Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/94

 wife appeared in Philadelphia looking for an escort to accompany her on a last visit to her husband, in jail in Virginia under sentence of death, Hector Tyndale chivalrously offered his services, thus braving not only the fury of the mob surrounding John Brown's prison, but also the violent prejudice of his own neighbors. The news of the breaking out of our Civil War found him on a business journey in Europe, but he instantly, at great sacrifice, hastened home to enter the volunteer army. He was made a major in the Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Regiment, and won promotion by efficient service on various fields. At Antietam he was severely wounded in the head, and obtained the rank of a brigadier-general for conspicuous bravery in action. Having recovered after long prostration, he was assigned to my division. As a strict disciplinarian, he was, as frequently happens, at first not popular with his soldiers, but they gradually perceived that his apparent sternness sprang from an overruling sense of duty and a conscientious care for their welfare, and then their respect turned into affection. It was this rigid, relentless, uncompromising sense of duty which years later, after he had returned to private life, made his fellow-citizens in Philadelphia more than once look to him when the civic situation demanded the services of men of uncompromising rectitude and indomitable moral courage. He never was a popular man, in the ordinary sense, for he would often appear haughty from his moral sensitiveness, and distant, owing to his very nature. Only his near friends enjoyed the real loveliness of his character. He was an aristocrat by taste, and a true democrat by principle and sympathy. I have known few men who so nearly approached the current conception of antique virtue and the ideal of the republican citizen. He died in 1880, not yet sixty years old.