Book: The Crisis, Complete

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AFTERWORD

The author has chosen St. Louis for the principal scene of this story for
many reasons. Grant and Sherman were living there before the Civil War,
and Abraham Lincoln was an unknown lawyer in the neighboring state of
Illinois. It has been one of the aims of this book to show the remarkable
contrasts in the lives of these great men who came out of the West. This
old city of St. Louis, which was founded by Laclede in 1765, likewise
became the principal meeting-place of two great streams of emigration
which had been separated, more or less, since Cromwell's day. To be sure,
they were not all Cavaliers who settled in the tidewater Colonies. There
were Puritan settlements in both Maryland and Virginia. But the life in
the Southern states took on the more liberal tinge which had
characterized that of the Royalists, even to the extent of affecting the
Scotch Calvinists, while the asceticism of the Roundheads was the keynote
of the Puritan character in New England. When this great country of ours
began to develop, the streams moved westward; one over what became the
plain states of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, and the other across the
Blue Ridge Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee. They mixed along the
line of the Ohio River. They met at St. Louis, and, farther west, in
Kansas.

Nor can the German element in St. Louis be ignored. The part played by
this people in the Civil War is a matter of history. The scope of this
book has not permitted the author to introduce the peasantry and trading
classes which formed the mass in this movement. But Richter, the type of
the university-bred revolutionist which emigrated after '48, is drawn
more or less from life. And the duel described actually took place in
Berlin.

St. Louis is the author's birthplace, and his home, the home of those
friends whom he has known from childhood and who have always treated him
with unfaltering kindness. He begs that they will believe him when he
says that only such characters as he loves are reminiscent of those he
has known there. The city has a large population,--large enough to
include all the types that are to be found in the middle West.

One word more. This book is written of a time when feeling ran high. It
has been necessary to put strong speech into the mouths of the
characters. The breach that threatened our country's existence is healed
now. There is no side but Abraham Lincoln's side. And this side, with all
reverence and patriotism, the author has tried to take.

Abraham Lincoln loved the South as well as the North.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "THE CRISIS":

Behind that door was the future: so he opened it fearfully
Being caught was the unpardonable crime
Believe in others having a hard time
Freedom meant only the liberty to earn their own living
Humiliation and not conscience which makes the sting
Most dangerous of gifts, the seeing of two sides of a quarrel
Naturally she took preoccupation for indifference
Principle in law not to volunteer information
Read a patent medicine circular and shudder with seven diseases
She could pass over, but never forgive what her aunt had said
Silence--goad to indiscretion
Simple men who command by force of character
So much for Democracy when it becomes a catchword
They have to print something
To be great is to be misunderstood

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