I
INTRODUCTION
After the inauguration of President Lincoln, March 4, 1861, much
discussion followed in Washington and in the North, and plans were
proposed respecting peaceable adjustment of the troubles occasioned
by the secession of the Southern States from the Union. But the first
hostile gun fired at Fort Sumter and the National flag, on April 12,
put an end to all peace proposals, and solidified the North in favor
of restoring and preserving the Union by force of arms. As one of our
statesmen of that day expressed it, yesterday there had been difference
of opinion, to-day there was unity.
When two days afterwards the President's call for seventy-five thousand
volunteers for three months' service was issued, my first impulse was
to respond to that call; but before any movement for enlistments could
be made in our locality the quota of Indiana was filled to overflowing.
I was content for several reasons to await the progress of events.
I cherished no desire for military glory, and distrusted my special
fitness for the life of a soldier. In my college days I had contracted
a horror of war and regarded it as the most terrible and futile of
human follies. Shortly before my graduation I had delivered a public
address for my literary society on peace and war, using as its title
Charles Sumner's well-known oration--"The True Grandeur of Nations." I
regarded myself as a peace man.
I had only recently entered upon the practice of my profession, and was
ambitious to make a reputation as a lawyer. But, most serious of all, I
had just established a modest home with a young wife and our first-born
babe of less than a year old. It would be a terrible strain upon my
affections and hopes to break these dearest of all ties for a life in
the military service.
I, with the great body of the people of the North, entertained the hope
that the seventy-five thousand men, who constituted the army so quickly
formed, would prove sufficient for the reëstablisment of the Federal
Union. But the battle of Bull Run, July 21, dispelled that delusion,
and the President's call for three hundred thousand afterwards
increased to five hundred thousand volunteers for three years' service
indicated that a long and bloody war was in prospect. I resolved no
longer to delay my entrance into that service.