The Days of a Man 1859 



conciliation, the partisan momentum of his former 

 Republican adherents carried them into violent 

 opposition. 



In the variojis incidents of the war, the rise and 

 f a ll o f its military leaders, I took a continuous 

 mterest - As a boy of eight, I recall seeing pictures 

 of John Brown, Green, Copeland, and the rest of 

 the little band at Harper's Ferry posted in Card's 

 Grocery, the local post office. Later the same window 

 showed us Major Robert Anderson and his men, 

 who were fired upon at Fort Sumter by Beauregard 

 and the hot-headed youth of Charleston; Colonel 

 Elmer Ellsworth, also, shot in Alexandria for hauling 

 down a Confederate flag. 



My early impressions of Lincoln were naturally 

 potion drawn from those around me ; my own appreciation 

 of his greatness of character has grown steadily 

 from that^ first knowledge of him and his work. It 

 was not until about the middle of the war, however, 

 that people understood his determination to save 

 the Union by freeing it from slavery, its worst curse. 

 The Emancipation Proclamation marked an epoch 

 in history. But it took us a long time to see that 

 Lincoln was greater than Seward, greater than Chase, 

 greater than any or all of his Cabinet. 

 The call After the war began, every community responded 

 for men to the call for men, a demand utterly foreign to the 

 experience and hopes of the North. One after 

 another the boys went away, among them, in the 

 spring of 1862 as I have said, my brother Rufus and 

 James Beadle. The camp near Portage Bridge, 

 where the first enlisted men of our section were 

 drilled, I distinctly remember. Meanwhile I took 

 the keenest interest in the events of the struggle: 



H 32 a 



