The great soldiers who finally triumphed in the field as the instruments of Lincoln's policy and fought their way to victory for the Union--Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Meade, Sheridan--would have been ranged on the Northern side just the same whether Lincoln or another had been at the head of affairs. But it is doubtful whether another president would have found them out. Lincoln made his own grave mistakes regarding men. But he put forward no general because that general was _his man_. He observed and waited. A man of the people himself, grandly simple, he somehow nosed out the men of the same type. All the generals who proved great were his discoveries. The structure of Lincoln's achievements was not, however, the result of negative circumstances. It did not rise because things were not just so and so. It was a positive thing--the result of the active operations of a powerful genius, which the people recognized before the politicians and the writers did. In the people's mind, the war was "Old Abe's" war. It was Old Abe who stood at the helm. Congress did not know it, but it was really working Lincoln's will. The cabinet did not always know it, but it was Lincoln who really had his way. He kept his own counsel. He carried out his plans. The people were right. It was Old Abe who was doing things. And without him the most important things would have gone undone. He was an original creation--as Lowell said, a "new birth of our new soil, the first American." Nature, for him, threw aside her old-world molds, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. Yet what could be clearer than that Abraham Lincoln, who by birth and inheritance was of the South, not the West, might have turned his strength to the support of quite a different cause if the accident of fate had sent him southward, not northward, in his childhood? CHAPTER XVIII IF SKIPPER JENNINGS HAD NOT RESCUED CERTAIN SHIPWRECKED JAPANESE Toward the end of the year 1850, Captain Jennings, of the American bark _Auckland_, trading in Asiatic waters, picked up the shipwrecked crew of a Japanese fishing vessel, somewhere off the coast of Japan. The captain was then bound for the new port of San Francisco, which the California gold-diggings had already made an important city. He continued on his course, and in due time--that is to say, very early in the year 1851--landed at San Francisco with his party of refugees.