with manly pride in its
success; as soldiers in the field, they did their duty with a calm
defiance of danger and death, that the world has not seen equaled in the
six thousand years that men have followed the trade of war. In the
prison their conduct was marked by the same unostentatious but
unflinching heroism. Death stared them in the face constantly. They
could read their own fate in that of the loathsome, unburied dead all
around them. Insolent enemies mocked their sufferings, and sneered at
their devotion to a Government which they asserted had abandoned them,
but the simple faith, the ingrained honesty of these plain-mannered,
plain-spoken boys rose superior to every trial. Brutus, the noblest
Roman of them all, says in his grandest flight:

Set honor in one eye and death in the other,
And I will look on both indifferently.

They did not say this: they did it. They never questioned their duty; no
repinings, no murmurings against their Government escaped their lips,
they took the dread fortunes brought to them as calmly, as unshrinkingly
as they had those in the field; they quailed not, nor wavered in their
faith before the worst the Rebels could do. The finest epitaph ever
inscribed above a soldier's grave was that graven on the stone which
marked the resting-place of the deathless three hundred who fell at
Thermopylae:

Go, stranger, to Lacedaemon,--
And tell Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her laws.

They who lie in the shallow graves of Andersonville, Belle Isle, Florence
and Salisbury, lie there in obedience to the precepts and maxims
inculcated into their minds in the churches and Common Schools of the
North; precepts which impressed upon them the duty of manliness and honor
in all the relations and exigencies of life; not the "chivalric" prate of
their enemies, but the calm steadfastness which endureth to the end. The
highest tribute that can be paid them is to say they did full credit to
their teachings, and they died as every American should when duty bids
him. No richer heritage was ever bequeathed to posterity.

It was in the year 1864, and the first three months of 1865 that these
twenty-five thousand youths mere cruelly and needlessly done to death.
In these fatal fifteen months more young men than to-day form the pride,
the hope, and the vigor of any one of our leading Cities, more than at
the beginning of the war were found in either of s