The boys of '61 Author:Charles Carleton Coffin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PREPARING FOR THE GREAT STRUGGLE THE battle of Bull Run awakened the people of the Northern States to a sense of the magnitude of the conflict ... more »before them — that military service was to be no holiday affair; that, if they would preserve the Government established by their fathers, they must put forth all their energies. It set men to thinking. Four days after the battle, in Washington, I met one who all his lifetime had been a Democrat, standing stanchly by the South till the attack on Sumter. Said he: "I go for liberating the niggers. We are fighting on a false issue. The negro is at the bottom of the trouble. The South is fighting for the negro, and nothing else. They use him to defeat us, and we shall be compelled to use him to defeat them." These sentiments were gaining ground. General Butler had retained the negroes who came into his camp, calling them "contraband of war." Men were beginning to discuss the propriety of not only retaining, but of seizing, the slaves of those who were in arms against the Government. The rebels were using them in the construction of fortifications. Why not place them in the category with gunpowder, horses, and cattle? It was clear that, sooner or later, the war would become one of emancipation,— freedom to the slave of every man found in arms against the Government, or in any way aiding or abetting treason. How seductive, how tyrannical, was slavery! Three years before the war, a young man, born and educated among the mountains of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, graduating at Williams College, visited Washington, and called upon Mr. Dawes, member of Congress from Massachusetts, to obtain his influence in securing a position at the South as a teacher. Mr. Dawes knew the young man, son of a citizen of high standing, res...« less