Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/355

Rh North and South, bankers' associations assembled in various places where Northern and Southern men met together to discuss finance. The great Southern exposition at New Orleans in 1884, and afterward in Atlanta (1895), did much to encourage the Southern people, and showed the people of the North our splendid natural resources, and displayed the push and earnestness of the Southern people.

Not long after the inauguration of President Cleveland (1885), General Grant, the great leader of the Union armies and twice president of the United States, died under peculiarly touching surroundings. A deadly disease seized him, and he passed slowly away before its steady progress. His heart seemed then to turn on the happy reunion of his country, and his utterances tended to bury sectional animosities. He said, "Let us have peace," and this terse epigram found lodgment in the hearts of his countrymen North and South. While the reconstruction policy was put in execution, during the time he was president, in all its rigor, still a retrospective view caused the Southern people to believe he had befriended them when he could judiciously do so. The temper of the victorious North was not such that any one man, however influential, no matter what his generous instincts were, could anticipate any change of policy prematurely. They felt that he had been generous to the soldiers of the South during the war whenever he had the power to be generous; also, that in executing the policy of Congress he was obeying orders in the spirit of his military training rather than in sympathy with that policy. He felt, too, as he stated, that if a law were wrong and impracticable, it would work out a good result by its strict enforcement, and this was really the effect in the consolidation and in the irresistible effort of the Southern people in wresting from the wreck the white civilization of the South, an effort almost equal to a revolution. They believed that his great common sense