Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/63

Rh demand for recruits became great, especially in New York, where the people, though compelled to furnish their contingent, were at once peculiarly unwarlike, and mainly on the Southern side. The North, as an industrial community, fought as industrial communities (our own included) always fight, with the industry which supplies the sinews of war: and this became more apparent as the war went on, and the drain upon the labour market became more severe. But there must also have been many in the Northern armies to whom, the rate of wages and the earnings of industry being what they are in that country, the pay of a soldier could have been but a slight inducement. On the whole, probably no country has ever received a larger free-will offering of its children’s blood. There were some at least in those ranks whose self-devotion (I hardly like to use the profaned name of chivalry) could scarcely be doubted. It was no sordid motive that led Mr. Wadsworth, when past middle age, to leave wealth, ease, social honour, troops of friends, for the hardships of a soldier’s life, and death at the head of his division. It was no sordid motive which led Colonel Lowell, whose funeral I myself witnessed, to resign the pleasures of a fine and cultivated intellect and the brightest promises of opening life for the service in which he gloriously fell. It was no sordid motive and no common self-sacrifice that led Colonel Shaw to accept the command of the first negro regiment, and imperil not only his life, but his reputation, to redeem the despised race. When Colonel Shaw was killed in leading his regiment against Fort Wagner, the Southern chivalry, insulting the dead, buried him, as they said, among his niggers. A Federal general was about to remove the body to a more honourable place of burial: but Colonel Shaw’s family