"LIFE TOO PRECIOUS TO BE LOST."
Benjamin Owen, a young Vermont volunteer, was sentenced to the extremity for being asleep on post. Lincoln was especially lenient in these cases, as he held that a farm-boy, used to going to bed early, was apt to maintain the habit in later life. It came out that the youth had taken the place of a comrade the night before, as extra duty, and this overwork had fatigued him so that his succumbing was at least explicable. This clue being in a letter he wrote home, his sister journeyed to the capital with it and showed it to the President.
"Oh, that fatal sleep!" he exclaimed, "thousands of lives might have been lost through that fatal sleep!"
He wrote out the pardon, and said to the girl:
"Go home, my child, and tell that father of yours, who could approve his country's sentence, even when it took the life of a youth like that, that Abraham Lincoln thinks the life too precious to be lost."
He went in his carriage to deliver the pardon to the proper authorities for its execution--and not the soldier's. Then, making out a furlough for the released volunteer, he saw him and the sister off on the homeward journey, pinning a badge on the former's arm with the words:
"The shoulder which should bear a comrade's burden, and die for it so uncomplainingly, must wear that strap!"