Type-Setting and Electrotyping by
C. J. Peters & Son, Boston

To

My Grand Nephew

RICHARD LABAN ADAMS

This Book

Is Affectionately Dedicated

PREFACE

"FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT" is the fifth and last but one of "The Blue and
the Gray Series." The character of the operations in connection with the
war of the Rebellion, and the incidents in which the interest of the
young reader will be concentrated, are somewhat different from most of
those detailed in the preceding volumes of the series, though they all
have the same patriotic tendency, and are carried out with the same
devotion to the welfare of the nation as those which deal almost solely
in deeds of arms.

Although the soldiers and sailors of the army and navy of the Union won
all the honors gained in the field of battle or on the decks of the
national ships, and deserved all the laurels they gathered by their
skill and bravery in the trying days when the republic was in peril,
they were not the only actors in the greatest strife of the nineteenth
century. Not all the labor of "saving the Union" was done in the
trenches, on the march, on the gun deck of a man-of-war, or in other
military and naval operations, though without these the efforts of all
others would have been in vain. Thousands of men and women who never
"smelled gunpowder," who never heard the booming cannon, or the rattling
musketry, who never witnessed a battle on sea or land, but who kept
their minds and hearts in touch with the holy cause, labored diligently
and faithfully to support and sustain the soldiers and sailors at the
front.

If all those who fought no battles are not honored like the leaders and
commanders in the loyal cause, if they wear no laurels on their brows,
if no monuments are erected to transmit their memory to posterity, if
their names and deeds are not recorded in the Valhalla of the redeemed
nation, they ought not to be disregarded and ignored. It was not on the
field of strife alone in the South that the battle was fought and won.
The army and the navy needed a moral, as well as a material support,
which was cheerfully rendered by the great army of the people who never
buckled on a sword, or shouldered a musket. Their work can not be summed
up in deeds, for there was little or nothing that was brilliant and
dazzling in their career. They need no monume