The past rises before us, and we see four millions of human beings governed by the lash; we see them bound hand and foot; we hear the strokes of cruel whips; we see the hounds tracking women {363}through the tangled swamps; we see babes sold from the breasts of mothers. Cruelty unspeakable! Outrage infinite! Four million bodies in chains--four million souls in fetters. All the sacred relations of wife, mother, father and child trampled beneath the brutal feet of might. All this was done under our own beautiful banner of the free. The past rises before us; we hear the roar and shriek of the bursting shell; the broken fetters fall; these heroes died. We look--instead of slaves we see men, women and children. The wand of progress touches the auction block, the slave pen, the whipping post, and we see homes and firesides, and schoolhouses and books, and where all was want and crime and cruelty and fetters, we see the faces of the free. These heroes are dead; they died for liberty; they died for us; they are at rest; they sleep in the land they made free under the flag they rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the tearful willows and the embracing vines; they sleep beneath the shadows of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or storm, each in the windowless palace of rest. Earth may run red with other wars, they are at peace. In the midst of battle they found the severity of death. I have one sentiment for the soldiers, living and dead--cheers for the living, and tears for the dead. Our Noble, Heroic and Self-Sacrificing Women. EMORY A. STORRS. |BRIGHT and shying on our resplendent annals shall appear the names of those thousands of noble, heroic and self-sacrificing women, who organized and carried forward to triumphant success a colossal sanitary and charitable scheme, the like of which, in nobility of conception and perfectness of execution, the world had never before witnessed, and which carried all around the globe the fame and the name of the women of America. From camp to camp, from battlefield to battlefield, through the long and toilsome march, by day and by night, these sacred charities followed, and the prayers of the devoted and the true were ceaselessly with you through all dangers. Leagues {364}and leagues separated you from home, but the blessings there invoked upon you hovered over and around you, and sweetened your sleep like angels' visits. While the boy soldier slept by his camp fire at night and dreaming of home, and what his valor would achieve for his country, uttered even in his dreams prayers for the loved ones who had made that home so dear to him, the mother dreaming of her son breathed at the same time prayers for his safety, and for the triumph of his cause. The prayers and blessings of mother and son, borne heavenward, met in the bosom of their common God and Father. ANTIETAM. |I'VE wandered to Antietam, John, And stood where foe met foe