315 [Illustration: UNION HEROES] [Illustration: [Capitol]] WAR FOR THE UNION. On the 4th of March, 1861, when Abraham Lincoln took the inaugural oath in front of the National Capitol, his footprints upon the marble marked the great and terrible epoch in the history of our government. The scene was imbued with a grandeur undiscovered and without acknowledgment from the thousands and thousands of freemen who crowded and surged like an ocean at his feet. An old man, bowed both by responsibility and years, stood by his side, then and there to render up his august position over a great country, at the very moment struggling with the first throes of civil war. How weary he had become, and how gladly he laid down the burden of his power, no heart save his own can tell. But the darkness and the thunders of coming strife followed alike James Buchanan in his retirement and Abraham Lincoln into the thorny splendors of the White House. Solemn and very sad were these two men as they stood for a brief space before the people. The splendor of power brought no happiness either in the giving or receiving. No two men upon the face of the earth ever stood before a people in an attitude so imposing, so fraught with terrible events. When they shook hands peace veiled her face, and, shuddering, shrunk away into the shadows which have darkened around her closer and thicker, till she is now buried so deep beneath the gathered death-palls that no one can tell where she is hidden. For months and even years she had been threatened by factions, disturbed by reckless speech and still more reckless pens, but now, behind all these, warcries swelled, and bayonets glistened in the distance, bloodless as yet, but threatening storms of crimson rain. There, upon the verge of this coming tempest, the two Presidents parted, one for the solitude of a peaceful home, the other outward bound into the wild turmoil of contesting thoughts and heroic deeds. As I have said, no one fully realized the coming terror, or thought how easy a thing it is for a war of passions to verge into a war of blood. Still the signs of the last three months had been painfully ominous. The strife of opinions and clash of factions, which had been waxing deeper and stronger between the North and the South, concentrated after Lincoln’s election, and the heart of the nation was almost rent in twain before he took the inaugural oath. When he stood up, the central figure of the imposing picture presented to the nation on the fourth of March, a southern government had already been organized at Montgomery, and Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as its president, while the men who had abandoned their seats in the United States Senate now held place in the Confederate Cabinet.