From Philadelphia the funeral train went to New York, then east toward Springfield, Illinois, the President’s final resting place, where it would arrive on May 4.
Along with thousands of others, I stood in the silent weeping crowd saying and waving farewell to our beloved President as the black funeral train pulled out of the Washington station that twentieth day of April, 1865. As the sound of the slow-moving cars faded from hearing, gradually the crowd dispersed. It was time to look ahead. We had won a war and lost a President—all within two short weeks.
I walked back toward the boardinghouse.
Even before I arrived there, I knew I could remain in Washington no longer. There was nothing for me here now. All the work that had kept me so occupied had been bound up in Mr. Lincoln and the war. What purpose could there be in my remaining in the capital any longer?
I needed to find someplace to think and pray and collect myself, to write in my journal, and to ask God what he wanted me to do. So many possibilities and thoughts had flooded my mind, but now with the war over and Mr. Lincoln gone, suddenly everything was changed. Two years ago I had been strongly drawn to the life Sister Janette had shown me. Since then I had been swept into so many things! I had served as a nurse, as a writer, as a political campaigner, as a fund-raiser . . . even as a spy!
But now . . . all that was past.
What did God want from me now? What did he want me to do? Where did he want me to go?
Three faces kept returning to my mind—Christopher, Sister Janette, and Pa. And every time I thought of Pa, I could hear his words: Ain’t that about long enough . . . see your face again. Especially your pa.
He was probably right; it was about long enough that I’d been away. But before I could go back, I still had a few questions to resolve. There was only one place I knew I’d be able to think, to pray, and to work hard in the meantime, a place where I knew I’d find a ready welcome. And it still could be, I thought, that God would have me live there permanently. But whatever he had in mind for me, that was surely the best place for me to seek it.
I turned around, went back to the station, and checked the departure schedules.
Then I returned to the boardinghouse to gather my things, to tell Mrs. Richards I would be leaving her, to thank her for everything, and to make sure she had my forwarding address . . . just in case.
Sister Janette and all the other nuns at the convent were so delighted to see me, and welcomed me so warmly, I immediately felt one of their fellowship again. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought only a week had passed since my first visit, not just two months short of two full years.
“You look wonderfully well, Sister Janette,” I said. “I would never know you had been wounded.”
“I’ve never felt better, Corrie. The Lord has been good to us here. But what of you?”
“It would take a week to tell you everything,” I replied.
“Then we shall take a week! How long will you be able to stay with us?”
I shrugged. “Maybe as long as you’ll have me,” I said. I explained that I needed some time to pray and think and write.
“I’m so happy you wanted to come here to seek and inquire of the Lord,” she said. “You will be welcome for as long as you like. Come, I’ll show you where to put your things.”
For the next week I did nothing but enter into the life of the convent with the sisters—working, tending the animals, helping with the food and dishes, joining in prayer times and Mass, going to visit people in the community. I can’t say I stopped thinking altogether, but I consciously did my best just to enter into the life around me and not dwell on the uncertainties that lay in front of me.
Whenever I prayed, which was many, many times every day in the midst of other duties or work or activities, I simply said, “Lord, show me what you want me to do now. Show me what to write, where you want me to go, and however much of the next chapter of my life you want me to know.”
Ever since the day when General Lee and General Grant had met at Appomattox Court House, I had been thinking a lot about the war and what it all might mean years from now. I suppose seeing General Lee up close had stuck with me even more than had my association with General Grant before that. I thought I understood General Grant. He seemed to be a soldier and not much more. But Mr. Lee struck me as more complex. He was a brilliant general, everyone said that, but he was also a southern gentleman and an outspoken Christian. I had heard that he read his Bible every day, even through most of the war, and prayed frequently with his men. And I just could not understand all that. From everything I’d heard and read in the newspapers during the whole last year of the war, thousands and thousands of lives—maybe even a hundred thousand!—would have been saved if Robert Lee had given in sooner. I had a hard time seeing much other than stubbornness and pride in his fighting on and on against the North after everyone knew the war was over. He must have known it too, yet he kept right on fighting, causing more and more young men to die.
And yet when I rode beside him for those few minutes that day, he didn’t seem like a cruel man who would take death lightly. But all the way back from that short interview, I couldn’t help but think of how much less destruction and killing there would have been, and Atlanta and Savannah and Richmond and other cities wouldn’t have had to be destroyed, if only he and Jefferson Davis and the other southern leaders hadn’t been so stubborn and kept fighting for so long. I suppose I was seeing it from the side of the North. I’m sure Southerners didn’t look at it that way.
Then my mind turned to wondering why the war had had to be fought at all. It seemed it had to do with pride and stubbornness as much as slavery. And now the South was practically destroyed, President Lincoln was dead, the war was over, three million young men had taken up arms against each other, and six hundred thousand of those were now dead. Could anything be worth such a huge price? And judging from what I’d seen on Robert E. Lee’s face, and from what John Wilkes Booth had done, the pride and stubbornness still remained.
For some reason I found myself thinking about Pa and Zack. They’d known each other for a long time. But then there’d come that moment of conflict and separation and breaking between them when Zack had left and spent a year away. It was a heartbreaking time for Pa, but once it was over, he and Zack knew each other even better, in deeper ways. In the last letter I’d had from Almeda, which had been waiting for me at Mrs. Richards’, she told me about some new project Zack and Pa were working on to dig a new mine where they thought there might be a fresh vein of gold. Maybe the pain of that time when Zack was gone had accomplished something between them that might not have been able to happen any other way.
I didn’t know if that was true. It didn’t seem right that pain and conflict and fighting had to be the thing that brought two people closer together, but I reckon it sometimes did work that way. Maybe it would be the same with our country, like if the North and South were two brothers who had to fight each other as teenagers to get to know each other well enough to grow up into adults who cared about each other and could work together.
After I’d been at the convent for five days, I knew that something was bubbling and stewing inside me about all I’d been thinking. Whether it would turn out to be a new article about the war, or the completion of the one I’d attempted about Grant and Lee, I didn’t know. But I had to try to write down my thoughts and make some further sense out of what had happened. I scratched down some ideas for a day or two, then decided to rewrite it all as well as I could, even if only to help me organize the ideas that were coming to me. I went to the writing desk the sisters let me use, got several sheets of paper, took the lid off my bottle of ink, dipped in my pen, and began to write. After reworking some of it several times, trying to get the words just right, this is what I wrote.
What should we call this war just past? It has already been called many things: the War of the Rebellion, the War between the States, the Brothers’ War, the Late Unpleasantness, the War aga
inst Northern Aggression, the Second American Revolution, the Lost Cause, the War against the States, or the War of Attempted Succession.
Whatever label we give it, any civil strife such as this is full of hurtful and bitter ironies.
Now that we have faced the sternest battle we will likely ever face, in the adolescence of our nationhood we have encountered a foe that we least expected—the mirror of our own self, our very brother. Thus, for reasons mysterious, the conflict was more bitter and hateful than the Mexican War or the English War of 1812. Why this should be so is a puzzle. Why have we so despised our own flesh and blood? Did it in truth take the death of more than half a million to free four million Negro slaves? Perhaps we will never know if the price was worth it.
But we do know that we are but one nation. We have found out that about ourselves, even at a tragic cost. We have looked within ourselves, man into man, woman into woman, brother into the heart of brother. Perhaps in so doing we will grow stronger and take our place as a nation of higher stature.
Writing about brother looking into the heart of brother reminded me again of General Grant and General Lee and what I had said about how they stood for the North and South settling the last squabbles of their youth.
Was this war a good thing, a healthy thing, in the life of our nation? Will it lead to stronger bonds and a greater unity of national purpose? Or was it fueled by nothing more than stubborn sectional pride and a bitter hatred that grew more and more determined with every passing week the war dragged on? How will it serve to make us all—Northerners and Southerners—better Americans?
As I wrote, so much was going on inside me. Not only did it apply to our country, it all had to do with me too, and with some things I was beginning to look inside to find out about myself.
How might it have been different had Robert E. Lee accepted the command offered him by President Lincoln over the entire Union army? Most families lost young men on both sides of Mason-Dixon. Four of Mrs. Lincoln’s brothers fought in gray uniforms against her husband. At Cold Harbor, seven thousand young men met their death in twenty minutes. In two days at Shiloh, more Americans fell than in all previous American wars added together. So great was this epic conflict that all of us who lived through it, who watched it, who read of it, and who endured it will forever be changed. And in the end, the finale of the war brought no triumph, only an anguishing deepening of the heartache with the disgrace of assassination.
We all have been changed. We will all continue to be changed by this national tragedy, by this four-year-long moment when we as a nation focused all our energies and efforts inward upon ourselves to ask ourselves what kind of people we are, and what price are we willing to place on our mixed, confused, and conflicting convictions.
What are we made of?
I had been changed by the years away from home as much as from the war itself. Yes, so many changes had taken place. And now the last question I’d posed stared back at me from the page. I hadn’t intended it, but it was as though I’d asked it of myself.
That there was greed and selfishness exposed in our beings there can be little doubt, yes, and a great evil pride. But we found courage in far greater supply, and dignity and bravery and heroism, and selflessness in a thousand unseen ways in a thousand quiet out-of-the-way corners on every one of the ten thousand places where conflict took place during the last four years of this war.
Perhaps we learned that hatred resides in us, and that is a painful thing to learn. But perhaps most of all we learned that we are brothers, after all. And that freedom, though it is hard won at a bitter cost, is something we believe in though it cost the blood of our national family to preserve it.
I stopped.
My thoughts were getting jumbled, and I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything. The article wasn’t focused, and I couldn’t come to any conclusion.
By now I had begun to turn my introspective questions onto myself. I started by looking at the country and talking about mirrors and asking what kind of people we were as a nation. Now I was wondering what I was made of as an individual. Inexplicably, I found myself thinking about the small town of Bridgeville, New York. What did it have to do with the war?
I rose from the chair and walked about the room, stretching my arms and legs. I couldn’t do any more writing now. By this time I had learned that when the thoughts stopped flowing, there was no use forcing them. When more perspective on the war was ready to occur to me, it would wander out of the depths and into the front of my brain.
Sister Janette was in the kitchen preparing vegetables for dinner. I joined her, rolled up my sleeves, took a knife, sat down on a stool beside a large pot of potatoes, and began helping her peel them.
“Why is it called the Convent of John Seventeen?” I asked.
“Because we are the Sisters of Unity,” she replied.
“What does that have to do with John Seventeen?”
“John Seventeen is the chapter where Jesus’ prayer for unity is found.”
I had heard Almeda and Rev. Rutledge mention it, but I asked Sister Janette what special meaning it had to her.
“What do you think, Corrie?” she asked. “Do you think Jesus could pray for something his Father didn’t want to do for him?”
“I don’t suppose,” I answered. “For him to pray in opposition to God’s will would be . . . I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like it could even be, could it?”
“I don’t think so,” Sister Janette said. “I can’t imagine Jesus praying in opposition to God’s will. That would put a dividing line straight between the Father and the Son, and I simply don’t think that is possible.”
“There is Jesus’ prayer in the garden,” I said.
“That used to trouble me somewhat,” Sister Janette said slowly, “until I looked very closely at it.”
“And what did you see then?”
“I looked at the words of Jesus’ prayer very carefully. He didn’t pray that the cup, that is, the crucifixion, would be taken away. He only said that if it was possible, he would like it to be taken away. But his true heart’s prayer, the thing he specifically requested the Father to accomplish, was to do his, the Father’s, will. And that prayer the Father did answer perfectly.”
“So all of Jesus’ prayers were answered,” I said.
“No, there’s one important prayer that hasn’t been answered yet—but not because it wasn’t prayed according to the will of the Father. Jesus prayed it because his Father wants to do it, but it just hasn’t taken place yet.”
“Jesus’ prayer for unity?”
“Yes. He prays that all his followers will someday be one in the same way that he and the Father are one. It hasn’t happened yet, that is clear, because his people are far from united. But we believe it will happen one day. It has to happen. God’s people have to be one because Jesus prayed for it, and he couldn’t pray for anything that God the Father did not purpose to do. He prayed for unity, therefore someday there will be unity among the children of God. And that is why this is called the Convent of John Seventeen, because we are the sisters who have committed ourselves to working for unity among God’s people.”
We peeled away at the potatoes in silence for a while. I couldn’t help thinking about what I’d been trying to write before. Maybe that’s what had prompted me to ask about the name of the convent.
“This country sure hasn’t been unified,” I said after a while.
Sister Janette shook her head sadly. “I would like to think that it may again become what could be truthfully called the United States of America, but after the devastation and killing, it is difficult to see how it could be.”
I recalled the words I’d just written—brotherhood . . . united as one.
“Our nation is not so much different than the church that calls itself Christ’s body,” Sister Janette went on. “People on all sides of every argument like to think that God is with them. Southerners and Northerners alike all prayed to the same God, and all in
voked his blessings to help them prevail.”
“Will there ever be unity?” I asked.
“In the church, or in this land?”
“Both, I guess.”
Sister Janette smiled, but again her countenance was sad. “I don’t know, Corrie. The war is over, so I suppose I should be optimistic about the country. Yet I confess to many questions. Unity would seem to have come back to our nation. But I cannot help wondering if it is really worthy of the name unity, or if it is only defeat. Was there ever unity before the war? It is not likely. The states never were united, and it took a dreadful war for us to find out just how disunited we were all along.”
“How about in the church?”
“I hope it will not take such a conflict among God’s people for us to awaken to the truth of Jesus’ prayer in John 17. I am hopeful. All of us here at the convent are hopeful. Of course there will be unity among God’s people. Jesus prayed for it. But when? . . . that is not an easy question to answer.”
We were silent again, and after peeling the rest of that evening’s potatoes and putting them on the cookstove to boil, we went outside. By then we were talking about other things and did not return to the subject of unity, either in the church or the country.
But all the rest of that afternoon and evening, my mind was filled with the two images of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant—what it must have been like the moment their eyes met in the house in Appomattox, and what it must have felt like as their hands clasped.
Land of the Brave and the Free Page 19