the
partly sight-seeing journey to the first battle-field of the great war,
the commission from the horror-struck authorities at home to find and
bring back from Virginia the body of the first Massachusetts soldier to
fall,--all prove the naivete of the popular conceptions at that time of
what it was to enter upon war. This Chelsea boy,[2] whose body my
brother was bidden by the mayor of their native place to recover and
send home at all costs, was but the first of the fated host of three
hundred and sixty thousand young men about to die for their country in
the ensuing four years. I remember distinctly the consternation of the
community when it was found that the Chelsea company of the First
Massachusetts Infantry had been in the sharp action which was the first
engagement in the approaching collision of the main armies, and that men
had actually been shot and killed. The sickening realization was akin to
that feeling my eldest brother[3] in that regiment had confessed to me
when I was visiting him at the assembling and training camp at Readville
and the new army wagons in their fresh blue paint and white canvas
arrived on the scene in long array. "It looks as though we were really
going," he remarked ruefully.

[1] Andrew J. Clement, First Sergeant, Company M, First Massachusetts
Cavalry; died at Morton, Pennsylvania, February 27, 1908.

[2] Philander Crowell, Company H, First Massachusetts Volunteers.

[3] William B. Clement, Company H; died at Chelsea, July 18, 1896.

I find a pretty complete picture of the psychology of those bewildered
and dreadful weeks and months in two speeches of Wendell Phillips in
that series of wonderful orations in which he rode the storm seeking to
direct it to great issues. Some of these speeches I had the fortune to
hear. I have been looking up certain things I heard delivered in that
deliberate utterance of his with its polished periods, precise and
penetrating as rifle-shots, yet freighted with passion, white-hot with
intense conviction. It is only necessary to compare these two speeches
of Phillips's to show how men's minds tossed and turned and agonized in
those days,--the minds of honest, independent, fearless, conscientious
men, too. In a speech of April 9, 1861, at New Bedford, Wendell Phillips
was in Cassandra vein. Besides many other epigrammatic deliverances to
similar effect, he said:

Inaugurate war, we know not where it will end; we are in
no condition to fi