Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/34

 presumably be allowed to look on at the antics of men wherever they chose, in peace. They had known Lincoln, no inconsiderable distinction in itself!

Out of that first convention my grandfather, like them, had gone, and he had done his part to help elect Lincoln after Lincoln had defeated Chase in the Chicago convention of 1860, and had been nominated for the presidency. And then, with his man elected, my grandfather had gone into the war that broke upon the land.

He went in with the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment which he was commissioned by Governor Dennison to recruit at Urbana, and when it was marshaled in camp near Urbana its command was offered him, an honor and a responsibility he declined because, he said, he knew nothing of the art of war, if it is an art, or of its science, if it is a science, and so was content with the shoulder-straps of a captain. One of his sons, a lieutenant in the regular army, was already at the front with his regiment, and another son was a captain in the 66th, and later on, when my grandfather had been transferred to the Department of Subsistence, he took his youngest son with him in the capacity of a clerk, so that the men of his family were away to the war for those four years, and the women remained behind, making housewives and scraping lint, and watching, and waiting, and praying, and enduring all those hardships and making all those sacrifices which are so lauded by the poetic and the sentimental and yet are not enough to entitle them