The South Like an Ash-Cake
At the end of 1864, the Confederacy was scotched if not quite killed. Sherman had halved it by striking into Savannah. East Tennessee and southwest Virginia were cut by Stoneman. Alabama and Mississippi were traversed by Grierson and Wilson. In sum, the new map resembled that of a territory charted off into sections.
President Lincoln said that its face put him in mind of a weary traveler in the West, who came at night to a small log cabin. The homesteader and his wife said they would put him up, but had not a bite of victuals to offer him. He accepted the truss of litter and was soon asleep. But he was awakened by whispers letting out that in the fire ashes a hoe-cake was baking. The woman and her mate were merry over how they had defrauded the stranger of the food. Feeling mad at having been sent to bed supperless—uncommon mean in that part—he pretended to wake up and came forth to sit at the dying fire. He pretended, too, that he was ill from worry.
“The fact is, my father, when he died, left me a large farm. But I had no sooner taken possession of it than mortgages began to appear. My farm was situated like this——” He took up the loggerhead poker to illustrate, drawing lines in the ashes so as to enclose the ash-cake. “First one man got so much of it one side,” he cut off a side of the hidden dough. “Then another brought in a mortgage and took off another piece there. Then another here, and another there! and here and there”—drawing the poker through the ashes to make the figure plain—“until,” he said, “there was nothing of the farm left for anybody—which, I presume is the case with your cake!”
“And, I reckon,” concluded Mr. Lincoln, “that the prospect is now very good of the South being as cut up as the ash-cake!”—(Telegraph Manager A. Chandler.)
“I COUNT FOR SOMETHING!”
The true lovers of the South were sorely wrung in 1864 by the Emperor Napoleon taking advantage of the “lockup” of the United States, to set a puppet in the Austrian Archduke Maximilian on the imperial throne— so called—of Mexico. It was said that the Cabinet of Lincoln were divided on the subject; whereon the Marquis of Chambrun, having the ear of the Executive, called on him, and inquired on the real state—would the United States intervene, if only by winking at a filibustering expedition from the South, with Northern volunteers accessory, to assist the natives against the usurper?
“There has been war enough,” was his rejoinder, with that sadness which Secretary Boutwell declares inseparable from him, but not due to the depression of public affairs. “I know what the American people want; but, thank God! I count for something, and during my second term there will be no more fighting!”
It was left for his successor, with the two armies disbanded, but still whetted for slaughter, to expel the French by the mere threat of their union to restore the republic.