but it was also the carnival of patriotism. The world may never witness its like again. Let us pray that an overruling Providence may spare the country from another such visitation of treason, when citizens shall fly to arms to protect with their lives and fortunes their beloved country. So let us pray! The incidents of joy and sorrow, of pleasure and pain, connected with that Great Awakening, would fill a book—would make a volume to become the treasured tome for to-day, for to-morrow, and for the long years to come. It will only be made by time. When the war is past, and the soldier returns to rejoin the home he has so long forsaken-alas! how many homes will never have their doorway darkened again by the forms of their loved ones!-then will come forth the incidents of that patriot-service, to make their way over the community and become a part of the neighborhood's treasures. Those treasures, time will surely gather and present in a folio, which each loyal home will love to call its own. It will be our purpose to go over the field and glean what we may. Enough already has been recorded to make such a volume as we now propose. We shall devote a few weeks to gathering the scattered leaves-thus to contribute our share to the store from which the Home-Tome of the War shall be made hereafter, by some loving and competent hand. We have superadded Life Sketches of Ellsworth, Winthrop, Baker, Lyon-all offered up as sacrifices upon the altar of Liberty. May their memory ever be held dear! Also biog raphies of General Scott and General McClellan. Also concise but explicit accounts of those conflicts which stand forth in the History of the War as "representative" events 260 XXXII Incidents of the Capture of the Port Royal Forts XXXIII. The Fall of Forts Henry and Donelson XXXIX. Incidents at the Bombardment of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, and Fall of New Orleans INCIDENTS AND ANECDOTES OF THE WAR. I. THE AWAKENING. APRIL 19th, 1775, the blood of the Men of Massachusetts, the first martyrs in the cause of American Independence, was shed at Lexington. April 19th, 1861, the blood of the Men of Massachusetts, the first martyrs in the cause of the American Union, was shed at Baltimore. How the news flew over the land to arouse the already awakening vengeance of the Men of 1775! The blood of Lexington had not become dry ere the beacon-fires of alarm gleamed from the hills. While the young men flew to arms, the old men leaped into the saddle, to herald the tragedy and call the country to its defense. The message flew from lip to lip, from hill-top to hill-top, "until village repeated it to village; the sea to the backwoods; the plains to the highlands, and it was never suffered to droop till it had been borne North and South, and East and West throughout the land. It spread over the bays that receive the Saco and the Penobscot. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and ringing like bugle-notes from peak to peak, overleapt the Green Mountains, swept onward to Montreal, and descended the ocean river, till the responses were echoed from the cliff at Quebec. The hills along the Hudson told to one another the tale." The summons hurried to the South. In one day it was at New York; in one more at Philadelphia: then it flew to the South, to the West-was borne along the sea-coast to awaken the answering shout from bays, and sounds, and harbors-was hurried over the Alleghanies to awaken the note of response in the solemn wilds of the pathless West. How sublimely did the men of that time respond to the call! The ferries over the Merrimac swarmed with the men of New Hampshire. Three days after that cry "to arms!" John Stark was on the Boston hills with his invincible battalion. From Connecticut came Putnam, the man of iron, riding his horse one hundred miles in eighteen hours, and gathering as he ran a troop of followers, each armed with a rifle as true in its aim as the heart of its owner was loyal to Freedom. Little Rhode Island had a thousand of her resolute and hardy sons before Boston ere the oppressor had retreated from his sacrifice at Concord, and Nathaniel Greene was Rhode Island's leader. Thirty thousand patriots in a few days hemmed in the city of Boston, where the British had taken up their defiant stand; and the tragedy of Bunker's Hill was soon enacted before her gates. How all this sounds like the rush to arms in 1861! Sounds like it because the cause was the same-the defense of Constitutional Liberty and Inalienable Rights; because the loyal men of '61 were worthy sons of the sires of '75; while the enemy of 61 were the degenerate sons of their sires, bent upon the destruction of those institutions which the heart of Liberty and the hand of Freedom had built. It was a cause worthy of the devotion lavished upon it; and history will never tire of recording the generous deeds of those who answered the call for men to "suppress treasonable combinations and to cause the laws to be duly enforced." The Diary of Events, from the fall of Sumter to May 1st, deserves to be preserved in every man's memory. The events were so extraordinary in themselves, the spirit in which the people acted was so astonishingly alive with devotion to the country and the sustenance of its laws, that another generation will study the story with amazement. As preliminary to our work, we may offer the record of that remarkable Awakening. |