ion
was started, signed, and sent on. It ran in substance thus: "We are in
evil case, and we earnestly desire that you hasten our deliverance by
every means consistent with right and honor. But--honor first! Let the
nation's plighted faith to its black soldiers be kept, at whatever cost
to us. We ask you to still refuse all exchange of prisoners, until the
Osame treatment can be secured for black and white." Was ever a braver
deed than that?

One picture more. In a military hospital at Washington, Walt Whitman was
engaged as a volunteer nurse. In a letter to a friend, he depicted in a
few sentences the tragedy of it all, and yet the triumph of the spirit
over the body and over death itself. He wrote of a Northern hospital,
but the like might be seen on Southern soil, as to-day among Russians or
Japanese,--it is the tragedy and triumph of humanity. "These thousands,
and tens and twenties of thousands, of American young men, badly wounded
... operated on, pallid with diarrhoea, languishing, dying with fever,
pneumonia, etc., open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights,
... showing our humanity ... tried by terrible, fearful tests, probed
deepest, the living souls, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty
bonds of art. To these, what are your dreams and poems, even the oldest
and the tearfulest?... For here I see, not at intervals, but quite
always, how certain man, our American man,--how he holds himself cool
and unquestioned master above all pains and bloody mutilation.... This,
then, what frightened us all so long! Why, it is put to flight with
ignominy--a mere stuffed scarecrow of the fields. Oh, death, where is
thy sting? Oh, grave, where is thy victory?"

CHAPTER XXVI

EMANCIPATION BEGUN

When the war began, the absorbing issue at the North was the maintenance
of the Union. The supreme, uniting purpose was the restoration of the
national authority. Slavery had fallen into the background. But it soon
began to come again to the front. Two tendencies existed at the North;
one, to seek the restoration of the old state of things unchanged; the
other, to seize the opportunity of war to put an end to slavery.

The pressure of events raised special questions which must be met. As
soon as Northern armies were on Southern soil, slaves began to take
refuge in the camps, and their masters, loyal in fact or in profession,
followed with a demand for their return. Law seemed on the master's
side; but the us