Benjamin F. McLaws

“ That night the Sioux warriors celebrated the butchery of twenty men, women and children in the true Indian fashion, with blackened faces, keeping time in their war dance to the beating of drums, circling over the bloodstained snow with unearthly yells among the mutilated bodies of their victims, until exhausted by their horrid orgies. ”

“ The lobbyist who is for or against anything for hire, who haunts the chamber of legislation and taints the atmosphere with his corrupt designs, who shadows members at their homes and hotels, injecting his poison into the public service, is a criminal, whose approach is an insult, and to whom the doors of the Capitol should never swing inward. ”

“ The labored breathing of the locomotives behind you, the clouds of smoke and steam that wrap you as in a mantle, the noon-day eclipse of snow, the surging of the ship, the rattling of chains, the creak of timbers as if the craft were aground, and the sea getting out of its bed to whelm you altogether, the doubt as to what will come next—all combine to make a scene of strange excitement for a land-lubber. ”

“ It is declared that the constitution plants slavery upon all the public domain, and there nurtures and protects it. “It is no longer held under this decision that freedom is national and slavery local, confined to limits of the States that see fit to uphold it. It is fastened upon every foot of soil belonging to the Government, and there is no power in Congress, or in Territorial governments to expel it. Whatever territory may be acquired by the United States will instantly become slave soil. Wherever the flag of the country goes, there goes slavery with its chains and manacles. ”

“ These humble heroisms in every day life of the patient women all over the land, were inspired by as fervent patriotism as ever impelled the men of the family to face their country’s foes on the field of battle. Like the deeds and sufferings of the private soldiers they must ever remain unrecorded but like the nameless graves that the red demon of war left scattered all over the South, in which serenely slept the unknown dead, the memory of what they did in the great struggle “will never perish from the earth.” ”

“ These rugged settlers led the way through hardships and privations, creating from nature's resources new homes where the rude log cabins crowded the vanishing wigwams farther westward. They first ventured upon the unsheltered prairies and turned over the sod of countless years' formation, which carpeted with grass and flowers a soil of unsurpassed fertility. They brought from distant states and countries habits, customs, religions, prejudices, and virtues of widely separated communities and nationalities. ”

“ Then, with the warble of bugle and much clatter, clang and ring of hoofs and spurs and scabbards, the old-fashioned troopers rode by with eagles in their eyes; their holsters, small packages of thunder and lightning, at the saddle-bow; their shiny cylinders of portmanteaus snugly strapped behind; the terrible frown of a bear-skin cap lowering on every brow, its jaunty feather, tipped with emblematic blood, springing out of the fur like the blossom of a magnified and glorified bull-thistle—and the flare of the red-coats set the scene and your heart on fire together! ”

“ Resolved, That we still recognize and sustain the time honored doctrines taught by the early fathers of our political faith, that freedom is the great cardinal principle which underlies, pervades and exalts our whole political system; that the Constitution of the United States does not in any way recognize the right of property in man; that slavery as a system is exceptional and purely local, deriving its existence and support wholly from local law. ”

“ The haggard, dejected, living skeletons, crying for medical aid and food, and the ghastly corpses with glazed eyeballs staring up into vacant space, with flies swarming down their open mouths, and over their rags infested with swarms of lice and maggots, as they lay among the sick and dying, formed a picture of helpless, hopeless misery, impossible for words to portray. ”

“ One large ripe star used to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods—I loved to fancy it would lodge sometime, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I did for beech-nuts—a star with such a warm and human sort of light, so like an earthly fire-side somewhere, with the door open, that it always inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much among the belongings of that particular landscape as the daisies in the pasture, and not more than a breath or two farther off. ”

“ Why should the great freedom-loving State of Iowa longer deny them this right? No one reason can be given that has not been used to bolster up slavery for the last hundred years. The war that has just closed has swept that relic of barbarism from our land; let the Republican party have the courage to do justice. “I have no fear of the result in a contest of this kind. We shall carry the election and have the satisfaction of wiping out the last vestige of the black code that has long been a disgrace to our State.” ”

“ I feel no hostility to free education going as high as the State or National Government feels able to provide—protecting, however, every child in the privilege of a common school education before public means are appropriated to a higher education for the few. ”

“ A fortnight ago, John hung his jacket upon the fence, and to-day he shook out from one of the pockets a nest, and two eggs as blue as the sky.
There is singing everywhere: from the tuft of gray grass there comes a small tune of two notes and a rest, then two more; from the second rail of the fence a gush of melody; from the roof-ridge, a solo; from the depths of the air, as of angel calling unto angel. The birds and the buds make it May, and May it shall be. ”

“ Summer sends the bees thither to bugle among the thistle-blows, and the ground-sparrows build in its margins, and the faded ribbon of yellow sand grows bright in its glowing sun. The winds waft the breath of the morning over its desolate way, and the rains long ago beat out the old footprints it used to bear. Autumn sighs as it follows it through the ravine and among the hemlocks, and the drifts that Winter heaps are unbroken and stainless. ”

“ The long marches beneath the burning sun, the chilling blasts of winter storms, camping at night without shelter amid rain and sleet and sinking exhausted by the wayside, the wary months in camp amid the deadly malaria of swamp, wasting away with disease in dreary hospitals, the indescribable horrors of the battlefield where every form of mutilation rends the human body, the hasty burial in unmarked graves, the hideous tortures of prison life. ”

“ The Man of Mount Vernon endowed February, that cheapest of the months, with a twenty-second it never owned before; took what had been a blank white leaf between a brace of nights, so bent back upon it the radiant truth of all his life, that, independent of the sun, it shines right on—the radiant truth that the man of truest symmetry is the man of truest power. ”

“ No bolder feet, old Road, ever left their impress on other pathways; no truer hearts than hastened on thy rugged way, have ever turned beautiful in the "better land." If there were ever those whose laugh was music, then thy woods have heard it. The daughters of the West are passing fair, but those young brows of old, whose white flashed white again from thy singing streams, and eyes glanced back to eyes—no brighter and no purer were ever bent above a classic wave. ”

“ These vast plains, in which the eye finds no object to rest upon, are first seen with surprise and pleasure, but their great uniformity at length becomes tiresome. The grass was now about a foot high, as the wind swept over the great plain, it appeared as though we were riding on the unquiet billows of the ocean. ”

“ Their brilliant deeds will be an inspiration to patriotism in all the coming years of the Republic. But no history of the war however minute can record the silent sufferings on the countless marches, the heroic deeds in deadly conflict, the horrors of the prison pens, of the common soldiers. Their unmarked graves are scattered among the forests, swamps, highways and farms of more than twenty States. They marched away from northern homes in the years of early manhood when hopes were high and life was dear to them and to all the family circle from which they parted. ”

“ The professional lobbyist has, I regret to say, become one of the features of legislative assemblies; he has become a stench in the nostrils of a decent community and ought to be driven out with the lash of scorn, pursued by the penalties of the law from the presence of every official and from the precincts of every legislative body in the republic. ”

“ Taylor is a word-painter unsurpassed in America. His style is rare, quaint, full of images as a brook of pebbles, and his rhythm waves and undulates as softly and as sensuously as the wind that sways the summer wheat. * * In the fields he sings the songs of the spring, and the passion flowers, of the roses, and the summer time. His are the birds'-notes. He interprets the quaint, low tune of the busy wren, the soaring snatches of the sky-lark, the liquid language of the oriole, the ever-sad and questioning call of the partridge, and the pheasant's everlasting monotone. ”

“ You roll out of Buffalo in the teeth of the wind, and the world is turned to snow. All goes merrily. The machine strikes little drifts, and they scurry away in a cloud. The three engines breathe easily, but by-and-by the earth seems broken into great billows of dazzling white. The sun comes out of a cloud, and touches it up till it outsilvers Potosi. Houses lie in the trough of the sea everywhere, and it requires little imagination to think they are pitching and tossing before your eyes. ”

“ Anderson was placed under McLaws’ command.
[13] “Are you acquainted with McClellan?” said Lee to General Walker on September 8, 1862. “He is an able general but a very cautious one. His enemies among his own people think him too much so. His army is in a very demoralised and chaotic condition, and will not be prepared for offensive operations—or he will not think it so—for three or four weeks.”—Battles and Leaders, vol. ”

“ Other trees had been caught by a rotary power and whirled around and around until they hung by a mass of fine splinters to their stumps. Others, green and full of life, had been entirely stripped of their bark even into the small limbs. Nothing could better show the irresistible rotary motion of the whirlwind. ”

“ The cloud of smoke from our guns hung for a moment in the breeze, then rose, revealing to us the sickening sight of riders and horses lying in a promiscuous heap of dead and dying. Their warm life-blood was forming little pools, which uniting, ran away in streams, while the pitiful neighing of dying horses, and the sorrowful cries and appeals of the dying soldiers for help and water was a sight to make the soul sick. ”

“ This generation cannot realize the continued sacrifices borne by the men and women during the war period. No pen can describe them in all of the varied forms in which they came upon the people from year to year as the conflict increased in magnitude. Every new emergency was met with a lofty and unselfish patriotism that has never been surpassed in any age or by any race. ”

“ In speaking of John Brown’s invasion, the Governor said:
“Is it strange that, maddened by recollections of wrongs inflicted upon them in Kansas because of their love of freedom, should lead men to the conclusion that they should do and dare as much at home for liberty as those who have oppressed them were doing abroad for slavery? While I deeply deplore and most unqualifiedly condemn, I cannot wonder at the recent unfortunate and bloody occurrence at Harper’s Ferry. ”

“ Millions of flies swarmed over everything and covered the faces of the sick patients and crowded their open mouths, depositing their maggots in the gangrenous wounds of the living, and in the mouths of the dead. ”

“ The younger generation of the closing years of the Nineteenth Century can know little of the slow progress of evolution which has transformed the bleak prairies of fifty years ago into beautiful farms of unsurpassed fertility, adorned with shady groves, fruitful orchards, large barns, modern homes and generous equipments of the best labor-saving implements. ”

“ The annual Fourth of July celebration appealed to the patriotism of every citizen, old and young. The oration of the young lawyer from a distant town was listened to with rapt attention and the national songs resounded through the grove. A picnic dinner spread beneath the sheltering trees, and a country ball in the evening, made up a day of general enjoyment for the entire population. ”

“ The fearful list of killed and wounded that had brought woe and desolation to countless homes through the long agonizing years, would come no more.
Hardly had the news of the crowning victory and the dawning of early peace, reached the distant parts of the country, when, like an awful flash from a clear sky came the startling tidings of the assassination of the President. ”

“ The sight was appalling as the cloud of inky blackness settled down to the earth again in the distance, sweeping on with a mighty power, glowing with a thousand forked tongues of lightning as the very earth seemed to tremble beneath the incessant roar of thunder. No pen or tongue can convey to the mind a true picture of the frightful sights and sounds that lurked in the rear of that irresistible tornado as it was then gathering greater power of destruction to overwhelm and crush the town of Camanche. ”

“ In times of peril to our Government and the Union it becomes the sacred duty of all true patriots to unite in the preservation of constitutional freedom and in thwarting the designs traitors. It is a strange and sad necessity which compels American citizens to band themselves together in this manner to sustain the Constitution and the Union; but the Government under which we live is threatened with destruction. ”

“ I found hundreds of graves of the red men on the island. Sleep on in peace, ye brave fellows, until the white man comes and with sacrilegious plow-share turns up your bones from their quiet and beautiful resting place! ”