Over the little farm-house in the ravine in the fall of 1863 there fell with the sinking moon these solemn dirges of the great dark woods. The stars brightened their crowns till _Via Lactea_ shone a highway of silver dust or as the shadow of that primeval river rolling across the blue champaign of heaven. The depths of repose that follow the enjoyment of the young irrigated their limbs, filling the sensuous nerves and arteries with a delicious narcotism--a deep, quiet, healthful sleep, lulled by the chant of the serene mother-forest.
Hush! A light step, like a blown leaf: the loose wooden latch rises at the touch of a familiar hand; familiar feet, that have trodden every inch of that poor log floor, lead the way; and then all at once, like a bundle of Chinese crackers, intermingled with shrieks and groans and deep, vehement curses, the rapid reports of pistols fill the chambers. The beds, the floors, the walls, the doors are splashed with blood, and the chambers are cumbered with dead and dying men in dreadful agony. Happy those who passed quietly from the sweet sleep of Nature to the deeper sleep of death! Of thirty young men in the flush of youth, not one escaped. Six Federal scouts had threaded their way since sunset from the Federal lines to do this horrible work. Oh, Captain Jack, swart warrior of the Modocs! must we hang you for defending your lava-bed home in your own treacherous native way, when we, to preserve an arbitrary political relation, murder sleeping men in their beds?
Let me close with an incident of that great game of war in which the watershed of the Ohio was the gambler's last stake.
The Confederacy was a failure in '62, held together by external pressure of hostile armies. It converted civil office into bomb-proofs for the unworthy by exempting State and Federal officials; it discouraged agriculture by levying on the corn and bacon of the small farmers, while the cotton and sugar of the rich planter were jealously protected; it discouraged enlistment by exempting from military service every man who owned twenty negroes, one hundred head of cattle, five hundred sheep--in brief, all who could afford to serve; it discouraged trade by monopolies and tariffs. But for the ubiquitous Jew it would have died in 1862-'63, as a man dies from stagnation of the blood. It was the rich man's war and the poor man's fight.