Samuel Chapman Armstrong (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Life In The Army. 1862-1865 Examinations were over and college honors assigned?to Armstrong the "Ethical Oration"; class-day was past, with its absorbing interests of dance and the supper, when "every man told faithfully whether he was engaged or in love," and the last farewells were spoken under the elms while the morning sun streamed down, finding every good fellow in "floods of tears." College life ended, he returned to New York to await whatever destiny had in store for him. For weeks the military situation had been growing more serious. McClellan had met the Confederates in two battles?Fair Oaks on May 31st and Gaines's Mills on June 3oth?and the Union Army had suffered severe defeats. But McClellan laid all disaster to insufficient support from headquarters, and demanded from Lincoln always more and more troops, intimating that if he had had a larger force these defeats would have been victories. Ready to give his generals every chance for success, Lincoln issued a call for troops. The country responded, "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong," and recruiting went forward briskly. Armstrong still considered Hawaii as his fatherland and did not share the burning patriotism of the times; neither did he evince any special interest in the cause of the slave; though before long the constant presence of danger made him appreciate the need of the sustaining power of a moral principle and fostered in him both hatred of slavery and love of his adopted country?still the road to enlistment in the army was an easy one for him; his friends and classmates had already entered upon it, public opinion was urgent, and his own temperament inclined toward the soldier's life. He expected at first no more than a place in the ranks, but yielding to t...