On New-year's morning, 1864, President Lincoln entered the War
Department building. His sensitive nature, more than ever strained to
the utmost tension, was irritated by hearing a woman wailing over a
child in her arms at an office door. Major Eckert requested to
ascertain the cause of the grief brought back the painful but not
unexampled explanation. A soldier's wife had come to Washington with
her babe, expecting to have no difficulty in going on under pass to the
camp where her husband was under the colors. But she learned, to her
dismay, that, while an officer's wife has few obstacles to meet in
communing with her husband under like circumstances, the private's is
dissimilarly situated. This poor soul, with little money anyway, was
perplexed how to wait in the expensive city till her wish was granted.
"Come, Eckert," blurted out the chief in his frank manner, "let's send
the woman down there!"
It was recited that the war office had strengthened the orders against
women in camp.
"H'm!" coughed the other in his dry way, ominous of an alternative,
"let us whip the devil around the stump since he will not step right
over! Send the woman's husband leave of absence to report _here_--to
see his wife and baby!"
So the officer on duty wrote the order, and the couple were happily
reunited.--(By A. B. Chandler, manager of postal telegraphs, attached
to the War Department in the war.)
* * * * *
"LIFE TOO PRECIOUS TO BE LOST."
Benjamin Owen, a young Vermont volunteer, was sentenced to the
extremity for being asleep on post. Lincoln was especially lenient in
these cases, as he held that a farm-boy, used to going to bed early,
was apt to maintain the habit in later life. It came out that the youth
had taken the place of a comrade the night before, as extra duty, and
this overwork had fatigued him so that his succumbing was at least
explicable. This clue being in a letter he wrote home, his sister
journeyed to the capital with it and showed it to the President.
"Oh, that fatal sleep!" he exclaimed, "thousands of lives might have
been lost through that fatal sleep!"
He wrote out the pardon, and said to the girl:
"Go home, my child, and tell that father of yours, who could approve
his country's sentence, even when it took the life of a youth like
that, that Abraham Lincoln thinks the life too precious to be lost."
He went in his carriage to deliver the pardon to the proper authorities
for its execution--and not the soldier's. Then, making out a furlough
for the released volunteer, he saw him and the sister off on the
homeward journey, pinning a badge on the former's arm with the words:
"The shoulder which should bear a comrade's burden, and die for it so
uncomplainingly, must wear that strap!"
* * * * *