TO THE CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF THE UNION, WHO, BY TOIL AND PIETY UNDER ARMS, IN LOYALTY TO COUNTRY AND TO CHRIST, ENDING OFTEN IN CHEERFUL DEATH, HAVE FURNISHED THE INCIDENTS WHICH ARE HERE GROUPED TOGETHER-IN JUST PRAISE OF THE THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. ADVERTISEMENT. By the vote of the U. S. Christian Commission, at its final meeting, five residuary Trustees were appointed, through whom the profits accruing from the sale of this book are to be expended for "the spiritual and temporal benefit of those who are, have been, or may be, soldiers or sailors in the service of the United States." INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT. THIS Volume has its origin in the peculiarity of the war in the United States against rebellion—not of the forces arrayed against each other, or of movements executed, or of victories wrought; but of the forces of Christianity developed and exemplified amid the carnage of battle and the more perilous tests of hospital and camp. These religious forces were not begotten of the Christian Commission; they came with the army from the Christian homes of its citizen soldiery. The Commission was, rather, born of them. Certainly it began because of their existence and need of help, and became, at once, their helper and recorder. The officers of the Commission felt that the five thousand Delegates, a majority of them ministers of the Gospel, who had gone to the field laden with good cheer and tokens of love for the soldiers, and had thus been enabled to come into the closest sympathy with them, and to bring back to the fireside fresh, truthful pictures of camp-life, must have witnessed scenes of faith and heroism, of conversion to the new life and dedication to Christ, and in chapel-tents and fever-wards and on bloody fields have heard manly testimony for truth and taken messages from the lips of death, such as would make a record that ought not to be lost to the Republic or to the Christian Church, nor left in unwritten fragments to degenerate into army traditions. They, accordingly, not only provided for the permanent record of the Christian Commission, in its organization and work, by the Home Secretary, Rev. Lemuel Moss, but also instructed the Field Secretary "to prepare a volume of such Incidents as may be regarded by him as fully authentic, and the most valuable of those which have occurred during the work of the Commission." Entire absorption by the secretary, thus instructed, in another labor growing out of the war, and unexpected difficulties in gathering and authenticating so many Incidents, have occasioned a much longer delay than was anticipated in the preparation of the volume. For most of the Incidents names of the authors are given; and persons thus named, unless mentioned as belonging to some other relief organization, or as in the army for some other purpose, are Delegates of the Christian Commission. Where an Incident is credited to a Delegate who is not named, the name of the person receiving it from the Delegate is given. The few Incidents taken from the religious press generally bear the names of their authors. In the exceptions to this, the character of the periodical in which they originally appeared is offered in evidence of their authenticity. The five hundred and more Incidents here gathered have been preferred out of over ten thousand that were in hand, on the principle of the largest variety of character in their subjects and of time and place in their occurrence. No such collection of stories can be made without the peril of sameness, even to satiety; and the more perfect each sketch may be in itself the greater the peril. A relief has been attempted by marshalling the Incidents along the line of army operations in both place and time. Thus an Incident recorded for a given day becomes a part of the army history of that day—an illustration in the case of one man of what may have been transpiring with hundreds of others; and thus it receives an historical and topographical interest which may help carry the reader with less weariness towards the end. The briefest possible sketch of army movements and results of great battles is all that could be allowed for such an historical line. The materials of this sketch, or skeleton record, and often the words in which it runs, have been freely taken from Mr. Greeley's "American Conflict." In the Incidents furnished out of the author's own army experience it has seemed best, for securing authenticity with simplicity in the form of statement, that he should use the third person and speak of himself very much as of others. Whatever excellence this book may possess is fairly to be credited to its friends, as follows: To the Delegates and members of the Commission, who have responded so kindly and heartily to requests for Incidents occurring under their own observation; to the watchful care of the Committee of Publication, who have counselled at every chapter; especially, to Charles Demond, Esq., of Boston, who has patiently and with great profit to these pages read them all in proof; and, more than all, to Rev. John Irving Forbes, who, by his long and intimate connection with the work of the Christian Com |