The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864

That on Long Island breaks,
To the youth who tills the uttermost hills
By the blue northwestern lakes!

And ye Freedmen! rally, rally
To the banners of the North!
Through the shattered door of bondage pour
Your swarthy legions forth!
Kentuckians! ye of Tennessee
Who scorned the despot's sway!
To all, to all, the bugle-call
Of Freedom sounds to-day!

Old men shall fight with the ballot,
Weapon the last and best,—
And the bayonet, with blood red-wet,
Shall write the will of the rest;
And the boys shall fill men's places,
And the little maiden rock
Her doll as she sits with her grandam and knits
An unknown hero's sock.

And the hearts of heroic mothers,
And the deeds of noble wives,
With their power to bless shall aid no less
Than the brave who give their lives.
The rich their gold shall bring, and the old
Shall help us with their prayers;
While hovering hosts of pallid ghosts
Attend us unawares.

From the ghastly fields of Shiloh
Muster the phantom bands,
From Virginia's swamps, and Death's white camps
On Carolina sands;
From Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg,
I see them gathering fast;
And up from Manassas, what is it that passes
Like thin clouds in the blast?

From the Wilderness, where blanches
The nameless skeleton;
From Vicksburg's slaughter and red-streaked water,
And the trenches of Donelson;
From the cruel, cruel prisons,
Where their bodies pined away,
From groaning decks, from sunken wrecks,
They gather with us to-day.

And they say to us, "Rally! rally!
The work is almost done!
Ye harvesters, sally from mountain and valley
And reap the fields we won!
We sowed for endless years of peace,
We harrowed and watered well;
Our dying deeds were the scattered seeds:
Shall they perish where they fell?"

And their brothers, left behind them
In the deadly roar and clash
Of cannon and sword, by fort and ford,
And the carbine's quivering flash,—
Before the Rebel citadel
Just trembling to its fall,
From Georgia's glens, from Florida's fens,
For us they call, they call!

The life-blood of the tyrant
Is ebbing fast away;
Victory waits at her opening gates,
And smiles on our array;
With solemn eyes the Centuries
Before us watching stand,
And Love lets down his starry crown
To bless the future land.

One more sublime endeavor,
And behold the dawn of Peace!
One more endeavor, and war forever
Throughout the land shall cease!
For ever and ever the vanquished power
Of Slavery shall be slain,
And Freedom's stained and trampled flower
Shall blossom white again!

Then rally! rally! rally!
Make tumult in the land!
Ye foresters, rally from mountain and valley!
Ye fishermen, from the strand!
Brave sons of the West, America's best!
New England's men of might!
From prairie and crag unfurl the flag,
And rally to the fight!

FINANCES OF THE REVOLUTION

In all historical studies we should still bear in mind the difference between the point of view from which one looks at events and that from which they were seen by the actors themselves. We all act under the influence of ideas. Even those who speak of theories with contempt are none the less the unconscious disciples of some theory, none the less busied in working out some problems of the great theory of life. Much as they fancy themselves to differ from the speculative man, they differ from him only in contenting themselves with seeing the path as it lies at their feet, while he strives to embrace it all, starting-point and end, in one comprehensive view. And thus in looking back upon the past we are irresistibly led to arrange the events of history, as we arrange the facts of a science, in their appropriate classes and under their respective laws. And thus, too, these events give us the true measure of the intellectual and moral culture of the times, the extent to which just ideas prevailed therein upon all the duties and functions of private and public life. Tried by the standard of absolute truth and right, grievously would they all fall short,—and we, too, with them. Judged by the human standard of progressive development and gradual growth,—the only standard to which the man of the beam can venture, unrebuked, to bring the man with the mote,—we shall find much in them all to sadden us, and much, also, in which we can all sincerely rejoice.

In judging, therefore, the political acts of our ancestors, we have a right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of our own. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clue to the labyrinth in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther into the mysteries of social and political organization than Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, and started ideas which, once at work in the mind, would never rest till they had evolved momentous truths and overthrown long-standing errors. But no one had yet seen, with Adam Smith, that labor was the original source of every form of wealth,—that the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer, were all equally the instruments of national prosperity,—or demonstrated as unanswerably as he did that nations grow rich and powerful by giving as they receive, and that the good of one is the good of all. The world had not yet seen that fierce conflict between antagonistic principles which she was soon to see in the French Revolution; nor had political science yet recorded those daring experiments in remoulding society, those constitutions framed in closets, discussed in clubs, accepted and overthrown with equal demonstrations of popular zeal, and which, expressing in their terrible energy the universal dissatisfaction with past and present, the universal grasping at a brighter future, have met and answered so many grave questions,—questions neither propounded nor solved in any of the two hundred constitutions which Aristotle studied in order to prepare himself for the composition of his "Politics." The world had not yet seen a powerful nation tottering on the brink of anarchy, with all the elements of prosperity in her bosom,—nor a bankrupt state sustaining a war that demanded annual millions, and growing daily in wealth and power,—nor the economical phenomena which followed the reopening of Continental commerce in 1814,—nor the still more startling phenomena which a few years later attended England's return to specie-payments and a specie-currency,—nor statesmen setting themselves gravely down with the map before them to the final settlement of Europe, and, while the ink was yet fresh on their protocols, seeing all the results of their combined wisdom set at nought by the inexorable development of the fundamental principle which they had refused to recognize.