A mulatto woman kept the house of the foremost man of the Nation and received his guests with condescension.
In this atmosphere of festering vice and gangrene passions, the struggle between the Great Commoner and the President on which hung the fate of the South approached its climax.
The whole Nation was swept into the whirlpool, and business was paralysed. Two years after the close of a victorious war, the credit of the Republic dropped until its six per cent. bonds sold in the open market for seventy-three cents on the dollar.
The revolutionary junta in control of the Capital was within a single step of the subversion of the Government and the establishment of a Dictator in the White House.
A convention was called in Philadelphia to restore fraternal feeling, heal the wounds of war, preserve the Constitution, and restore the Union of the fathers. It was a grand assemblage representing the heart and brain of the Nation. Members of Lincoln's first Cabinet, protesting Senators and Congressmen, editors of great Republican and Democratic newspapers, heroes of both armies, long estranged, met for a common purpose. When a group of famous Negro worshippers from Boston suddenly entered the hall, arm in arm with ex-slaveholders from South Carolina, the great meeting rose and walls and roof rang with thunder peals of applause.
Their committee, headed by a famous editor, journeyed to Washington to appeal to the Master at the Capitol. They sought him not in the White House, but in the little Black House in an obscure street on the hill.
