"Executive Mansion, Washington, August 23, 1864. "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards. A. LINCOLN." In that memorandum is the sign-manual of a great soul. Lincoln, believing his own defeat was written in the stars, thought, not of himself, but of how he, defeated, could best save the cause of the Union from defeat. A small man thinks first of himself. A big man thinks first of his duty. Life was happy at the White House now. The President had been re-elected and it was clear that long before his second term was over, he would have won a victorious peace. The South was still fighting with all the energy brave men can show for a cause in the righteousness of which they believe, but after all the energy was that of despair. Grant was now in supreme command of the Union forces, East and West. He had been commissioned Lieutenant-General and put in command March 17, 1864. In commemoration of this event, the turning point in the great struggle, Lincoln had had a photograph of himself taken. But two copies of it were printed. One Lincoln kept himself. One he gave Grant. Here is the one given Grant. [Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN] The new Lieutenant-General was hammering away at Richmond. The Mississippi, now under Union control, cut the Confederacy in two. All the chief Southern seaports, except Savannah and Charleston, had been captured. And in this same month of November, 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who ranked only second to Grant in the United States army, cut loose from Atlanta, Georgia, captured two months before and began his famous march to the sea, with Savannah as his destination. He illustrated his own well-known saying: "War is hell." If it was hell in Sherman's time, what word can describe the horror of it in our day? He swept with sword and fire a belt of fertile country, sixty miles wide, from Atlanta to the sea. He found it smiling and rich; he left it a bare and blackened waste. He had destroyed the granary of the Confederacy and before the next month ended he had made his country a Christmas present of the remaining chief Southern seaport, Savannah. He wrote to Lincoln: "I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and also twenty-five thousand bales of cotton." Cotton was worth a dollar a pound in those days.