Rebellion

No sooner had Abraham Lincoln been elected in 1860 that South Carolina left the Union. Men spoke of her as though she were a hot-headed sister who might yet be brought back to reason. Some said the South was only threatening, as it had threatened before. Others feared the threats had at last become purpose. Few of us, I think, believed our Union would rip apart along the seam of North and South.

When federal troops were fired upon at Fort Sumter and President Lincoln answered by calling for 75,000 volunteers, we knew the matter had passed beyond speeches, compromise, and speculation. In our community, war did not arrive with cannon shot and war cries. It arrived in names. A boy who had sat at a school bench. A neighbor’s son. A brother of someone I knew. A young man whose mother had packed his clothes with more courage than peace. Their regiments might be written down as Indiana or Illinois, but to us they were simply our boys, gone into a danger we could scarcely imagine and could not prevent.

Chicago lay near enough to our lake-country settlements that its news, committees, regiments, and sorrows reached us almost as our own. Men crossed county and state lines to enlist, and women crossed those same invisible lines through letters, aid, prayers, and anxious inquiry.

We read of the Union defeat at Bull Run and felt the first foolish confidence go out of the North. We followed the news from Kentucky and Tennessee — Mill Springs, Fort Henry, Fort Donelson — places and battles where our boys were. Then came Shiloh, with its dreadful lists of killed and wounded. The names in those lists were not simply ink on paper. Every regiment carried its own number, but grief never kept to regimental lines.

The 88th Illinois formed in Chicago in the latter part of the summer of 1862 and became known as the Second Board of Trade Regiment. One of its senior officers was Alexander S. Chadbourne, a Maine man and a connection of mine. Many of the privates of the 88th were young men or boys who had been my pupils or neighbors in that small western town where I then lived. It was through my interest in the welfare of these soldiers that I became intimate with Richard Realf.^⁠[1]

NOTES

¹ Sophia to Richard J. Hinton, March 8, 1879 ; Realf enlisted on August 11, 1862, and was mustered in as sergeant major o of the 88th on August 27. The 88th was ordered to Louisville, Kentucky on September 4th, 1862