approaches, reached the apex-the "lonely heights of immortal fame;" he was en rapport with the people; he consulted their oracles-he hearkened to their voice; he was their agent; in his acts he but reflected their will; hence his popularity. When men will leave homes of comfort and ease;-when they will sever themselves from all the endearments of home. and domestic life, for the hardships of a camp and the dangers of the field, it attests a patriotism which is one of the most sublime and unselfish of virtues. Yet I know officers whose proclivities were in favor of the Rebels at the start; finding the people slipping away from them, they adroitly changed their course, and espoused the Union cause; they were serviceable to the Union, but it is nonsense to say they were patriots. All that can be said in their behalf, or to their credit, is that they were adroit politicians; and ultimate history will so class them. There were indeed many unselfish patriots in the war; there were also many politicians, whose names will readily suggest themselves, who used the war as a means to retrieve or advance their political fortunes; and there were many who had no sentiment at all on the subject; but who served in the army as they would pursue an avocation, because they had nothing else to do, or because that enured to their interests more completely than anything else; but, in general terms, it may be said that the basis and substratum of our defence of the Union was unalloyed patriotism;-that the most of those who engaged in it, did so from a belief that the Union needed their moral and physical aid; and that it was a matter of conscientious duty to rally to its support. Even as there were many grades and qualities of merit and reasons for commendation in what we call patriotism; so were there many grades and qualities of turpitude and moral delinquency in what is denominated treason. The most flagrant and diabolical instance was that of Arnold; he sought a high command in order to gain an imposing and im portant point d'appui, and then deliberately bargained away the liberties of his country for money. The names of Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold are written down in the same leaf of the "curse book of Pandemonium;" but it is an invidious and unauthorized degradation of Judas; for he only sold his Master; Arnold's uncompleted crime was the sale of his country, and the betrayal of his friend and commander-inchief, who had incurred obloquy by adhering to him. The treason of Triggs was not mercurial, like the others, but was political; he was permeated with the virus of slavery and could not see any ethical difference between treason to his government and a political advantage. The treason of Isaac Toucey and John B. Floyd is similar; one sent our ships to distant ports, and the other disposed of our army and arms to the best advantage for the prospective rebellion. The matter of starving and burying alive our prisoners will always constitute a very dark chapter of the Jeff. Davis. dynasty. When it came to those practices, it no longer came within the category of a history of the war; it was simple felony ;—premeditated felony with malice propense; the Davis dynasty had no right to imprison soldiers it could not provide for; and every instance of the many who were starved to death is an inexcusable murder. Semmes' career was equally piracy; and in the "Pirate's own Book" of the future, the name of Semmes will be so conspicuous that those of Gow and Kidd will "pale their ineffectual fires." Mr. Lincoln's statesmanship was conspicuous in the af fections of the people which he amassed to himself. In French history, Louis XV. gained the appellation of the well beloved; this was a mere fancy, hardly founded in truth; but Mr. Lincoln deserved and is entitled to such a soubriquet; the poet Holmes truly says, in a letter I include herein, that "he died, the best beloved man of his time;" he might have said, the best beloved ruler of all time, for such he was; and when he called for new levies, the people felt a desire to fill them, largely as a personal favor to the President; so also when he promulgated any new policy-the people were inclined to acquiesce in it because of the glory of its authorship. Who could have foisted emancipation on the nation but Lincoln? Who could have held the Border states to their allegiance but him? Who could have retained Stanton in the Cabinet but him? Who could have bound the New England Radical and the Kentucky Conservative to the same policy? The Professor of Chemistry at the North Carolina University at Chapel Hill voted for Fremont in 1856, and, according to Southern precedent and methods, was expatriated; but he told me that he was in New York city when news of the firing on Fort Sumter came; and that in the uprising and spirit of the people which he saw there, he discerned a public virtue and patriotism which he had not supposed possible to exist with such intensity in any people. In such uprising, he prophetically saw ultimate national salvation and regeneration, and the historian may now readily see that such was the plain fact. Our troops enlisted to save the govern ment; the Southern troops enlisted, as they were made to believe, to save their individual homes; they were drilled into the belief that the invader would pillage and destroy their homes unless repelled; and those that did not fly to arms at such call, were simply dragged to the army by conscript gangs. So that the uprising of the North was all the more sublime and patriotic from the purity and individual unselfishness of the animating motive. Who can resist a thrill of patriotism at reading of the ride of Paul Revere-the history of the minute-men of the Revolution-of sturdy Israel Putnam leaving his plow in the furrow and his oxen unyoked to join the little patriot band of the Revolution? Our war had similar incidents: Cairo was invested within forty-eight hours after the President's first call, and Ben Butler, who voted fifty-seven times in the Convention of 1860 for Jeff. Davis, as his candidate for President, left a law case he was trying, for the tented field; and had his case continued. T. E. G. Ransom had just made elaborate plans for a mining adventure: he was full of his scheme in April, and gave me glowing accounts of his future plans. Within twentyfour hours, he had sold out everything for what he could get, and had a company enrolled for the war, and, the youngest general in our army, he died a soldier's death within two years; a fit son of the Ransom, the colonel of the Vermont regiment, who died a glorious death on the heights of Chapul. tepec. W. H. L. Wallace, of Ottawa, when a mere youth, was an aide-de-camp, and at the side of the gallant Hardin, when the latter fell at Buena Vista. He was an unambitious man, but a true patriot. When the call for troops came, he closed up his lawoffice and entered the army, not to wield a political lever, but from an imperious sense of duty; and at the "hornets' nest" at Shiloh-the "infernal regions" of battle, he yielded, up his life-an unsullied patriot. Dick Oglesby was in the State Senate when the war broke out he offered and engineered through with his resistless energy, all needful measures for the prosecution of the war; and then took the field himself. He was the only one of this illustrious trio of Illinois generals who came out alive, and a grateful state has accorded to him its highest honors. Everywhere, the same spirit prevailed, One voice, one mind inspired the throng; |