n my
favor.

The duties of patriotic citizenship in time of war have not always
been duly appreciated, even by those most zealous in their loyalty
to the government. I would not detract one iota from the honor
and fame of the wise, brave, and patriotic statesmen who upheld
the hands of the great Lincoln in his struggle against the avowed
foes of the Union, and his still harder struggle with professed
patriots who wielded national influence only for evil, though under
the guise of friends of the Union. But if many thousands of those
zealous and "truly loyal Union men," many of whom I knew, could
have managed in some way to get into the ranks and get killed in
battle in the first year, I firmly believe the Union would have
been restored much sooner than it was.

When the people have chosen their chief to lead them through the
fierce storms of civil war, he alone must guide the ship, or else
all must perish. After the storm has burst upon them it is too
late to select another pilot. Then partizan opposition, impairing
the popular strength and confidence of the leader and embarrassing
his military operations or public policy, becomes treason, and a
far more dangerous treason than any which the open sympathizers
with the public enemy could possibly commit. Those powerful leaders
of public opinion who hounded Lincoln on to measures which his far
greater wisdom and his supreme sense of responsibility told him
were unwise, deserved to be hanged, or at least to be imprisoned
until the war was over. That some of them died in shame and disgrace
upon the failure of their own selfish schemes for personal or
political aggrandizement, was only a mild measure of righteous
retribution.

In the calm atmosphere of these later years I still think that the
course of the young soldier who had not learned any of the arts or
of the ambitions of partizan leaders, but whose only motto was "the
President's policy is my policy; his orders my rule of action,"
was much more in accord with the plain duty of every citizen of
the republic. I can find in my mind or heart only contempt for
that theory of patriotic duty which sends one citizen to the front,
freely to give his life, without question, to enforce the orders
of the chosen leader of the nation, and permits another to stay at
home and bend all his efforts toward forcing the substitution of
his own egotistical views upon the country, in lieu of those which
the great leader has decid