I
Was Also Very Anxious To Ascertain, If It Might Be In My Power To
Do So, With What Spirit Or True Feeling As To The Matter The Work
Of Recruiting For The Now Enormous Army Of The States Was Going On
In Those Remote Regions.
That men should be on fire in Boston and
New York, in Philadelphia and along the borders of secession, I
could understand.
I could understand also that they should be on
fire throughout the cotton, sugar, and rice plantations of the
South. But I could hardly understand that this political fervor
should have communicated itself to the far-off farmers who had
thinly spread themselves over the enormous wheat-growing districts
of the Northwest. St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota, is nine
hundred miles directly north of St. Louis, the most northern point
to which slavery extends in the Western States of the Union; and
the farming lands of Minnesota stretch away again for some hundreds
of miles north and west of St. Paul. Could it be that those scanty
and far-off pioneers of agriculture - those frontier farmers, who
are nearly one-half German and nearly the other half Irish, would
desert their clearings and ruin their chances of progress in the
world for distant wars of which the causes must, as I thought, be
to them unintelligible? I had been told that distance had but lent
enchantment to the view, and that the war was even more popular in
the remote and newly-settled States than in those which have been
longer known as great political bodies.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 179 of 538
Words from 47497 to 47761
of 143277
