The orator moves
across the scene in history like some refulgent planet in the sky. The
story of those nine wonderful days makes illustrious forever the history
of eloquence and patriotism.

The winter of 1862 and '63, with its high-wrought excitements, brought
Beecher the peril of a nervous breakdown. His exhaustion illustrates the
fact that some men who stayed at home endured as much as others who
went to the front. Generals and their marching regiments often suffered
much, but they were not alone in their fortitude and faith. Women who
toiled on farm or in hospital, working men who laboured to support the
boys at the front, orators who went up and down the land inciting
patriotism in the people, preachers who realized that the breakdown of
conscience meant the breakdown of the cause--these all were citizen
soldiers who defended the Union and kept the faith.

Among them all no man poured out his life more generously than Henry
Ward Beecher. Since 1850, through the intensities of the Fugitive Slave
Law, the Fremont campaign, the Kansas troubles, the Lincoln election,
the era of secession and the first two years of the war, he had been
preaching, writing, lecturing, making public addresses, attending to his
great pastorate, and active in every civic and national interest. And
during the war, back and forth, across the land, from city to city, in
church, hall and armoury, he lifted up his voice in the presence of
multitudes, telling the story of the founding of the Republic, showing
that the Republic, with its self-government, was the last, best hope of
man, reminding boys that they must fight and live for the Union that
their fathers had died to found. When at length Antietam was won, and
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and the rebellion
staggered like a giant stunned by a crushing blow, Beecher was lifted
into the seventh heaven of hope, and had the vision of coming victory.
In that hour he told his people that he was ready to die, that God might
peel him, and strip away all the leaves of life, and do with him as He
pleased; that he had lived fifty years, that he had had a good time,
that he had "hit the devil many blows and square in the face, that it
was joy enough to have uttered some words because they were incorporated
into the lives of men and could not die."

But we all know that it is possible to stretch the strings of the mental
harp too tightly. Excitement burns the nerve as an electric curren