON DOWN. (p. 512) ] Meanwhile Grant, through the autumn of 1864, was encompassing Petersburg and drawing zigzag lines around it, that were too much like the short epistles that creditors send to unwilling debtors, to be agreeable. The autumn leaves here fell on busy workers; and among the busiest, the Silent Man, who was casting up long accounts in his head, which only opened to let out smoke. In him, however, there was much fire, American and Greek.