All day long he received visits from distracted relations, mothers and wives asking him to pardon their sons or husbands in prison as deserters or captured from the enemy; asking for tidings of their beloved ones at the front. His generals complained that he undermined the discipline of the army by pardoning what he called his “leg” cases--cases where men had run away before the enemy. “If Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs, how can he help their running away with him?” said Lincoln. The story of William Scott is a case which shows the way in which Lincoln used to act. William Scott was a young boy from a Northern farm, who, after marching for forty-eight hours without sleep, offered to stand on guard duty for a sick comrade. Worn out, he fell asleep, and was condemned to be shot for being asleep on duty in face of the enemy. Lincoln made it his custom to visit all the divisions of his army in turns, and, as it happened, two days before the execution he was with the division in which Willie Scott was, and heard of the case. He went to see the boy, and talked to him about his home and his mother. As he was leaving the prison tent he put his hands on the lad’s shoulders, and said-- “My boy, you are not going to be shot to-morrow.... I am going to trust you and send you back to your regiment. But I have been put to a great deal of trouble on your account. I have come here from Washington, where I had a great deal to do. Now, what I want to know is, how are you going to pay my bill?” Willie did not know what to say: perhaps he could get his friends to help him, he said at last. “No,” said Lincoln, “friends cannot pay it; only one man in the world can pay it, and that is William Scott. If from this day on William Scott does his duty, my bill is paid.” William Scott never forgot these words. Just before his death in one of the later battles of the war, he asked his comrades to tell President Lincoln that he had never forgotten what he had said. All the time, people who did not know the President threw on his shoulders all the blame for the long continuance of the war. Until the last year of the war, the newspapers abused him continually. The horrible loss of life in Grant’s last campaign was laid to his charge. Only those who came to the President to ask his help in their own suffering, understood what his suffering was; he suffered with each of them--he suffered with the South as well as the North. After Antietam, he had said, “I shall not live to see the end; this war is killing me.” The crushing burden he had borne so long and patiently had bent even his strong shoulders.