“‘Go home and raise your six thousand extra men. And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men!’
“I couldn’t say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn’t have an answer. We all got up and went out, and when the door closed one of my colleagues said:
“‘Well, gentlemen, the old man is right. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Let us never say anything about this, but go home and raise the men.’
“And we did—six thousand men—making twenty-eight thousand in the War from a city of one hundred and fifty-six thousand. But there might have been crape on every door, almost, in Chicago, for every family had lost a son or a husband. I lost two brothers. It was hard for the mothers.”
