TAKEN FROM REBELLION AND GIVEN TO LOYALTY.
A lady out of Tennessee, which was early to join secession, came to Washington in search of her son, a youth enlisted in the Confederate Army. She found him in the Fort Henry hospital, where, allowed to see him, as she was loyal, in spite of regulations about prisoners of war, she learned that he would recover. She induced him to recant and offer his parole if he were allowed freedom. She called on Secretary Stanton, but he was in one of his boorish moods--was he ever out of them?--and repulsed her with rudeness. She finally appealed to the President, who seemed very often balm to Stanton, "a fretful corrosive applied to a deathly wound," and he gave her an order to receive the young man if he swore off his pledge to the wrong side.
"To take the young man from the ranks of the rebellion," he said to her, "and give him to a loyal mother is a better investment to this government than to give him up to its deadly enemies."
The young man was enabled to resume his studies, but in a Northern college!